Russia said it intends to cancel US$2.2 billion owed by the poorest African countries in support of an initiative by the eight major industrialized nations to write off more than US$40 billion of debt.
Russia's UN Ambassador Andrey Denisov told a UN ministerial meeting focusing on ways to increase funding to fight poverty that Moscow wanted "to underline our general support" for the June 11 agreement by finance ministers of the Group of Eight to immediately cancel the debts of 18 poverty-burdened nations.
"This year Russia intends to announce the cancellation of US$2.2 billion for the poorest African states on a bilateral basis," Denisov said on Tuesday.
Russia is a member of the Group of Eight. Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin indicated after the G8 announcement that Moscow is ready to forgive African debt left over from the Soviet era. In a June 12 interview on state-run Rossiya television, he said Moscow hoped that eliminating some debt, which is unlikely to be paid back in the next decade or two anyway, "would help lift up the economies of these states."
But Denisov's speech was the first to give a figure and a timetable.
The Russian ambassador said that like the G8, Moscow will cancel debts under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC), a program launched by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 1996 to help nations, mainly in Africa, escape the poverty-trap.
The G8 deal will initially scrap US$40 billion owed by 18 nations eligible for debt relief under the initiative, including Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana and Mali. A further nine countries owing US$11 billion are expected to complete the program's targets for good governance within 12 months to 18 months and would then qualify.
To meet the good governance standard, the G8 want recipient nations to cut corruption, tackle fraud, free up their economies and liberalize trade.
Denisov said "in absolute terms, Russia is among the leaders in the cancellation of debt of the poorest countries."
But he said Russia believes that debt cancellation alone will not lift countries out of poverty unless they reform financial and budgetary policies, adopt structural reforms, strengthen state institutions and improve the climate for investment.
Pakistan's UN envoy Munir Akram said world leaders attending a UN summit in September, which will focus partly on how to reduce extreme poverty by half by 2015, should also endorse significant debt cancellation for poor non-HIPC countries and more debt relief for heavily indebted middle-income countries.
The two-day ministerial meeting, which ended late on Tuesday, focused on commitments made by governments in 2002 at the UN summit on financing development in Monterrey, Mexico. Rich nations pledged to increase development aid, cancel debts to the poorest countries and open the global trading system, while developing countries promised to end corruption and promote good governance and democracy.
EU nations were lauded for setting timetables to increase aid to 0.7 percent of their national incomes by 2015. But the Group of 77, which includes 132 mainly developing countries, said that's not enough, and urged all donor countries to meet the target.
The G77 also criticized the failure to reach a breakthrough on trade since Monterrey and expressed hope that a ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in December would finally agree to give poor nations greater market access.
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