Japanese Jubilee 2000 casts doubt on reports of Japanese government initiative

Yoko Kitazawa, President of the Jubilee 2000 Coalition in Japan, has expressed doubt about press reports that the Japanese government is ready to cancel its outstanding loans to the 41 HIPC countries. The Asahi Evening News and the International Herald Tribune (22^nd April) said that Japan was prepared to cancel aid debt worth 930 billion yen ($8 billion) owed by the heavily indebted poor countries. This was on the condition that other industrialised countries shoulder a proportionate share of the financial burden to help the impoverished nations.

Ms Kitazawa said that Kiichi Miyazawa, the finance minister, had pledged only to extend the Japanese debt relief initiative, currently in place for some of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries. Japan currently includes 20 African countries in its Grant Assistance for Debt Relief. A debtor country, which services its debt, receives 80 per cent of its debt service back in the form of a grant. Mr Miyazawa said that he would increase the number of countries eligible for the scheme and increase the amount of grant assistance from the present level of 80 per cent.

Ms Kitazawa said that the Japanese government was therefore not planning to cancel HIPC debts as the Jubilee 2000 Coalition had called for. She and other representatives of the Jubilee 2000 Coalition Japan met (on April 16^th) with Foreign Minister Mr Masahiko Koumura and Mr Haruhiko Kuroda, head of the International Financial Department of the Finance Ministry. The government representatives said explicitly that they would not cancel the debt of the poorest countries for the year 2000 for two main reasons. In principle, the government believed that debtors should honour their debt obligations, and since Japan was not a Christian country, the government would not observe Jubilee 2000 like other G7 governments. This objection ignores the fact that Jubilee 2000 is supported by Buddhist, Muslim and Jewish faith groups as well as Christian denominations, along with many other sectors of the world community.

Japan has carried out a Grant Assistance for Debt Relief scheme for the poorest countries in Africa since 1988. It has involved grants of 30 billion yen ($250 million).

At the Second Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD II) in Tokyo in October 1998 Japan pledged to provide another 60 billion yen ($500 million) as Grant Assistance for Debt Relief, spread between 1999 and 2025. In parallel to this grant assistance, the Japanese debt relief scheme includes debt rescheduling for 50 years. The effects of this will therefore be drawn out until the year 2049.

Ms Kitazawa said that Japan was owed 958.3 billion yen in aid loans ($8 billion), and a further 429.2 billion yen ($3.6 billion in non-concessional loans). In addition the Ministry of Agriculture is owed 54 billion yen ($460 million) in loans made in the form of rice exports to countries in crisis. Neither the non-concessional loans nor the Ministry of Agriculture loans are covered under the Grant Assistance for Debt Relief Scheme. Grants received by debtor countries also carried the obligation that they had to be spent on Japanese goods. She said that the Japanese government was therefore a long way from meeting the calls of the Jubilee 2000 movement.