Thank you for your Jubilee Debt Campaign card about the slow progress in debt cancellation.

Whilst I welcome the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) it is taking far too long to deliver and has fallen well short of expectations. Six countries out of 42 have received full debt relief under the initiative after five years of bold promises from the G8, and despite the efforts of churches, charities, and MPs from all parties, unpayable debt remains a huge burden on the developing world.

I have campaigned on debt relief and have called specifically for two things that would make a difference to the debt cancellation process. Firstly the debt relief formula should be adapted to make allowances for shocks to the economies of the indebted countries, e.g. the recent collapse in commodity prices. In addition a special effort should be made to cancel the debts of countries with very high rates of HIV/Aids infection. Gordon Brown has certainly made the right noises about the first of these but so far the international community has not adopted these suggestions.

I believe that in addition to debt relief globalisation must be used as a force for good by giving developing countries access to markets that are currently subject to tariff and trade barriers. There is something wrong in giving debt relief with one hand and then denying poor countries the ability to export their way out of poverty with the other. We must break the link between dependency and debt.