5 November 1998

The South African Communist Party supports the aims of the Jubilee 2000 South Africa Campaign, which will be launched in Cape Town tomorrow.

At the heart of the Jubilee 2000 campaign is the insistence that the 3rd World debt should be scrapped by the year 2000.  At a time when the peoples of the South are being made to bear the brunt of the current global crisis of capitalism, the Jubiliee 2000 vision is more relevant than ever before.

Over the past 25 years declining profitability and productivity in the advanced economies has been met by a frenzied and increasingly speculative wave of globalisation, as huge stock-piles of Western capital range unregulated across the world in pursuit of profits.

Attempts are made to blame the current crisis on "unwise borrowing" in "emerging markets".  The fact is that for every unwise borrowing in the South there is usually an unwise lender in the North.  In the end, of course, it is neither the unwise borrowers nor lenders who suffer the most acute consequences of the crisis.  It is millions of poor farmers, workers and unemployed in Indonesia, Brazil, Russia and Africa.The 3rd World debt must be scrapped.

Issued by:
SACP Head Office