Resolution 36
Poverty and Debt
This Conference:
1. Calls attention to the life-and-death urgency of the problems of world poverty.
2. Salutes the courage and solidarity of poor people who, at great personal cost, are struggling to achieve their own liberation from poverty and oppression.
3. Calls for an international, co-operating settlement, negotiated by both industrial and developing countries, that will establish policies to reduce interest charges and the level of indebtedness, based on shared responsibility for the world debt and in accordance with Christian and humanitarian principles of economic justice and social and ecological interdependence.
4. Calls on national governments, transnational corporations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank together, to re-examine all principles governing trade relationships, the transfer of technology and resources and all loan and aid policies in order to improve the economic viability and local autonomy of developing countries.
5. Requests these bodies to consider these and other creative ways of involving the global economy over time by:
(a)(i) correcting demand imbalances; (ii) reducing protectionism; (iii) stabilising exchange rates; (iv) increasing resource transfers; (b) offering relief from debt incurred with commercial banks in ways that will not leave debtor economies vulnerable to foreign manipulation, by (i) lending directly to developing countries at reduced and subsidised interest rates; (ii) improved rescheduling of existing debt repayments; (iii) debt conversion arrangements; (iv) establishing a multilateral body to co-ordinate debt relief; (c) offering relief from official debts incurred with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund through (i) improved rescheduling of existing debt repayment; (ii) lending on conditions oriented to development objectives; (iii) refraining from making demands on debtor countries which would endanger the fabric of their national life or cause further dislocation to their essential human services.
Communion International Monetary Fund World Bank (See further para.73 of the Report on "Christianity and the Social Order.")