19 March, Larry Elliott, The Guardian: The expected rise in US interest rates will increase financial pressures on developing countries already struggling with a 60% jump in their debt repayments since 2014, a leading charity has warned. Five of the countries on the charity’s list – Angola, Lebanon, Ghana, Chad and Bhutan – were spending more than a third of government revenues on servicing debts. Countries with the highest external government debt payments as a proportion of revenue include a number of Least Developed Countries, including Angola, Chad and Bhutan.
The Jubilee Debt Campaign said a study of 126 developing nations showed that they were devoting more than 10% of their revenues on average to paying the interest on money borrowed – the highest level since before the G7 agreement to write off the debts of the world’s poorest nations at Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005.
Developing country debt moved down the international agenda following the Gleneagles agreement in which the G7 industrial countries agreed to spend £30bn writing off the debts owed to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank by the 18 poor countries.
But developing country debt is now once again being closely monitored by the IMF, which says 30 of the 67 poor countries it assesses are in debt distress or at risk of being so.
Lending to developing countries almost doubled between 2008 and 2014 as low interest rates in the west led to a search for higher-yielding investments. A boom in commodity prices meant many poor countries borrowed in anticipation of tax receipts that have not materialised.
But the Jubilee Debt Campaign said the boom–bust in commodity prices was only one factor behind rising debt, pointing out that some countries were paying back money owed by former dictators, while others had been struggling with high debts for many years but had not been eligible for help. The campaign said developing countries were also vulnerable to a rise in global interest rates as central banks withdrew the support they have been providing since 2008.
The US Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates this week – with the financial markets expecting two or three further upward moves during 2018.
Tim Jones, an economist at the Jubilee Debt Campaign, said: “Debt payments for many countries have risen rapidly as a result of a lending boom and fall in commodity prices. The situation may worsen further as US dollar interest rates rise, and as other central banks reduce monetary stimulus. Debt payments are reducing government budgets when more spending is needed to meet the sustainable development goals.”
The US Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates this week, with markets expecting further rises. Photograph: AFP/Getty
External loans to developing country governments rose from $200bn per year in 2008 to $390bn in 2014 and while they have since dropped to $300-350bn per year from 2015-2017 they remained well above levels seen prior to the global financial crisis.
Commodity prices peaked in the middle of 2014 and more than halved over the next 18 months. Despite a recovery from their low in January 2016 they remain more than 40% lower than they were at their peak.
The Jubilee Debt Campaign said the fall in global commodity prices had reduced the income of many governments that are reliant on commodity exports for earnings. In addition, weaker commodity prices led to the exchange rates of developing countries falling against the US dollar, increasing the relative size of debt payments since external debts tend to be owed in dollars.
Angola and Mozambique, two sub-Saharan African countries, and Least Developed Countries, heavily dependent on commodity exports – had both seen falls of 50% in their exchange rates since 2014.
Jones said there had been a lack of transparency about how debts had been incurred. And he said private lenders should suffer from any restructuring agreements.
“Where there are debt crises, the risk is that the IMF will bail out reckless lenders, and the debt will remain with the country concerned,” Jones said. “Instead, reckless lenders need to be made to bear some of the costs of economic shocks through lower debt payments, allowing governments to maintain spending on essential services.”
13 – jan 2018: IPS James Jeffrey: L’Ethiopie a connu sa part méritée de la dégradation et de dommages environnementaux, mais de nos jours il met de plus en plus en place un exemple de la façon de lutter contre le changement climatique tout en réalisant la croissance économique. “La communauté internationale sait très bien que l’Ethiopie est l’un des précurseurs de la politique climatique internationale, sinon le premier pays africain”, déclare Fritz Jung, le représentant de la coopération bilatérale au développement à l’ambassade d’Allemagne à Addis-Abeba.
(IPS) – Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugee women from Myanmar are currently living in the cramped camps along Bangladesh Myanmar border. Victims of sexual and physical violence in the Rakhine state, women have been disproportionately affected by this crisis and these women’s perils are far from over in the host country as they continue to face multifaceted challenges. 
Jan 11 2018 (IOM) 
l’énergie comme vecteur de transformation, il est indispensable de développer l’accès à des sources énergétiques modernes adéquates, abordables et fiables pour permettre aux pays les plus pauvres du monde de se libérer du piège de la pauvreté.
LDC Watch along with five other likeminded organizations organized a side event “Reclaiming Power: People vs. Polluters” at COP23. This focused on how the Paris Accord can only be met by transforming the current energy system, and the meeting stressed that the next move is for a transformation to a clean energy system with special consideration towards energy sustainability, energy security and energy equity aspects of the LDCs. 
Tetet Nera Lauron, Bonn (IBON) 18 Nov: The annual climate summit enters its final days, with the hopes of coming to an agreement on a rulebook that clarifies how the 2015 Paris Agreement will be realized as the global response to climate change. The 23rd Conference of Parties (COP 23) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is meeting in Germany with the government of Fiji presiding, with the objective of uniting different governments and other actors on how to keep global temperature increase well below 2 degrees Celsius, and if possible, below 1.5 degrees. 
18 November: As COP 23 drew to a close, the Chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group, Gebru Jember Endalew, said, “As an Ethiopian, I know intimately the pain caused by climate change. My country is in the grip of a severe drought that has put 13 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia at risk of increased food insecurity. At the same time, our friends in South Asia have been drenched by extraordinary monsoon flooding, friends in the Caribbean have been battered by devastating hurricanes, and island states in the pacific are watching their homes disappear before their eyes beneath the water.” 