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Venezuela-led club says region must craft own response to crisis
(EFE Ingles Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Caracas, Nov 26 (EFE).- The leaders of the Venezuelan-led Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, known as ALBA, agreed here Wednesday on the need for the region to formulate its own response to the global financial crisis.
Concretely, they spoke of the "immediate" implementation of a scheme allowing ALBA nations and other Latin American countries to avoid the use of foreign currencies in intraregional trade as a step toward creating a single-currency zone.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez convened an emergency summit of the group to address the turmoil in the international economy.
Present for the meeting were the presidents of Bolivia, Evo Morales; Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, and Honduras, Mel Zelaya, as well as Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit and Cuban Vice President Ricardo Cabrisas.
Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, attended as an observer.
"We won't wait with our arms folded for the so-and-so International Monetary Fund and the so-and-so World Bank to come solve our problems," Chavez said before the meeting began.
"We shouldn't expect anything except from ourselves," he said. "Of course, we will be listening to the opinions of the G-20, the G-21 or the G-whatever, but we also have things to say. The South also exists. We also exist and we will make decisions."
Ecuador's Correa suggested the rapid creation of a "system of reciprocal compensation and a unit of account (that) would permit the region to trade without the necessity of using a foreign currency," such as the U.S. dollar.
Such a move, he said, would also provide a basis for eventually moving toward a single-currency area to include ALBA and any other interested countries in the region.
Correa, a U.S.-trained economist, likewise sought and received from ALBA a statement of solidarity with Ecuador in anticipation of reprisals over Quito's move to cease repayment of what it deems "illegal" debt assumed by previous governments.
"Without support from our brothers, Ecuador can be crushed," Correa said, suggesting that rich-world governments, the IMF and the World Bank might seek to punish his country severely enough to deter any other developing nations from seeking to disavow what is known in international law as "odious debt."
ALBA leaders responded with a resolution backing Ecuador and urging other indebted nations to follow Correa's lead and "place in evidence the acts that have damaged their economies and the shattering of the judicial order that should prevail under the rule of law."
"Ecuador is not alone," Chavez said, after reading the text of the resolution.
The ALBA leaders were unanimous in blaming IMF and World Bank policies for the current financial meltdown and for hindering, rather than helping, economic development development in poor countries.
"Hunger and poverty have grown" under the prevailing financial regime, Honduran President Zelaya said, adding that in the face of the present crisis, "we small societies demand the right to independence, sovereignty and respect."
Bolivia's Morales said that neither the G-20 summit in Washington - including the world's seven biggest economies plus emerging giants China, India and Brazil - nor last week's gathering of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Peru put forward a "solution to the problems of inequality, of social injustice."
More criticism of the rich countries came from Cuban Vice President Cabrisas, who noted that the same governments providing trillions of dollars to bail out banks declined to heed a U.N. request earlier this year for $30 billion to battle famine.
Chavez conceived of ALBA as an alternative to the U.S.-proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, an initiative that has since collapsed. The leftist firebrand is using some of the wealth generated by Venezuela's immense oil reserves to underwrite his regional project. EFE
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Copyright ? 2008 EFE News Services (U.S.) Inc.
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