Activists call for the cancellation of the Global South’s debt.

To: Governments of the G7 countries.

In anticipation of the 50th G7 Summit on June 13th-15th, 2024 in Apulia, Italy, we write to you as movements, organizations, activists and groups calling for justice in the ongoing climate and social crises.

We come from the Global South. We are the ones suffering the worst impacts of the climate crisis, produced predominantly by the Global North and particularly by the countries that make up the G7.

As is evident to all the leaders attending the 50th G7 Summit, in recent years climate change has been advancing at an ever-increasing pace instead of slowing down. We are already dangerously overshooting several planetary boundaries, putting billions of lives and essential livelihoods at risk.

A major driver of this and other crises is the debt system imposed by multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, both of which are led and dominated by the G7 and their representatives. We, Global South countries, are forced to extract resources needed for the production and consumption of the Global North. We are forced to cut down our trees and deplete our soils while being deprived of affordable public services without seeing any meaningful responses to the unfolding impacts of the climate and ecological crisis. All this destruction, only to see our taxes and national resources go into payments of interest rates on an illegitimate debt that we have already paid many times over.

Enough is enough! We claim our right for a self-determined life outside of the neocolonial control of the Global North imposed on us through debt. We're calling out the hypocrisy of this year's G7 summit and its topic. It supposedly focuses on the Global South, but the G7 was formed as a response to the Global South's push for liberation from continued colonial structures. That push included proposing a New International Economic Order in 1974, the reaction to which was the formation of the G7 to consolidate Global North power. How can you claim to talk about the Global South without having us present at the negotiation table? Nothing about us, without us!

Given the nature of the exploitative credit system, it is becoming increasingly difficult to respond to the climate crisis, pandemics and other social and environmental priorities. In order to tackle these challenges we call for the following necessary steps:

Unconditional cancellation of all bilateral, multilateral and private debts of the countries of the Global South;

Sufficient climate finance and funds for Loss and Damages in the form of grants from the Global North;

Further reparations for centuries of colonial exploitation, genocides and climate and ecosystem destruction;

That a Global South task force oversees and has the political, economical and legal power to execute all these demands.

We know that it is not in the G7’s interest to do these things since the purpose of the G7 is to uphold a capitalist and colonial power system of which debt is a major pillar. We are not expecting the G7 to give us debt cancellation, justice and real decolonisation. This is why we need to stand in solidarity to bring an end to the colonial institutions that perpetuate debt and injustice, by organizing globally and taking our political power back. It’s time that the people make politics, not the political elite and the corporations.

Who owes whom? The Global North and the G7 in particular has a historical debt with the Global South. This debt is multilayered: the debt owed because of colonialism and its atrocities; the still ongoing plundering of resources; the death and misery inflicted on the people of the Global South by slavery, apartheid and genocide; the destruction of ecosystems; and the disproportionate appropriation of the atmosphere by centuries of greenhouse gas emissions.

We now take matters into our own hands to abolish the debt system and colonial continuations once and for all. This change has nothing to do with Global North charity or good will, it is simply restorative justice being put into effect.

In solidarity,

End Fossil Occupy Uganda

Debt For Climate Uganda

Debt for Climate México

End Fossil Occupy Tanzania

End Fossil Occupy Nigeria

Agape Earth Coalition

Fridays For Future Zambia

Scientific Rebellion - Mexico