From Jeffrey D. Sachs.

Sir, Jamie Drummond (Letters, February 19) hits the nail on the head. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC) formulas are meaningless.

It is perfectly possible, under HIPC, for a country filled with massive hunger, extreme poverty, and pandemic disease to be pressed to service debt on the grounds of formal debt-export ratios, which say nothing about true ability to pay.

International coherence requires a new standard of ability to pay, based on the ability to develop and reduce extreme poverty, and more precisely on the ability to meet the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The MDGs are ostensibly the guiding development objectives of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and careful analysis shows that most of sub-Saharan Africa needs a total cancellation of debt combined with massive increases in grants in order to fight hunger, disease, lack of infrastructure, and massive income poverty.

If the technical staffs of the IMF and World Bank were allowed to do their analytical work, rather than simply following the arbitrary dictates of the creditor governments that control their boards, they would quickly converge at that conclusion.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York, US