WASHINGTON (AFP) - The world's top finance officials reaffirmed a pledge to ease the debt burden of the world's most impoverished nations but failed to come up with a concrete plan.
The International Monetary Fund's policymaking arm expressed a need to improve debt relief, without endorsing a specific measure or addressing calls for a 100-percent writeoff for the neediest nations.
The IMF's International Monetary and Financial Committee echoed a statement a day earlier from the Group of Seven wealthiest industrialized nations highlighting the need for debt action, while declining to take a position on how to accomplish this.
The IMF, which recently extended its program for partial debt relief, said in its statement it "looks forward to further consideration of outstanding issues in the proposed framework for debt sustainability, before it is made fully operational, and of further debt relief, including its financing."
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown nonetheless brushed aside the notion that the meetings had failed to accomplish anything on debt, noting that the G7 had agreed on the need to confront the challenge of debt sustainability and would prepare a progress report by the end of the year.
Brown reiterated a British pledge to write off its share of debt owed to the World Bank and the African Development Bank by poor countries and called on other nations to do the same.
But the IMF left the issue for later consideration.
While there are a number of ideas and suggestions being debated, Brown said, "there's a growing consensus that multilateral debt relief has to be dealt with as soon as possible."
Brown's plan provided fresh impetus to a movement aimed at wiping the debts that are crushing many poor nations and hampering the fight against poverty.
But the rest of the G7, which besides Britain groups Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, has different ideas.
US Treasury Secretary John Snow has hinted at the possibility of a 100 percent debt writeoff but has offered no specifics.
"The international community needs to take prudent and appropriate steps to ensure long-term debt sustainability for low-income countries, which is essential for economic growth and poverty alleviation," Snow said in a statement Saturday.
"To break the ongoing 'lend-and-forgive' cycle, grants and debt relief must be significantly increased. We urge the international community to consider more options to do so, including those that would provide up to 100 percent debt relief from the international financial institutions."
Although the IMF took no firm action, Brown stepped up his appeal to the international organization representing 184 nations.
"Many countries are still being forced to choose between servicing their debts and making investments in health, education and infrastructure," Brown said.
He reiterated British proposals that the IMF revalue its massive gold holdings to help finance debt relief for poor countries and said the international community should fund up to 100 percent relief on debt owed by the poor to the World Bank and the African Development Bank.
"The UK will lead the way in relieving those countries still under the burden of this debt by paying our share -- 10 percent -- of their payments to the World Bank and the African Development Bank in their stead," Brown pledged, adding: "And we urge other governments to follow us in this."
An IMF-World Bank debt relief initiative for poor countries, launched in 1996, was extended this week to the end of 2006.
But the effort has been faulted by non-governmental groups as woefully insufficient.
Action Aid spokesman Romilly Greenhill said the IMF and World Bank acknowledged the need for more debt relief but "then responded by commissioning more IMF and World Bank studies. It's time to replace notebooks with checkbooks."