Group of Eight leaders agreed Thursday to seek a two-year extension to the life of an expiring debt-reduction scheme for the world's poorest countries.
The so-called heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative, managed by the International Monetary Fund, had been due to fold at the end of 2004, leaving many countries still crippled by debt.
Envisioned at its birth in 1996 as a way to relieve 100 billion dollars of debt for countries that have sound government, the so-called HIPC initiative has so far only cancelled 31 billion dollars.
"We are committed to fully implementing the HIPC initiative and to supporting debt sustainability in the poorest countries through debt relief and grant financing," the G8 leaders said in a joint statement.
Leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States said they had instructed their finance ministers to work with other donors to extend the sunset date of HIPC to December 31, 2006.
They also promised "topping up where appropriate" for the scheme, without specifying a sum.
The world's most powerful leaders, meeting at a luxury beach-side resort in Sea Island, off Georgia, also told their ministers to "consider measures that can further help the poorest countries address the sustainability of their debt."
Leaders asked for a progress report by the end of the year.
MIDEAST QUARTET TO MEET THIS MONTH: World leaders at the Group of Eight summit here called Thursday for a new meeting of the diplomatic "quartet" on the Middle East in a bid to revive moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.
The G8 leaders said the quartet - the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union - should "meet in the region before the end of the month" to consider ways to restart the stalled process.
The quartet should "engage with Israeli and Palestinian representatives and set out its plans for taking forward in practical terms its declaration of May 4" in which the grouping welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plans to withdraw from Gaza and called for further Palestinian reforms.
The announcement from the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States seemed intended to spark new life into the quartet's much-vaunted, but as yet-unimplemented "roadmap" to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But US officials conceded that the meeting would be a routine gathering of diplomats from the four members and would not involve the quartet principals: UN chief Kofi Annan, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowan, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency.
"This won't be anything out of the ordinary," one US official told AFP on condition of anonymity. "The quartet meets at envoy level pretty frequently, about once every two months."
The quartet principals last met on May 4 at the United Nations after which they endorsed Sharon's disengagement plan.
In their statement, the G8 leaders also gave a thumbs-up to the Sharon proposal and pledged to "restore momentum" to the roadmap.
The statement came a day after the leaders here adopted a US initiative to encourage reforms in the Middle East that drew scepticism from many regional leaders who thought the focus should be on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Thursday's text said the G8 looks forward to Israel's pullout from Gaza and part of the West Bank in 2005 "and hopes that this disengagement initiative will stimulate progress towards peace in the region."
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