Every hour of every day, the poorest people in the world give the richest people in the world $7 million (about £4 million). Even though we give "aid" to developing countries, they still give us much more than we give them. This is because the developing countries owe the rich countries more than $2 trillion. Although they are desperately trying to repay this, the debt keeps getting bigger.

The British chancellor Gordon Brown has called for a doubling of aid to poor countries - but that money will all come back to us in debt repayments. For example, Comic Relief's Red Nose Day in 2003 raised an incredible $59 million, a huge outpouring from a generous British public. But the money came back faster than people gave it - it took a whole day to raise, yet it was only enough to cover 8 hours of debt payments. And Red Nose Day happens only once every two years.

At their summit in Cologne in 1999, the leaders of the group of eight most industrialised countries (G8) promised to cancel $100 billion dollars in poor country debt. Although that is only 4% of developing country debt, it would have been useful. But more than four years later less than half of that has been cancelled.

'Mozambique's debt service is larger than than the health budget'

Mozambique has probably received more debt relief than any other country. Prime Minister Luisa Diogo is pleased that whereas Mozambique was paying $169 million a year in debt service (that is, interest plus repayment of principal), after two debt cancellations it is now paying $55 million per year. This is a huge saving, but she points out that debt service is still larger than the health budget ($32 million a year), or the education budget ($50 million). "So we know that something is still wrong", she concludes.

Why does Mozambique have a debt? The debt dates back to the 1970s and 1980s. After independence in 1975, the new nation was encouraged to borrow money to build clothing factories and to develop plantations to export cotton and bananas. In the 1980s, Mozambique was attacked by apartheid South Africa in a brutal war in which more than a million people died and much of the infrastructure was destroyed. To "help" the people of Mozambique, the country was given loans. White minority rule (apartheid) in South Africa ended 15 years ago, but Mozambique is still paying the price - repaying loans that were given to help it feed people after South Africa destroyed farms and factories. Meanwhile, interest rates were increased, while the money Mozambique earned from exporting cotton, tea and cashew nuts decreased as world prices fell. Instead of rebuilding after the war, Mozambique had to concentrate on paying debts.

Nearby is the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s it was called Zaire and ruled by a brutal dictator called Mobutu, who supported the West in the Cold War. The World Bank and IMF lent $13 billion to Mobutu, despite many suspicions that the money was being mis-used, and that he would never repay the loans, and that he was killing anyone who opposed him. Today Mobutu is dead and the DRC is struggling to rebuild a country destroyed by the Western-backed Mobutu. Does the West feel responsible? Not at all. Instead it is demanding that Mobutu's victims repay the money he borrowed to suppress them. In 2002 four countries - France, Belgium, South Africa and Sweden - lent (not gave) $522 million to the DRC so it could repay its debts to the International Monetary Fund, ensuring that it would be eligible to borrow more money to repay other debts.

This is the debt treadmill. Countries borrow more and more money to pay off old loans, but somehow fall deeper in debt. Take the six years between 1998 and 2003. According to the World Bank, in those six years the developing countries paid an incredible $2,153 billion in interest payments and principal repayments. How did they do it? Mostly by borrowing another $1,692 billion. In addition they received $177 billion in aid which could be used to pay off debts. But poor countries were still out of pocket. They still had to find $366 billion of their own money to give to the rich north. That is $60 billion per year, or $7 million per hour. And the total debt actually increased, from $2,122 billion to $2,433 billion.

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