UN General Assembly
1996

agriculture, trade and investment, sports and border and immigration matters. Furthermore, we defined the conditions for joint strategies to take advantage of funds provided by multinational sources, such as those granted by the European Union under the terms of the Fourth Lomé Convention. I would now like to direct the attention of the General Assembly to a subject that just a few years ago was on the front pages of all the newspapers of the world and that, even though it still has a considerable impact on the effectiveness of development policies, has vanished from the world’s attention: the problem of foreign debt. The countries of the region have carried out a series of adjustment programmes in an attempt to regain external financial solvency. Nonetheless, there are still considerable imbalances as a result of the burden of debt 6 servicing, without a corresponding recovery in the terms of exchange that would allow us to create greater resources through our exports. In the case of the Dominican Republic, foreign debt increased 13-fold between 1964 and 1994. Today, thanks to