Willow's Pagan Place

George Monbiot
Thursday April 13, 2000
The Guardian 
The impoverished people of Zambia may have noticed a certain
discrepancy between what the World Bank says and what it does.
 The state, the bank's officials insist, must reduce its spending,
 and Zambia's people must pay for health and education out of
 their own pockets. Yet the same officials, as well as enjoying 
some of the most lavish public sector salaries on earth and 
generous "relocation allowances", have free use of the best hospitals
 and the best schools: the taxpayer meets their private health and 
education costs.

As the researcher Mark Lynas has shown, the World Bank's "reforms"
 are directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of
 Zambian people. Most cannot afford to buy their own medicines,
 so they die of easily treatable diseases. Partly as a result, infant
 mortality in Zambia has risen by 25% since 1980, while life expectancy
 has fallen from 54 to 40. The cuts have forced Zambia's Siavonga 
Hospital to merge its obstetrics and tuberculosis wards, with predictable
 results. The government has also been forced to slash its spending
 on education, from £40 per primary school pupil in 1991 to £10. 
Enrolment has fallen from 96% in the mid-1980s to 77% today. 
On April 16, thousands of people will converged in Washington to 
protest against the World Bank's policies. There will be plenty to 
keep them busy. For the World Bank is not, as it pretends to be,
 the saviour of the world's poor, but their most deadly enemy. 
Every one of the bank's policies is beset by contradictions. It claims,
 for example, to be the champion of free choice, yet its prescriptions
 are resolutely Maoist. It promulgates precisely the same approach to
 development everywhere on earth, regardless of circumstance. It rules
 not by science but by slogan: the great leap forward will be achieved
 by means of "comparative advantage", "privatisation" and "trade 
liberalisation". It keeps pursuing its crazy schemes even in the face
 of repeated failure: the bank is still funding hydroelectric dams all 
over the developing world, for example, despite scores of social 
and environmental catastrophes.

The World Bank assures us that it is now the champion of female education,
 having launched a handful of high profile schemes to provide schooling
 for girls. But every year its "structural adjustment" policies force millions
 out of school. Like the International Monetary Fund, it uses third world
 debt to extract concessions from developing countries, obliging them
 to cut their spending and hand the public sector to foreign corporations.
 As schooling throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa is now available
 only to those who can pay, the girls are dumped.

The bank claims to be fighting corruption. Yet it is one of the most corrupt
 and corrupting institutions on earth. It lent Indonesia's President Suharto 
a total of $25bn, much of which was stolen. Bank staff knew this was 
happening and colluded in the theft, covering up for the government 
in order to save face. In Washington the World Bank is enmeshed in a 
sticky web of crony contracting, as large US companies lean on their 
government to persuade the bank to give them work. Last month, it 
demonstrated that it had picked up a few tips from the corrupt regimes
 with which it cheerfully does business, by appointing as its chief economist
 the brother of one of its vice-presidents.

About once a year, the World Bank admits that it has erred, and promises
 that it has learnt from its mistakes. And every year it immediately repeats
 them. When the massive migration schemes it funded in Indonesia and 
Brazil led, predictably enough, to the displacement and murder of 
indigenous people, the bank acknowledged that it should not have provided
 the money. Today, however, it is investing in an almost identical scheme in
 western China. In 1991, it conceded that its forestry programmes were a
 disaster, and claimed to have changed its approach. Two months ago 
the bank admitted that the new policy is just as bad as the old one. It's
 not hard to see why the World Bank is destined to sow destruction 
wherever it goes. The "disciplines" it imposes are not, as it claims, market
 disciplines, but political disciplines. It has just one true mandate: to engineer
 a neoliberal world order so that first world countries can seize third world
 resources. It will stop at nothing to achieve this end. It helped, for 
example, to arrange both the 1998 re-election of Brazil's President 
Cardoso and the collapse, in 1999, of the Brazilian currency. It handed
 the first world a tame neoliberal regime, in other words, whose assets 
became available at bargain basement prices to foreign corporations.

As you may know, the World Bank has come under fire for its harmful policies that have hurt people's livelihoods, despoiled the environment, and disempowered women throughout the world. But did you know that you can exert influence on the World Bank through your university, church, trade union, or local government?

Activists working to confront corporate globalization have accomplished important goals in the past few years: we blocked adoption of the pro-corporate Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), and we mobilized in Seattle to stop the forward march of the World Trade Organization (WTO). We now have an important opportunity to hold the World Bank accountable for its misdeeds.

Social movements from poor countries around the world have long been struggling to stop the World Bank’s destructive policies in their countries. Just as students and other activists in the U.S. helped weaken apartheid through divestment campaigns, we can weaken the World Bank’s ability to implement these policies. We have a powerful strategy: pledging a boycott of World Bank-issued bonds until it ends its support of those policies and cancels debts owed to it by poor countries.

Here’s how it works: eighty percent of World Bank funding comes from bond issues. Many of these bonds are held by public institutions, such as churches, unions, universities, and local governments -- either directly or through ownership of shares in Wall Street-managed investment funds. This gives us a local lever against corporate globalization and the World Bank. We can exercise this leverage by asking institutions not to purchase World Bank bonds.

Why boycott the Bank? The World Bank, through its support of "structural adjustment" and "sectoral adjustment" policies, forces governments in poor countries to adopt policies that lower wages, restructure their economies to produce for the export market, and roll out the red carpet for multinational corporations that want to exploit cheap labor and natural resources. At the same time, Bank policies force these countries to divert resources from health care and education in order to make unconscionable payments on their international debts.

This boycott has been initiated in conjunction with grassroots groups throughout the global South. The goal of our campaign is to pressure the World Bank by attacking its funding, and thereby strengthen movements working for economic and social rights, and environmental sustainability, throughout the world.

Our campaign will be successful to the extent that the policies of the World Bank become a local issue. What follows is a list of suggested steps you can take to begin action in your own community or institution on this campaign.

We aim to weaken the Bank’s finances and public image by having as many institutions as possible adopt a ban on purchasing World Bank bonds. For an institution to adopt such a policy, it is not necessary that it hold such bonds at present, or have in the past; nor is it necessary to sell those it may hold now. What we seek is a pledge not to buy them in the future. However, if it turns out that your institution does hold these bonds, this could be important for outreach and organizing.

Thank you for your interest and energy. We welcome your ideas. Please contact us with any questions or suggestions, or if you want more information on this crucial campaign.

Two-thousand was supposed to be the Jubilee year,named after the biblical concept
in which debts are cancelled and slaves freed every 50 years. Last summer the
leaders ofthe world's richest nations announced with great fanfare that there would
finally be serious relief for the world's poorest,debt-ridden countries. That was
then, this is now. The G-8 leaders last year were responding to public protests
and organizing by advocatesof debt cancellation, including the international coalition of
Jubilee 2000 organizations, religious groups, the Pope, andother celebrities. This time
around they held their meetings-- with of heads of state from the United States,
Japan, Germany, France,Britain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, and Russia--
on the remote island of Okinawa, Japan. The bill for last weekend's get-together
was a staggering $750 million dollars--enough to write off the entire foreign debt of
Equatorial Guineaor Gambia. The inaccessible location kept the number of protesters
down-- except for the tens of thousands of local residents who turned out to demand
the removal of US military bases, which occupy a fifth of Okinawa. A year after the
G-8's pledges, and four years since the beginning of their "Highly Indebted Poor
Countries" debt relief program, only one of the 41 targeted poor countries-- Uganda,
has actually seen any debt cancellation. Meanwhile, the rest are spending more on debt
service than on health care or education. Talk is cheap, and so are the leaders of the
rich countries. They want to make it through the Jubilee year withthe least amount of
debt relief they can get away with. But they are interested in the helping out with
technologies that can provide new marketing opportunities for their own corporations.
The big new initiative to come out of this year'smeetings was a "dot-force" program to
spread internet service to the developing world. "Let them eat laptops," was the rallying
cry of the rich leaders, and it was music to the ears ofcorporations like Cisco Systems that
sent executives to thesummit. The failure to provide meaningful debt relief makes a
mockery out of any Western proposals to help alleviate theAIDS epidemic in poor countries.
Sub-Saharan Africa has an estimated 24 million people with HIV/AIDS, and accounts for
83 percent of the world's total AIDS deaths. What good is the $300 million now contributed
from international sources to fight AIDS-- a small fraction of what is needed in any case--
when these countries are losing 50 times that much in debt service each year? Last week the
Clinton administration offered a one billion dollar loan program to help African countries buy
US anti-AIDS drugs. This is pathetic: a loan, at seven percent interest, to poor countries already
buried under a mountain ofdebt. So that American pharmaceutical companies can sell theirdrugs
at a profit to countries where 20 percent or more ofadults are infected with the AIDS virus. Here
are the principles behind our policies: (1) the maximum amount of debt service must be extracted,
even if theloans were originally made to corrupt dictators who funneled the money to Swiss bank
accounts and (2) generic versions ofcurrently patented drugs (as manufactured, for example, inBrazil)
must not be allowed, no matter how many lives couldbe saved. It seems that one has to go back to
the slave trade tofind a policy toward Africa that exceeds this level of greed andcallous indifference
to human life. The only bright spots in the last week came from grassroots organizing on the home
front. At the prodding of publicinterest groups, the US House of Representatives passed a bill
requiring the World Bank to stop forcing countries to adopt"user fees." These are fees that people
have to pay for previously free public services, such as primary education and health care. As expected,
these policies have resulted in reduced access to these services in poor nations, including African
countries. And the city of Oakland, California pledged not to buy World Bank bonds, joining an
international effort designed to curb the abuses of the Bank and the IMF, and to pressure them
for real debt cancellation. The movement, with organizations in 35 countries, is modeled on the
successful boycott that helped bring about the end of apartheid in South Africa. It's going to take
some more stirring at the bottom before the world's poor get anything other than empty promises
from the politicians at the top. Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and
Policy Research in Washington, DC.
============================
Neil Watkins neil@e...
World Bank bonds boycott campaign
Center for Economic Justice
1830 Connecticut Ave.,
NW, Washington, DC 20009
phone: (202) 299-0020
fax: (202) 299-0021
web: www.worldbankboycott.org