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Foreign Aid or Trap? Will new World Bank CEO, Paul Wolfowitz, continue the Rape and Pillage of Poor Nations? by Sophia Barkat As the US-Iraq war architect, Paul Wolfowitz, heads from the Pentagon to the World Bank, the world wonders if he has turned in his guns. If Wolfowitz is anything as bad as Robert McNamara, who went from being an architect of the Vietnam War to being the CEO of the World Bank in 1968, the world has a lot of bad things in store. As Sierra Club activist, Jerry Mander, reminds us in "The Case Against the Global Economy", McNamara was more dangerous as the CEO of the World Bank than he ever was dropping bombs on Cambodia and Vietnam. What will the rule of Wolfowitz in the World Bank bring? Basic Policy: Rape & Pillage At present, the World Bank, USAID, and other donor organizations form a ‘tag-team’ with so-called free-market organizations like the IMF, GATT and WTO to simultaneously rape and pillage poor nations. The IMF tells poor nations they MUST cut back public-sector investment on agriculture, education, health care, etc. and also allow multinational corporations into their markets – known as creating "free markets" in the West -- OR else they will not be able to trade in the global market. And donors like the World Bank, USAID etc. tell the poor nations they must do exactly as the IMF and WTO says, if they want financial aid. The end result: poor nations have no public-health infrastructure to speak of, no expenditure on public education, no retirement security, no labor standards, no protection from natural disasters and no protection of agriculture and no environmental policy to stop the flood of toxic waste that keeps piling up in their ports due to IMF and World Bank pressure. And they have to accept in-kind aid from World Bank, USAID etc. so that the donor nations can cash in. (See Ruben Berrios, "Contracting for Development: The Role of for-profit contractors in US Foreign Development Assistance", 2000). Sounds like a stretch? It's not. Policy to Destroy Local Agriculture Currently, a country in Africa, like Ghana, pays back interest on it’s debt to the World Bank and other such lenders at a rate of 30% of it’s national budget. As Christian Aid reported, Ghana’s government, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, was forced to import cheap agricultural products. This despite the Governments’ plan to subsidize local rice and poultry farmers, as the farmers cannot compete with the imports even in their local markets, and had requested help. When the IMF heard of the government's plan, they simply put force on the government to not do so. (See "IMF sounds death knell for Ghanaian farmers") In Mali, cotton farmers have been experiences all-time lows in cotton prices because of WTO pressure to keep prices low. Multinational cotton farmers in the US have received $3.9 billion in subsidies, while the Malian government was not allowed by the IMF to give their farmers any subsidies. (See http://www.christianaid.org.uk/campaign/trade/stories/0304mali.htm) Agriculture, which is the life-blood of poor nations, is indeed, the first to go under World Bank, WTO and IMF pressures. These organizations primarily protect only the multinational corporations in the Western corporations involved in the aid business, and also the western multinational corporations, such as those involved in the agricultural industry, a reality known all to well by American family farms. The policies of these organizations is uniform all over the third world, which make up two-thirds of the world's population. In Bangladesh, for e.g. the government was told repeatedly to stop spending whatever pittance it was spending on the agriculture industry. As a result, Bangladesh has no Disaster Management Program to speak of either. When there is rainfall, during the Monsoon season, the arable land simply goes under water. (See http://www.juryfury.com). The policies too, have been to reduce crop production, so as not to reduce the price of rice in the world commodity markets. In Bangladesh, the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and other organizations have encouraged the cultivation of Hybrid Variety and Medium Variety BORO rice over Local Boro, and BORO in general above Locally abundant Amon rice. Local Amon rice requires 130 days to be grown. HYV BORO requires 207 days. (See Report of the Task Forces on Bangladesh Development Strategies for the 1990s" pg 64). Thus, World Bank and other donor organizations have suggested that Bangladesh go for reducing food production -- rice being the staple food. In the last decade, Bangladesh has become a net importer of rice, a fact that is explained away largely as a result of floods and less on deliberate policy. Destroying and dictating agriculture policy to poor nations in this way keeps food production down – a very good thing for Cargill and the average multinational food corporation. Due to IMF and World Bank pressures to import and gradual collapses of food production in nations, names like Cargill, Monsanto and ConAgra have been able to enter international markets, selling rice and wheat to people who should have been and could have grown it themselves. More so, some like Cargill have become net exporters of patented seeds to nations like India, that never considered patenting a naturally growing crop that is indigenous to them. (See Vandana Shiva, "Cargill: The New East India Company - A profile of the largest grain trader in the world." 1993.) Around 30,000 farmers die in India each year – many commit suicide – because they are unable to afford imported rice or wheat seeds, which they must use when planting new crops, thanks to the WTO’s enforcing of western patents of what are originally Indian crops. There are no ropes tying India, Bangladesh or Ghana to the WTO, World Bank or IMF, however. But the politicians and bureaucrats are so used to the easy solution of foreign aid and export economics, that they lack the initiative to leave these organizations. Why does India need to be in the WTO, anyway? It seems, India and Bangladesh have sacrificed their farmers so that their upper-class and export class can get jobs -- computer industry to garments industry. The IMF-WTO-World Bank attack on agriculture has therefore been possible and very successful. Humanitarian Organization Horrified Christian Aid has indentified some key problems with the World Bank & IMF policies in poor nations. Here they are in the original words of Christian Aid:
Hope? Will anything improve under Wolfowitz? Or will he further deteriorate the situation? A founding member of the Project for the New America Century, an organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership, Wolfowitz hardly has a reputation that lends hope to the average poor farmer in Ghana or Bangladesh. Indeed, having any hope under his leadership would be mere stupidity. But, as activists worldwide fear the worst from this man, they also take heart at the global consciousness that is spreading about these criminal organizations. With increased awareness, perhaps the IMFs, WTOs and World Banks will be tried in the International Criminal Court for suppressing free markets in the name of creating free markets. Just a week ago three people were charged with planning to destroy the IMF and World Bank buildings. These acts are violent, and violence solves nothing -- institutions can rise up out of the ashes if people's values and power structures do not change. But, it's almost understandable why people might want to do this. There are that many people in this world who's nations have been raped and pillaged by the organizations. The anger is not irrational. If the goal was to transform the World Bank into a real bank for the world, then the hope has been destroyed with the selection of the new leadership -- Wolfowitz. It almost ensures that the haate towards the World Bank and IMF and WTO will not die, at least not now. About the Author(s): See under Our Contributors to find out about the Author(s) of this article.
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