The real scandal at the World Bank

Meet a few victims from World Bank's mysterious economic directives toward the developing nations around the world. This global financial institution was created in the vision of "help the poor" and "end the poverty" motto, but its apparently ruthless and forceful ordering of the developing nations' governments adopting neoliberalism are fueling more miseries and even unaccounted deaths from lack of water and electricity, high priced imported foods that is contributing to poor nutrition to millions, etc. How could this be expected from this "benevolent" world institution? The answer is the following: "It does not promote a sensible mix of markets and state action - the real path to development. No: the World Bank pursues the interests of US corporations over the poor, every time."

Here is a few excerpt from Johann Hari's timely article in The Independent:

Meet Hawa Amadu, 70-something, living in the muddy slums of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and trying to raise her grandkids as best she can. Hawa has a problem - a massive problem - and the World Bank put it there. She can't afford water or electricity any more. Why? The World Bank threatened to refuse to lend any more money to her government, which would effectively make it a leper to governmental donors and international business, unless it stopped subsidising the cost of these necessities. The subsidies stopped. The cost doubled. Now Hawa goes thirsty so her grandchildren can drink, and weeps: "Am I supposed to drink air?"

She is not alone. Half a world away, in Bolivia, Maxima Cari - a mother - is also thirsty. "The World Bank took away my right to clean water," she explains. In 1997 the World Bank demanded the Bolivian government privatise the country's water supply. So Maxima couldn't afford it any more. Now she has to use dirty water from a well her villagers dug. This dirty water is making her children sick, and she is sullen. "I wash my children weekly," Maxima says. "Sometimes there's only enough water to wash their hands and faces, not their whole body ... This is not a nice way to live."

Meet some more victims. I have met hundreds, from Africa to Latin America to the Middle East. Muracin Claircin is a rice farmer in Haiti - only he can't grow rice any more. In 1995, the World Bank demanded Haiti drop all restrictions on imports. The country was immediately flooded with rice from the US, which has been lavishly subsidised by the US government. The Haitian government barely exists and can't offer rival subsidies anyway: the World Bank forbids it. So now Muracin is jobless and his family are starving.

Some 5,000 miles away, Charles Avaala in Ghana is watching his tomatoes rot. He used to grow them for a government-owned community tomato cannery that provided employment for his entire community. The World Bank ordered his government to close it down, and to open the country's markets to international competition. Now he can't compete with the subsidy-fattened tomatoes from Europe. He, too, is starving.

The problem is that the very pervasive and influential media have not done their journalistic duties, they have not raised this globally affecting issues to the forefront of public mind, rather than it is hidden away in the depth chart of hyped scandals in entertainment world and minute statistical arrays of scoring bonanzas of never ending sporting events. Here is a statistics from grim reality:

The World Bank's own Independent Evaluation Group just found that barely one in ten of its borrowers experienced persistent growth between 1995 and 2005 - a much smaller proportion than those who stagnated or slid deeper into poverty. The bank's own former chief economist, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, says this approach "has condemned people to death... They don't care if people live or die."

"They don't care if people live or die" -- but we the ordinary people do care. And it turns out that we the ordinary people "in the West - through their trade unions, churches, town councils, universities and private investments" owns The World Bank. How do we own "The World Bank"? Here is the answer:

The bank raises nearly all its funds by issuing bonds on the private market. They are often held by socially minded institutions, the kind who signed up to Make Poverty History.

An activist in this area clearly explains how to play role in caring for millions of poor families perhaps in thousands of miles away from us, but share the same humane bonding like rest of us:

we have a simple power: to sell the bonds and bankrupt the World Bank. "We need to break the power of the World Bank over developing countries just as the disinvestment movement helped break the power of the apartheid regime in South Africa,"

The campaign to make World Bank bonds as untouchable as apartheid-era investments has already begun. The cities of San Francisco, Boulder, Oakland and Berkeley have sold theirs. Several US unions have also joined. Even this small ripple has caused anxiety within the bank about the threat to its "AAA" bond rating.

My humble recommendation to this blog readers would be the following: start digging more neutral but credible information on this very urgent subject. A few books I recommend on this related issue by World Bank's past President and Nobel Prizer winner in economics Joseph Stiglitz, Muhammad Yunus who won Nobel prize in peace last year and a few other noted authors are the following:

Globalization And Its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz

Fair Trade For All : How Trade Can Promote Development by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton

Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz

Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty by Muhammad Yunus

End Of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs

Wealth And Poverty Of Nations by David Landes

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

With concerted and cohesive actions, we can all play vital role dissolving apparent "mysterious" World Bank policies that is clearly hurting millions, perhaps billions of poor people around the world who are not as lucky as we are using modern electronic media like Blogging and Internet.

Regards,
Sohel

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The real scandal at the World Bank