World Bank: "criminal"
NEARLY two years after the Rio Conference on the environment and development, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) having been debating a fundamental question. Is it possible to influence the policy of the World Bank? PIERRE GALAND, the general secretary of Oxfam in
Belgium, has said "no". In a open letter, extracts of which we publish below, he calls on NGOs to assert their independence.
International Viewpoint #255 April 1994
ON the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the United
Nations and the institutions of Bretton
Woods. I would like to resign from the
NGO-World Bank working group and its co-ordinating committee. My decision is guided by intellectual honesty and honesty towards the many friends with whom I work in the countries of the so-called "Third World"
"Having had the opportunity these past three years to observe the behaviour of the World Bank, I would like to join my colleagues in the NGOs who believe that only dissidence can lead to an alternative of justice and co-existence for the peoples of our planet. I was hoping that by working together in the
NGO-World Bank group we would make some progress towards co-development and addressing the condition of the most deprived segments of the world's population.
"The reality is very different. Poverty worsens every day. Hunger kills more effectively than the worst of wars. The number of sick without care, of illiterate youth, of homeless, of unemployed grows everyday at an unprecedented rate.
"The remedies provided by the World Bank for development are poisoned remedies that accelerate the process. For my soul and conscience, I am obliged to tell you, "enough!" You have stolen the correct discourse of the NGOs towards development, eco-development, poverty and people's participation. At the same time, your policies of structural adjustment and your actions accelerate social dumping in the South, by obliging it to enter defenseless into the world market.
"Thanks to you and your IMF colleagues, multinational firms are relocating, because you create productive conditions with reduced social costs. The result of your joint IMF-World Bank interventions is constant pressure on the world's economies to be more competitive. This objective is only 36 obtained through growing pressure on governments to cut spending and reduce social expenditure judged to be to costly.
In your eyes, this means that the only good governments ... are those that accept the prostitution of their economies to the interests of multinational corporations and the major groups of international finance.
"The World Bank is the biggest international institution involved in development, but it is also the most arrogant. It has an unequalled power of intervention into world affairs and the internal affairs of States. It dictates the conditions for development, and is only accountable to itself. |...]
"The World Bank is very well informed as to the state of poverty, impoverishment and abandonment of large sectors of the planet's population. Is it pure cynicism and lies? For my part, I believe that the World Bank is simply the object of a terrible misunderstanding from most of us, for whatever it might say it is an instrument in the service of an orthodox model of growth based on competition and not cooperation.
"Its task is to get everyone, big and small, participating in the great world market. But very rarely — and certainly not today - has growth equalled 'development'. At the end of the century, growth and competition have become a means of accelerated and disproportionate enrichment for a minority, and no longer has the effect of development, cooperation or redistribution. [.]
"As long as the World Bank continues with its crazed policies in the field of structural adjustment, we will have to mobilise ourselves and mobilise the greatest number of the victims of this type of intervention in order to fight it. After a three and a half year dialogue with the World Bank, within the NGO working group, I wish to offer my resignation. It is clear to me that there is no space to humanise the World Bank.
"Africa is dying, but the World
Bank is enriching itself. Asia and Eastern Europe are being robbed of all their riches, and the World Bank supports the initiatives of the IMF and GATT that authorise this pillage, which is both intellectual and material. Latin America, like other continents, watches in horror as its children serve as a reserve army of labour and, worse, a reserve of organs for the new transplant market in North
America.
"According to the World Bank, indispensable sacrifices of structural reconversion required for the globalisation of the economy and of markets are somehow the indispensable 'desert crossing' en route to the Eden of development.
"The revival of the economy of development — which promotes social justice through the access of the greatest number to the revenue of labour — requires us to urgently find the institution that can replace you and empower people to work towards restoring their dignity, food self-sufficiency and right to diversity in co-development.
"In resigning, I salute my colleagues for whom I retain my esteem, and I continue to appreciate a number of employees of the World Bank.
"Only regroupment and a new struggle for the transformation of the United Nations and the institutions of Bretton Woods will be able to create new conditions to wage the war on hunger and for co-development based on solidarity." *