I have always thought the World Bank does more harm than good, especially with its funding of huge dams, but despite the great protests which occasionally catch the attention of the media I have paid little attention to the details. Now my indifference has been jolted by an article in the Independent/UK by Johann Hari The Real Scandal at the World Bank: The Bank is Killing Thousands of the Poorest People in the World. I’ve learned of the campaign to make the Bank’s bonds as untouchable as investments in apartheid-era South Africa. Says a leader in the campaign, Dennis Brutus, who was once imprisoned with Nelson Mandela: "I lived to see the death of political apartheid. Now I want to live to see the end of global financial apartheid." The Bank is beginning to worry about its AAA bond rating since several U.S. unions and the cities of San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and Boulder have sold their World Bank bonds.
Today there is a scandal over the corrupt behavior of its president, Paul Wolfowitz, but as the article points out, the press is ignoring the much greater scandal at the World Bank: it
kills poor people by refusing to make loans unless poor countries stop subsidizing necessities and open their markets to global competition.
The article describes World Bank victims the author has met:
Hawa Amadu, a grandmother in Ghana who goes thirsty and without electricity. "Am I supposed to drink air?" she asks. Maxima Cari, a mother in Bolivia, who uses dirty water from a well dug by people in her village because in 1997 the Bank ordered Bolivia to privatize the water supply. The water makes her children sick and there is only enough to wash them weekly. (See The politics of Water in Bolivia for more about this issue.) Muracin Claircin, a rice farmer in Haiti whose livelihood was destroyed because the Bank forced Haiti to drop import barriers, permitting heavily subsidized U.S. rice to flood the market. Charles Avaala, a tomato farmer in Ghana who can’t compete with subsidized tomatoes from Europe. (The Bank ordered Ghana to open its markets to international corporations and close the government-owned tomato cannery Mr. Avaala used to supply.)
The World Bank claims to have a mission to end poverty, but as the article explains:
The bank’s own former chief economist, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, says (its policies have) "condemned people to death... They don’t care if people live or die."
Why? Why would a body that claims to help the poor actually thrash them? Because its mission to end poverty has always been mythical. As George Monbiot explains in his book The Age of Consent, the World Bank was created in the 1940s by US economist Henry Dexter White to be a further projection of US power. The bank’s head is invariably American, the bank is based in Washington, and the US has a permanent veto on policies. 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.
The article has many more details. You can find it here. I hope people who would like to defend the World Bank, or have participated in the protests and disinvestment campaign, will weigh in.