[Announce-DAN] Reminder: Thursday Night Walden Bello Speaks in Denver

["david martin" <p_hayze@hotmail.com>]

DEGLOBALIZATION: Toward an Internationalism that Supports Human Community 
and the Diversity of Life
By Walden Bello
2000 Global Justice and Peace Award Winner
author of Dark Victory: The United States and Global Poverty

Keynote Speech at
The Denver Justice and Peace Committee’s
16th Annual Awards Night Celebration
Thursday, November 2, 2000
6:30pm Reception
7pm Ceremony
$10 in advance, $12 at the door
(students $5 in advance, and $6 at the door)

First Mennonite Church
9th and Elati (South on Elati from the intersection of 11th and Speer
just east of West High School)

Walden Bello is one of the most powerful voices from the Global South 
against corporate globalization. His intellectual work and activism have 
inspired the growing movement against the WTO, IMF and World Bank. Over 20 
years ago (before the destructive influence of the World Bank had penetrated 
most of our consciousnesses) Walden and his colleagues obtained internal 
documents of the World Bank that exposed the corrupt relationship of the 
Bank to the Marcos dictatorship in the Phillippines.

Ever since Walden has been known as one of the most vocal and articulate 
critics of the IMF/World Bank cum WTO globalization. His voice rang through 
the rallies of the movement for global economic justice in Seattle, DC, 
Melbourne, and Prague. Now he will educate and inspire us this Thursday 
night in Denver.  You don’t want to miss this!!!

Walden is Executive Director of Focus on the Global South and a Professor of 
Public Adminstration and Sociology at the University of the Philippines. He 
serves on the board of Food First, 50 Years is Enough Network, Geenpeace 
Southeast Asia, and the Transnational Institute.

Walden is author of the following books: Development Debacle: The World Bank 
in the Philippines, Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle in Crisis, and Dark 
Victory: The United States and Global poverty. He has a Ph.D in political 
sociology from Princeton University. The website for Focus on the Global 
South is http://focusweb.org/.

In Solidarity,
David Martin
Executive Director
Denver Justice and Peace Committee
901 West 14th St, Suite 7
Denver, CO 80204
tel. 303-623-1463
fax 303-623-3492
e-mail: p_hayze@hotmail.com
website: www.djpc.org

The Prague Castle Debate: A Few Questions for Mr. Wolfensohn and Mr. Kohler

by Walden Bello

On September 23, 2000, President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic hosted 
an historic debate between the heads of the IMF and World Bank and their 
critics. The event took place at the historic Prague Castle—immortalized in 
Franz Kafka’s allegoric tale The Castle—a few days before the World Bank-IMF 
annual meeting in the Czech capital.

The following is an edited composite version of the Walden Bello’s two 
lengthy interventions during the debate:


I never thought I would be sitting so close to Jim Wolfensohn, President of 
the World Bank. I guess this is what you call combat in close.

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have avoided a real 
debate with their critics in civil society for a long time. Today, the 
representatives of these two institutions are here, partly because of 
President Havel’s moral suasion, partly because they realize that, with 
their two institutions suffering an unparalleled crisis of legitimacy—the 
worst in their 56-year history, in fact—the old strategy of denial and 
non-confrontation no longer works.

In this brief presentation, let me tackle four myths propagated by the Bank 
and the Fund, and end with questions to Mr. Kohler and Mr. Wolfensohn:

Myth No. 1: The World Bank and IMF are proponents of “good governance.”

Fact: For the greater part of the last 30 years, the Fund and the Bank have 
been intimately associated with very corrupt governments and human rights 
violators. What did the Brazilian military dictatorship, Ferdinand Marcos, 
Gen. Pinochet, the PRI government in Mexico, and the Suharto regime have in 
common?

They were all governments or heads of governments that were designated by 
the World Bank as “countries of concentration”--that is, countries to which 
the flow of Bank resources was greater than to other countries of similar 
size and income.

Over the last 30 years, over $30 billion in World Bank funds found its way 
to the Suharto dictatorship. According to several reports, including a World 
Bank internal report in 1999, the Bank tolerated corruption, accorded 
factual status to false government statistics, legitimized the dictatorship 
by passing it off as a model for other countries, and was complacent about 
the state of human rights and the economy. This happened under your watch, 
Mr. Wolfensohn, and the people of Indonesia will never forgive the Bank.

Myth No. 2: The IMF and the World Bank are concerned with the degradation of 
the environment.

Fact: Again and again, studies of the impact of IMF-World Bank structural 
adjustment programs have shown that, by institutionalizing stagnation and 
high poverty levels, they have been among the biggest contributors to 
environmental degradation in developing countries. In my country, the 
Philippines, for instance, so deep was the crisis triggered in the 
mid-1980’s by structural adjustment in both the countryside and the cities 
that the population flow shifted away from the cities to open access 
forests, watersheds, and artisanal fisheries, severely destabilizing them in 
the process. Studies show that by the early nineties, the top 15 Third World 
debtors--all of which were subjected to structural adjustment--had tripled 
the rate of the exploitation of their forests since the late 1970s, a 
phenomenon that was undoubtedly caused by the adjustment program’s pushing 
countries to rapidly increase their export earnings to pay off the foreign 
debt.

It is not sensitivity to the environment that is demonstrated by Mr. 
Wolfensohn and the World Bank management’s unyielding support for the 
Chad-Cameroon Pipeline, which will seriously damage ecologically sensitive 
rainforests like Cameroon’s Atlantic Littoral Forest. It is not concern for 
the environment that was revealed by the World Bank’s violation of its own 
rules on environmental assessment, involuntary resettlement, indigenous 
peoples, and environmental assessment in its failed attempt to push through 
the China Western Poverty Project that would have transformed an arid 
ecosystem supporting Tibetan and Mongolian sheepherders into land for 
settled agriculture for Chinese migrants.

A look at the Bank’s loan portfolio would reveal the reality behind the 
rhetoric: loans for the environment as a total of the Bank’s total loan 
portfolio declined from 3.6 per cent in FY 1994 to 1.02 per cent in 1998; 
funds allocated to environmental projects declined by 32.7 per cent between 
1998 and 1999; and more than half of all lending by the World Bank’s private 
sector divisions in 1998 was for environmentally harmful projects like 
mining, roads, and power.

Indeed, so marginalized is the Bank’s environmental staff within the 
bureaucracy that Herman Daly, the distinguished ecological economist, left 
the Bank staff because he felt he and other in-house environmentalists were 
having very little impact on Bank policy.

Myth No. 3: The Fund and the Bank are dedicated to combating poverty.

Fact: The opposite is true: the IMF and the Bank are central to creating 
poverty.

Structural adjustment programs imposed on over 90 developing and transition 
economies in the last 20 years have institutionalized economic stagnation, 
increased poverty, and exacerbated inequality in these areas. A recent World 
Bank study, in fact, admits that poverty worsened in the 1990’s in Eastern 
Europe, Subsaharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South 
Asia—all regions which have come under the sway of World Bank-IMF adjustment 
programs. Indeed, so bad was the record of adjustment programs that the IMF 
renamed the Extended Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) the Poverty 
Reduction and Growth Facility during the World Bank-IMF meeting in September 
1999. So devoid of success was the structural adjustment approach that Larry 
Summers, the US Treasury Secretary, who, as chief economist of the Bank in 
the early 1990’s, was a partisan of adjusment, admitted to the US Congress 
last year that it was time to shelve the “IMF-centered” macroeconomic 
approach because it just was not working.

Recently, the IMF has been busy creating poverty in East Asia. There is now 
a consensus that the harsh program of high interest rates and budget 
cutbacks imposed by the Fund turned an economic crisis into a full-blown 
recession that saw negative growth rates in Thailand, Indonesia, and South 
Korea accompanied by a sharp rise in unemployment and the poverty rate. At 
least 1 million people fell into poverty in Thailand and 21 million in 
Indonesia. In Korea, the trend of declining poverty rates between 1975 and 
1995 was sharply reversed in 1998, and the recession led to a suicide rate 
in 1998 that was 59.4 higher than in 1997.

As for the World Bank, the truth about Mr. Wolfensohn’s crusade to end 
global poverty was revealed by the findings of the bipartisan Meltzer 
Commission mandated by the US Congress to look at the record of the Bretton 
Woods institutions: 70 per cent of the Bank’s non-grant lending is 
concentrated in 11 countries, with 145 other member countries left to 
scramble for the remaining 30 per cent; 80 per cent of the Bank’s resources 
are devoted not to the poorest developing countries but to the better off 
countries that have positive credit ratings and can raise their funds in 
private capital markets; the failure rate of Bank projects is 65-70 per cent 
in the poorest countries and 55-60 per cent in all developing countries.

So why does the Bank continue to pontificate about going about its “noble 
mission” to end poverty? Because it has learned from Joseph Goebbels that a 
lie repeated often enough eventually attains the status of truth.

Myth No. 4. The Fund and the World Bank are actively soliciting the help of 
civil society.

The truth is that the World Bank and IMF are mainly interested in using 
civil society to legitimize their unchanged approaches via consultations 
that are really monologues. The Bank and the Fund are more interested in 
splitting civil society opposition to their projects, and they do this by 
branding some civil society groups as “reasonable NGO’s” and their more 
militant critics as “unreasonable NGO’s” interested only in “closing down 
discussion.” Certainly, dialogue with NGO’s was not the intent of 
Mr.Wolfensohn when he avoided debate on the merits and demerits of the Chad 
Cameroon Pipeline in favor of a strategy of name-calling by branding 
opponents of the project as the “Berkeley Mafia.”

Let me end by addressing the question: Are the Fund and the Bank capable of 
reform? I think we will know the answer from Mr. Kohler and Mr. Wolfensohn’s 
answers to the following questions:

- Mr. Kohler, do you propose to give greater decisionmaking power in the IMF 
Board to the developing countries? Will you do this by diluting the voting 
power of the United States and the European Union countries that now 
dominate the board?

- Mr. Kohler, will you propose ending the medieval and non- transparent 
practice of the IMF always being headed by a European?

- Mr. Wolfensohn, will you advocate doing away with the equally medieval and 
non-transparent tradition of always having an American head the World Bank? 
I would like to remind the audience that had Mr. Wolfensohn not given up his 
Australian citizenship to become an American, he would never have become 
head of the Bank.

- Mr. Wolfensohn, why did you not stand by your chief economist Joe Stiglitz 
and allow that powerful voice of reform to be pushed out of his staff 
position and later from his advisory role by influential conservative forces 
both within and without the Bank?

- Mr. Wolfensohn, what about Ravi Kanbur, who headed the World Development 
Report Project? Why did you not stand by this advocate of reform and allow 
the conservative forces in the Bank to stonewall him and leave him no other 
option but resignation?

So far, what we have been told here today is that Mr. Wolfensohn feels good 
about going to work everyday and that Mr. Kohler also has a heart. This 
frothy stuff is not the response that we in civil society are looking for 
today. We want hard answers to hard questions. Please.



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