World Versus Bank: The Return of the World Bank and the People's Resistance

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World Versus Bank: The Return of the World Bank and the People's Resistance

Monday, 06 October 2014 10:13
By Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha, Truthout | Op-Ed


If one was to do some superficial digging on the World Bank, you may get the impression that the Bank is a pure "development" organization, working exclusively in the interest of the public to reduce poverty and inequality. Indeed, the Bank's tagline is, "A world without poverty." But dig just a little deeper and the contours of a deep and extreme ideology become apparent. The World Bank reveals itself not as an altruistic benefactor of the world's poor so much as a link in the chain between Wall Street and the global south - a link the primary purpose of which is to facilitate profit for elite interests, through a long established pattern of wealth extraction.

The World Bank is very well funded and vastly powerful. With money it makes trading on Wall Street and through donations from rich country governments, it distributes about $30 billion each year, mostly in loans, to less rich countries, ostensibly to promote economic development. But it has a pretty checkered history, and one that has attracted legions of critics over the years, including a broad range of economists, governments and large NGOs, but most persistently grassroots and community groups whose lives it directly affects. And now, after a decade or so of relative calm during which the Bank seemed to get some measure of control back over its public image, criticism is again mounting.

It's a criticism that runs deep, to the very core of the Bank's purpose and guiding ideology, and it is being voiced all over the world, from the farmlands and cities of India, Latin America and Africa to the doorstep of the Bank's headquarters in Washington, DC.

Doing Business

Right now, at the center of the controversy are the Bank's Doing Business (DB) rankings. These come in the form of an annual report that ranks 189 countries according to how "business friendly" Bank officials think they are. In recent years, these rankings have assumed the position of a flagship program, that, in the Bank's own estimation have, "served as an incomparable catalyst for business reforms initiatives." They work on two fronts: First, they tell investment-hungry governments what a World Bank endorsed "business friendly environment" looks like, thereby setting the parameters of what form economic development must take. Secondly, and the reason governments pay attention, is that they then influence the flow of massive amounts of capital, from private and corporate investments to foreign aid to the Bank's own enormous portfolio.

This is where the Bank's extreme ideology comes in. Because it believes that absolutely all economic activity is positive, regardless of whom it benefits (a classic feature of a neoliberal "trickle down economics" belief system), and that being connected to mammoth global - therefore inevitably corporate - supply chains is the silver bullet for developing countries, their focus is on making legal and regulatory environments friendly to multinational business - particularly large monoculture agribusinesses. And as mounting evidence shows, far from stimulating equitable development, this "one size fits all" approach results in the enrichment of elites - both local and global - at the expense of small farms and business, particularly the family farms that currently feed 80 percent of the global south. There are any number of examples, from Guatemala to Sierra Leone to the Philippines, where the sort of "reforms" the Doing Business rankings promote have acted as a catalyst for massive industrial land grabs and the dispossession and forced eviction of countless small-scale farmers. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/26643-world-versus-bank-the-return-of-the-world-bank-and-the-people-s-resistance

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