EDITORIAL - Criticism of World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund - Editorial

Ecologist, The, Sept, 2000

The World Bank, IMF and WTO, of course, claim they have changed, spending more on health and education in developing countries, re-christening the structural adjustment fund the Poverty Reduction Facility, and marginally opening up Northern markets to developing country exports. But these moves have done little to compensate for the damage caused by the driving goals of the three institutions which remain fundamentally unchanged. As this special issue shows, attempts at reform, most notably at the World Bank under its current President, have failed. The radical slimming down of the institutions recommended by the US Meltzer Report has been rejected outright. So incapable are the Bank and the Fund's managers and backers of rethinking their fundamentalist, market-driven approach that even respected internal critics are sacked.

The way forward

So what is the way forward? The contributors to this special issue suggest various approaches ranging from radical reform to decommissioning. But how could these be achieved? One strategy could be to use the threat of securing sufficient public support for the severing of national contributions to the World Bank, IMF and WTO to exact far-reaching changes that might make them tolerable in the short-term. The World Bank and IMF would thus be forced to cease entirely from imposing policies of structural adjustment, however renamed, and in all contexts, including that of debt relief. The Bank would be made to close its private sector divisions that dole out loans and guarantees to corporations, and end lending towards most large-scale infrastructure projects, including fossil fuel developments. The WTO, meanwhile, would be gutted of all the agreements and rules that prevent countries protecting their small farmers, workers, traditional cultures and natural environment. All multilateral debt that is owed to the th ree institutions would be forgiven, and all three would be forced to undergo fundamental democratisation that would remove control over them by the G7 countries.

But to make these institutions truly compatible with the interests of the world's citizens would require a more complete transformation of their goals away from fostering policies of economic globalisation, that serve primarily the interests of large corporations, towards promoting policies that facilitate localisation and environmental protection. The nurturing of vibrant local economies is the only sustainable way to generate and protect sufficiently secure livelihoods, food security, community cohesion, political accountability, a healthy environment, and cultural diversity, which are the best remedies for poverty.

It is doubtful that the staff and culture of the World Bank, IMF or WTO -- used as they are to adopting a veritably Maoist approach in their uniform prescriptions for development around the world -- would be best placed or able to fulfil such new functions. Necessary institutions -- whether global or regional -- might have to be built from scratch and in such a way that they remain immune from the sort of corporate capture that seems to have befallen most global and indeed national institutions to date. Their exact design could be decided by a second Bretton Woods conference made up largely of citizens' organisations from around the world.