The Imf Formula: Generating Poverty - International Monetary Fund - Statistical Data Included

Ecologist, The, Sept, 2000 by John Cavanagh, Carol Welch, Simon Retallack

The impact on education

The same policies have had an equally devastating effect on the provision of education in developing countries. Under the mandate of reducing the size of the state, the IMF has encouraged the privatisation of schools. When this was undertaken in Haiti, an IMF report indicates extreme deterioration in school quality and attendance that will hamper the country's human capacity for many years to come. For example, only eight per cent of teachers in private schools (now 89 per cent of all schools) have professional qualifications, compared to 47 per cent in public schools. Secondary school enrolment dropped from 28 to 15 per cent between 1985 and 1997. Nevertheless, the report ends with recommendations for Haiti to pursue further privatisation initiatives.

Cuts dictated to balance government budgets have meant that in the 1980s alone, spending on education in African countries undergoing structural adjustment declined by 25 per cent, according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Meanwhile, to make up shortfalls, school fees are often introduced, forcing parents to pull children -- usually girls -- from school, so that literacy rates and skills decline.

In Ghana, the Living Standards Survey for 1992-93 found that 77 per cent of street children in the capital city Accra dropped out of school because of an inability to pay fees. In Zambia, the government has been forced to slash its spending on education from [pound]40 per primary school pupil in 1991 to [pound]10. Enrolment, consequently, has fallen from 96 per cent in the mid 1980s to 77 per cent today.

In sub-Saharan Africa, as explicit conditions of adjustment, education budgets are curtailed, the number of graduates in the teacher training colleges frozen, the number of contact-hours spent by children in school cut, and a 'double shift system' installed so that one teacher now does the work of two. The remaining teachers are laid off and the resulting savings to the Treasury are funnelled towards interest payments on debt.

The impact on food security

Because of structural adjustment, food security has declined dramatically in many developing countries. The shift from domestic to export-oriented agricultural production has undermined people's ability to provide for their families by reducing the amount of food cultivated for household consumption. The increased dependence on food imports that it creates places countries in an extremely vulnerable position, because they lack the foreign exchange to import enough food, given falls in export prices and the need to repay debt. It should come as no surprise therefore that 80 per cent of all malnourished children in the developing world live in countries where farmers have been forced to shift from food production for local consumption to the production of crops for export to the industrialised world. Furthermore, as Davison Budhoo, a former IMF economist, notes, export orientation "has led to the devastation of traditional agriculture and the emergence of hordes of landless farmers in nearly every country in wh ich the Fund operates".