IMF/World Bank/WTO: The Free-Market Fiasco

MF/World Bank/WTO: The Free-Market Fiasco IRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 24/25, 1995 "FIFTY YEARS IS NOT ENOUGH!", the International Monetary Fund's public relations director said last year in a debate in Madrid. "There is still a lot of work to be done." A more ominous threat to the well-being, in fact survival, of billions of human beings may never have been made before. IMF/World Bank/WTO: The Free-Market Fiasco makes short work of the protestations of innocence and good intentions made by the men who preside over today's globalized economy. It does more than describe the suffering caused in Africa, Latin America, South Asia and Eastern Europe by IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization policies. It explains why the suffering results inevitably from the neo-liberalism unanimously embraced over the last two decades by the world's ruling elites, North and South. Published in cooperation with the Brussels-based Committee for the Cancellation of the Third-World Debt and introduced by Committee leader Eric Toussaint, NSR 24/25's articles complement each other in describing the trap in which the peoples of the South have been caught Jacques Bournay, Susan George and Michel Chossudovsky each help explain how IMF/World Bank Structural Adjustment Programmes force countries to sacrifice their inhabitants' health, education and basic nutrition in order to devote "everything to export" and funnel money to Western banks. Applying this prescription to dozens of countries Simultaneously has made export prices tumble while the volume of exports has grown, they point out, leaving export income lower than before. Anke Hintjens completes this aspect of the picture by analyzing how the latest GATT accords re-affirm the Third World's exclusion from many Western markets, while giving the new World Trade Organization unprecedented powers to enforce the inequitable treaty. The IMF and World Bank's public relations offensive has tried to hide their responsibility for global impoverishment by talking about "social safety nets". They have been particularly glib on such fashionable topics as "the centrality of women to development" and "ecologically sustainable development". The Notebook exposes this rhetoric. Christian Ferri and Vandana Shiva show the emptiness of IMF/World Bank environmentalist pretensions, for example. Ferri shows how the World Bank continues to stifle internal critics of its ecologically disastrous mega-projects, which have displaced 2.5 million people. Shiva describes the effects on ThirdWorld farmers, consumers and ecosystems of multinationals' increasingly bold claims to "intellectual property rights" to millennia-old agricultural and medicinal plants. The Bretton Woods institutions' claims to have slowed or even turned around global impoverishment are wrong. Kevin Watkins describes the IMF/World Bank-created disaster area that is Africa. Chossudovsky exposes IMF/World Bank co-responsibility for the collapse of Somalia and genocide in Rwanda. James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer explain why Latin America's "lost decade" of the 1980s has not given way to prosperity in the 1990s; Michel Husson illuminates the well-known case of Mexico. Aleksandr Bugalin, Andrei Kolganov and Jean-Marie Chauvier explain how the IMF and World Bank have managed to halfdismantle the Russian economy. The political implications of the IMF, World Bank's and WTO's growing power are no less far-reaching than the economic and social consequences of their policies. Pierre Rousset raises some disturbing questions about how these institutions are steadily restricting the range of democratic decision-making on a national level, and the kinds of democratic alternatives that could challenge this trend. Emerging from the international movement that is looking for democratic alternatives, NSR 24/25 can be useful for several different audiences. For those beginning to explore these issues, it offers a wealth of information. for those already active, it provides an arsenal of arguments and advances some important strategic discussions. For all those who question today's neo-liberal consensus, it provides important elements for understanding the new tasks we face.