2. The overall results of these programmes are negative as far as h rights are concerned.
The Bretton Woods institutions ha imposed reductions in health and
"The economic storm that hit
Indonesia, South Korea and Russia is arriving in Brazil, and the key decisions in our economy are being made by speculators, multinationals, and the International Monetary
Fund. But this is our country, not theirs!"
The CUT trade union federation adj and student groups have adopted the slogan "Out with Cardoso, out cIn with the IMF". This slogan has not
SOV yet been approved by the national out leadership of the PT. Lula is fra apparently reluctant to launch such pro boi a slogan until the popular mobilisains tion has similar force to the movement to impeach president his go predecessor, President Collor.
CO
Not that Lula denies Cardoso's dir responsibility. "President Cardoso was elected on a programme of
USI wh education, health, and increasing the living conditions of the majority.
try of
Not to sell public property and organise the most massive transfer
CO of resources to foreign hands since ins de this country was a colony producing gold for the Portuguese court!"* gr
education spending on those countries which agreed to submit to the structural adjustment policies. This follows on demands by the World Bank and IMF to reduce both public expenditure and the public deficit.
Reductions in health spending, combined with the sometimes drastic fall in a population's real income, lead to an increase in child mortality rates and perinatal maternal mortality rates. This is the case for the poorest countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and Andean America, the Caribbean and South Asia. But it is also true of the lowest income groups in the other developing countries and those in transition towards a market economy. Health indicators throughout the world all showed an improvement during the period from the 50s to the early 80s. But since then, with the application of structural adjustment policies, the list of countries where progress has slowed gets longer and longer. As does the list of countries where the situation has deteriorated.
Rather than enter into a grim discussion of figures, it is more important to be aware of the dominant trend in a number of countries. Records show that there is no longer any progress in populations' living conditions, while the human deficit in terms of health remains scandalously high.
For growing numbers of the world's population, the right to life, the most basic human right, is no longer gaining ground. Such is the appalling outcome of the structural adjustment policies. As for the right to education, the right to adequate nutrition, the right to work or to a subsistence income, all these are losing ground over large parts of the world.
3. The negative effects of adjustment policies have a gender dimension: women's rights are even worse affected than men's. When access to education and health is restricted, women suffer the most.
4. The acceptance of structural adjustment plans entails partially renouncing the exercise of the right to national sovereignty. Some of the policies carried out by indebted governments within the framework of structural adjustment programmes are defined outside national borders by the Bretton Woods institutions, if not by one of the governments of the leading industrialized countries, or even by the boards of directors of private financial institutions.
In so far as adjustment policies are usually unpopular, the governments which agree to enforce them end up trying to limit the democratic expression of discontent by the population concerned. Latter years have seen insidious restrictions on the exercise of democratic rights. There has also been gradual limitation of legislative and judiciary powers as compared to executive power, which increasingly seeks to avoid democratic control. The process has begun. It is high time people became aware of it.
5. Limitations on the exercise of sovereign rights in defining national policies (and the trend towards limiting the exercise of the right to free expression) bar the way to carrying out policies in favour of human development.
At the end of the millennium, the world is both more "globalized" and more hierarchical than ever before. Structural adjustment programmes clearly constitute a way of exercising domination over the countries at the bottom of the hierarchy. Indeed, structural adjustment programmes imply, through privatisation in particular, the surrender of sovereignty over part of the production infrastructure and natural resources.
Those who benefit are generally the multinational companies of which the great majority are based in a handful of leading industrialized countries. Who can believe that these companies are more likely to support development in the least industrialized countries than the national governments themselves have done?