World Bank – The Real Scandal

The real scandal at the World Bank is not whether the former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz helped secure for his girlfriend a big pay-and-promotion package. It’s about how the Bank is killing thousands of the poorest people in the world.
Its victims are many. Let’s consider Africa, for example. Ghana can’t afford water or electricity because the World Bank refused to lend any more money to the government unless it stopped subsidising the cost of these necessities. The subsidies stopped and the cost doubled and people went thirsty. The World Bank also ordered the government to open the country’s markets to international competition. People who used to supply their agricultural products to government owned societies cannot now compete with the subsidised products from Europe. So they are now starving.
In the Americas, the multilateral Bank demanded the Bolivian government to privatise the country’s water supply. So people there are now unable to afford it and are forced to use dirty water from the wells. The new Socialist government wants to take the water back, and is of course condemned by the World Bank.
Similarly Haiti, which had been demanded by the Bank to drop all restrictions on imports, has been flooded by subsidised rice from the US. It cannot compete with these imports as it has been forbidden by the World Bank to offer subsidies. Now it can’t grow rice anymore.
Do we call these as business as usual or a colossal scandal?
The above is just a brief summary of the World Bank’s effect on the poor. In fact only one in ten of its borrowers experienced persistent growth in the last decade or so. The Bank’s approach has condemned people to death. It doesn’t worry if people live or die.
What many fail to understand is why would an institution which claims to help the poor actually harm them. The fact is that its mission and goal to help the poor is a myth. The World Bank was actually created to further US’s power. The bank’s head is traditionally an American, and the US has permanent veto on policies. The Bank promotes the interests of the US corporations rather than the poor. It does not distinguish between business rights and human rights.
The elites screamed about Wolfowitz’s small corruption but are ignoring his organisation’s proven immense corruption. We all need to stop this. People need to break the power of the World Bank over the developing nations. This is a fight which everyone should join.