In late September, with little fanfare, the World Bank released a response [www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/pb/pbfourdemands.htm] to the four demands circulated by the Mobilization for Global Justice (MGJ), the Washington-based coalition organizing protests and alternative educational events at the joint annual meetings of the World Bank and its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), scheduled for September 2001 in Washington, DC.

The following are excerpts from a rebuttal composed by twenty organizations, including the 50 Years Is Enough Network. The full document was released publicly in Ottawa just before the beginning of the re-scheduled meetings of the World Bank and IMF. It may be found on the web at <www.50years.org/action/n18/response.html>.

Those four demands, endorsed by hundreds of organizations around the world, are:

1. Open all World Bank and IMF meetings to the media and the public.

2. End all World Bank and IMF policies that hinder people's access to food, clean water, shelter, health care, education, and right to organize. (Such "structural adjustment" policies include user fees, privatization, and economic austerity programs.)

3. Stop all World Bank support for socially and environmentally destructive projects such as oil, gas, and mining activities, and all support for projects such as dams that include forced relocation of people.

4. Cancel all impoverished country debt to the World Bank and IMF, using the institutions' own resources.

The Mobilization for Global Justice cancelled its call for street protests in Washington in late September, in part out of respect for the victims of the September 11 tragedy and their families. But as the IMF and World Bank once again take up their business, the movement for global justice must too. The economic, social, and environmental realities of the Global South have not changed, after all; and the challenges that people in the North confront have only become more complex. The international movement for global justice will continue to work in every way to oppose the policies of the IMF and World Bank until their power to do harm has been eliminated. Whenever and wherever these institutions hold their closed-door meetings, our movement will continue to be there to expose them and demand justice.

On Demand #1: The decision-making bodies of the IMF and the World Bank, their respective Boards of Executive Directors, continue to operate in almost total secrecy. Their meetings are closed to citizens around the world who will be affected by the loans and policies being decided on, closed to their parliamentary representatives, and closed to the media. The written proceedings from these meetings are also secret, apart from heavily-edited summaries.

While continuing to use the rhetoric of "empowerment," "country ownership," and "participatory development," the World Bank has rejected citizen demands in three key areas:

1. The Bank has rejected calls for release of draft documents. Many important loan-related documents are only disclosed publicly after Executive Board and government approval, after they have already become binding contracts. People in borrower countries need information before important decisions have been made.

2. The Bank has rejected calls for public release of structural adjustment conditions. In a small move toward greater disclosure, some adjustment documents may be disclosed after Executive Board and government approval. However, borrowing governments will identify "sensitive or confidential" information that will remain secret.

3. The Bank has rejected calls to open its Executive Board to public scrutiny. This means the public will continue to be denied access to the substance of Board deliberations pertaining to specific lending operations and institution-wide policies.

On Demand #2: Policies formulated and supported by the World Bank and IMF have consistently reduced access to health care, education, clean water, and food, and have undermined workers' rights to organize (a human right highlighted in demands from around the world, but ignored by the World Bank). The economic and administrative systems established under these policies have devastated the productive capacity of national economies and proven hostile to the provision of basic services and protection of labor rights. Specific actions mandated by the World Bank, such as user fees, have directly caused undeniable suffering.

The World Bank aggressively pushed countries to charge user fees for primary health and education services for much of the last 15 years, often including them as conditions of loans. The user fees were meant to compensate for budget shortfalls that were in part related to strict IMF budget austerity demands. After years of independent research showed the harmful effects the fees had on preventing the poorest citizens from accessing these key services, the World Bank began to backtrack on its long-standing support for user fees. In September 2001, the Bank released a new policy statement opposing user fees for primary education and, in a highly qualified manner, for primary healthcare. However, despite new claims by the Bank that it now discourages user fees, several recent policy documents endorsed or approved by the Bank, including ones for Ghana, Mauritania and Burkina Faso, include user fees.

Contrary to Bank assertions, its adjustment programs have not been designed for the primary purpose of protecting key social sectors, much less to reduce poverty. These programs are no more development-oriented now than they were at their inception 20 years ago. Their core measures — economic deregulation and liberalization, privatization and austerity — have remained unchanged. (According to the World Bank, between 1995 and 1999, 65 percent of all adjustment operations included trade-policy and exchange-rate reforms and more than 32% of adjustment programs supported privatization reforms. Almost 100 percent of IMF loans have budget deficit conditions.)

Adjustment programs vary little from country to country because governments "adopt" adjustment programs designed by the Bank and the IMF. They take this step because these institutions have the power to cut off all international financing to a country, and do so whenever a country hesitates to implement the economic policies it considers "sound." Leading economists and insiders like the Bank's former Chief Economist, Joseph Stiglitz, and a former adviser to the Bangladeshi president, Rehman Sobham, have recently publicly belittled the Bank's claims that governments feel "ownership" of adjustment policies. Rather than a sense of having led or had equitable participation in formulating the policies, government officials frequently feel trapped into accepted policies they have little confidence in.

Structural adjustment has failed on its own terms, with countries displaying lower growth rates while undergoing structural adjustment than when they were not; and with the economically successful Southern countries of recent decades ignoring and contradicting central tenets of the structural adjustment policy package. In restructuring national economies so that international corporations and financial institutions can maximize returns on investments, production and trade, structural adjustment policies have destroyed the productive core of domestic economies. The World Bank, with the IMF, has successfully demanded "labor flexibility" measures which have undermined workers' legal protections and wages and facilitated mass layoffs. The Bank and Fund also routinely press countries to rapidly remove trade barriers (such as tariffs on imports) and government subsidies for basic needs (e.g. bread) and to raise interest rates. In dramatically reducing consumer purchasing power, increasing the cost of borrowing and forcing competition with heavily subsidized and powerful foreign multinational corporations, these policies have devastated small and medium-sized enterprises and farms, which produce for the local market and employ the vast majority of workers in most countries.

On Demand #3: Communities that have lived with oil, mining, gas, and large dam projects, and researchers who have analyzed them, find that such projects consistently have negative social, environmental, and developmental impacts. According to a recent Oxfam report, countries whose economies are dependent on oil and mineral exports also show exceptionally low living standards, higher poverty rates, exceptionally high rates of child mortality, malnutrition, income inequality, and low rates of literacy and life expectancy.

In addition, large dams and fossil fuels have well-documented negative local and global environmental impacts. According to recent research by the Institute for Policy Studies, the World Bank provided financing of $20 billion for fossil fuel projects between 1992 to September 2001; taken together, these projects will ultimately release 40.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide, an amount greater than all current annual global fossil fuel emissions.

The Bank states that "energy is critical in enabling developing countries to grow, to reduce poverty and to improve the quality of life for their citizens." The question, then, is how best to meet the energy needs of the most impoverished. The Bank currently devotes less than five percent of its energy lending and investment to meet the needs of the poorest 2 billion people, who, according the Bank's own studies, would best be served with clean and renewable sources of energy. Despite this, the overwhelming majority of Bank energy lending continues to be for fossil fuel projects. As the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network has shown, the ratio of fossil fuel funding to funding for clean, renewable sources of energy is approximately 20 to 1.

On Demand #4: The World Bank has tried to reverse the damage done to its public image by the Jubilee debt cancellation movement by claiming that it "strongly supports debt relief" through its Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. That program, however, is more a tool for inducing governments to accept new IMF/World Bank programs than a way of helping countries get out of debt. Governments wishing to benefit from HIPC must demonstrate prior compliance with IMF/World Bank structural adjustment conditions and commit to three, six, nine, or even twenty more years of structural adjustment to receive the maximum benefit.

HIPC relieves too little debt for too few countries, at little or no cost to the World Bank and IMF. Under HIPC, the World Bank and IMF relieve less than 50% of the most impoverished countries' debts, leaving them to pay more than $700 million each year in debt service to these institutions. HIPC's perverse sustainability formulae mean Zambia and Niger both face increased debt service payments after qualifying for the program. Five years after the introduction of HIPC, only three countries (Uganda, Bolivia, and Mozambique) have jumped through all its hoops and gotten the relief promised. Under intense pressure from Jubilee campaigners, the Bank and IMF quickly approved 20 countries for entrance into the program by the end of 2000, but new hurdles are now being erected for their completion. Meanwhile, indebted and impoverished countries like Bangladesh, Haiti, and Nigeria do not even meet the Bank's criteria for consideration under HIPC.

Many of the debts claimed by creditors, including the World Bank and the IMF, were accrued by dictators, corrupt officials, and non-democratic governments, often with the complicity of the lenders, who were guided by political, rather than economic, motivations (hence loans pocketed by leaders like Mobutu in Zaïre, with IMF knowledge, which the IMF now insists the people of his country must repay). Many of the debts have in fact been paid back, even several times over; they persist only because of interest charges.

The World Bank and IMF routinely protest that to take money from them is to deny the benefits of their lending to other needy countries. While the value of that lending can be questioned, the institutions are hardly vulnerable: the World Bank makes an annual profit of over $1.5 billion, and the IMF holds gold reserves valued at over $30 billion. Independent research by accountants Chantrey Vellacott DFK demonstrates that even under well-established conservative accounting procedures, the World Bank and IMF could find more than $30 billion to compensate for debt cancellation without jeopardizing their ability to carry out their overall functions, and without a negative impact on their credit ratings or status as lenders.