In the 1980s and early 1990s, the World Bank financed a number of highly visible development disasters. Dams in India's Narmada Valley, forestry and road projects in Amazonia, and gold mines in Pacific countries uprooted and impoverished hundreds of thousands of people and devastated the environment. Confronted by mounting public criticism, the World Bank began to shy away from many large infrastructure and logging projects in the mid-1990s.

World Bank researchers have plumbed new depths in producing shoddy and tendentious analyses, misrepresenting findings and drawing unjustified conclusions in a report released by the Bank on 17 December entitled "Lessons from NAFTA for Latin America and the Caribbean Countries".

Capping a two-year-long evaluation of the development impacts of the World Bank Group's support for oil, mining, and gas projects worldwide, the Extractive Industries Review (EIR) has recommended that the World Bank adopt significant reforms, including doing more to reduce poverty, immediately ceasing funding for coal projects worldwide and phasing out its support for oil production by 2008.

As we look toward 2004 and the 60th year of the IMF and the World Bank, 50 Years Is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice intends to once again use a milestone anniversary to expose the role and impact of the institutions and spark campaigns worldwide to more assertively challenge them, and the countries that control them, to change the way the global economy is structured.

Under pressure from world public opinion, especially from the Jubilee 2000 movement for debt cancellation, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) proposed the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative in 1996. In 1999, the Initiative was revised to include more countries that were left out in its first phase.

The impacts of World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs on countries in the Global South have been well-documented in the areas of health and education, food security and jobs. However, less is known about the impacts of the World Bank's latest obsession -- the privatization of water services. In country after country in recent years, the World Bank has been quietly imposing a for-profit system of water delivery, leaving millions of people without access to water.

Trade ministers from 34 countries of the Western Hemisphere (all but Cuba) met in Miami to discuss the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) from November 17 to November 21. Thousands of activists came to express their opposition to the treaty while the FTAA talks were taking place.