Contact: Sameer Dossani, 50 Years Is Enough Network, +1-202-340-0216
Soren Ambrose, Solidarity Africa Network , +1-202-667-6098 / +1-303-667-6613
Shalmali Guttal, Focus on the Global South, +1-202-463-2265 / +1-303-667-6613

WASHINGTON – This weekend, during the semi-annual ("spring") meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), finance ministers and central bank governors from around the world will discuss its proposed medium-term strategic plan. The much-debated changes at the institution are intended to "help all its [the IMF's] members meet the challenges of the 21st century's globalization," according to IMF Managing Director Rodrigo de Rato. But critics of the IMF and development advocates call the discussions as they have been framed superficial and diversionary.

"The officials talking about changes at the IMF at last recognize they have a dying institution on their hands, but they are trying to pretend the patient can be revived. The time has clearly come to pull the life-support plug and let the IMF die a natural death," says Sameer Dossani of the 50 Years Is Enough Network, a coalition of U.S. organizations opposed to IMF and World Bank policies.

"For 25 years the IMF has been given the power to impose economic policies on most developing countries in the world," says Soren Ambrose of Solidarity Africa Network, a development organization based Nairobi, Kenya. "Those policies have been great for multinational corporations' profits, but disastrous for everyone else. In Africa, where its power has been greatest and longest-lasting, the result has been the dismantling of social services, a rapidly falling standard of living, and declining growth rates for most countries. In Argentina - its most loyal student - the people have endured the most dramatic economic collapse of the last 20 years, and have now virtually ejected the institution. Reform of the IMF will be worse than an empty gesture unless it eliminates the institution’s extensive coercive powers over national governments."

Proposals to beef up the IMF's role in country surveillance and oversight of aid flows have been likened to arming the foxes at the doors of the henhouse. "The history of the IMF in the past quarter century is a perfect case study in the dangers of giving one institution too much power,"says Shalmali Guttal of Focus on the Global South, a policy and advocacy organization based in Bangkok, Thailand, "Any reform of the IMF must focus not on redesigning or enhancing its powers but on dramatically reducing them. If this institution is to continue, its role and function has to be completely rethought. Only by respecting the right of peoples to control their own economic policy can it have any relevance in the 21st century."

Other reforms currently on the table - such as U.S. Treasury official Tim Adams' proposed changes to the voting structure - don’t adequately address inequalities within the Fund, say critics. "Fiddling with percentages and adding a board member or two are cosmetic changes and would only deflect attention from the serious structural problems at the fund rather than solving them," says Dossani. "The IMF reshapes entire economies, punishes countries with which it disagrees, and can expel a country from the global economy, but its structure means that a few wealthy countries dictate the rules to the great majority of the world’s people. Proposals to boost some Asian countries' voting rights would at best add a couple countries to the list of those using the IMF to gain advantage over trading partners. Nothing less than radical democratization could begin to legitimize the IMF."