The failure of the IMF, World Bank and WTO to represent and further the interests of the developing world, through their one-size-fits-all approach, has lead to the collapse of trade negations, widespread criticism of their effectiveness, and bitter international protest. Many countries are rejecting the neoliberal ideologies of the ‘unholy trinity’ with intensifying calls for their reform or decommissioning.
The Government of Bangladesh has submitted a bill in the National Parliament on 31 October 2004 seeking legal immunity for multilateral lending agencies, especially the World Bank. Finance Minister M Saifur Rahman introduced the bill under the title "The International Financial Organisations Order (Amendment) Act 2004".
Developing countries negotiators have once again failed to understand the implications of consensus building exercise. Such was the debauchery of ‘consensus’ agreement this time, that the developing countries have allowed the rich countries to increase their agricultural subsidies and at the same time agreed to further open up their markets.
Some 320 million people, a third of the world’s 840 million hungry, go to bed hungry in India. It is not because there is not enough food in India. It is because these people cannot buy food even at ‘below the poverty line prices’. The world has suffered enough from economic lunacy. It is time to stand up and make mainline economists accountable.
Water is an area of growing concern, writes Devinder Sharma, but don’t blame the farmers, it is the seed industry and the agriculture scientists that need to be held accountable.
The World Bank has strange ways of eradicating poverty. Considering that sustainable agriculture is the established link to poverty eradication, the World Bank/IMF forced developing countries to shift from staple foods (crucial for food security needs) to cash crops that meet the luxury requirement of the western countries.
Burundi is a small, low-income state located at the geographic heart of Africa. It imports its petroleum and other goods principally through the port of Mombasa in Kenya, which means that they have to pass through Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda before they arrive in Burundi.
Capitalism from its beginning, when it first fought against Feudalist restrictions of trade, inaugurated the slogan "Free-Trade" which then became the shibboleth of capitalist expansion from proletarianization of the peasantry to form a wage working class in its primitive accumulation drive followed by a number of stages of industrialization and imperialism to the present stage of "single super-power imperialism" of the U.S.A., the prime progenitor of "Free Trade" today. Witness U.S. driven Globalization in the current (and hopefully last) stage of imperialism and domination of economic integration through the WTO, IMF, and the World Bank in their present modes.
