The WB is doing it terribly wrong

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

The World Bank’s action plan responding to an internal review on the bank’s resettlement practices does not address the serious failings the review found, 85 non-governmental organizations and independent experts from 37 countries said today in a letter to the World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim. (source)

World Bank breaks its own rules as millions lose land and livelihoods : Review of World Bank documents reveals electricity, water and transport projects contravened safeguards designed to protect rights of indigenous people. (source)

Dams, power stations and other projects designed to help the developing countries - all of that, financed by the World Bank... and it has all taken away the livelihood and homes of 3.4 million people around the world, a recent journalistic investigation shows. The report warns that the very existence of those people is under threat.

For example, in Nigeria the government has driven thousands of people off from the Badia East slum in Lagos. They only issued a warning before the bulldozers came in, instructing everybody to empty their homes - and then refused to provide any compensation. Another example is Kenya, thousands of people have lost their lands because of a forest protection program, funded by the WB. The investigating journalists have compiled a huge collection of similar stories from all corners of the world. Human righs organisations have long been criticising the World Bank for not caring enough about who controls the consequences of their projects. A classic example of the road to Hell being paved with good intentions.

Now that the WB has completed an internal investigation of their own, they do admit of "serious errors" in the way some of the mass resettlements have been conducted. The secretary general has said at a press conference in Washington that the WB should drastically improve the quality of its work, and learn from its mistakes. Because ultimately, it is meant to protect people's lives and their environment, not just to register activity.

But obviously, promises are not enough. We need to see real action. It is not enough for the WB to just promise that it won't do the same mistakes again. Additionally, it ought to identify as many of the affected as possible, and compensate them.

The lack of control and accountability in WB's activities is most evident from the fact that even until now, it has failed to achieve clarity about the number of people who have been directly affected by its projects. The reason is that it never checks the information coming from the local authorities in the countries where it realises its pojects. This is because the WB mostly cares about pouring money into its projects, but not about controlling the details of their implementation. And as usual, the devil is in the details.

In Nigeria's case, the WB should have known what the consequences of its project would be, because this actually isn't the first time a similar project has been realised in the same country, with a very similar result. And yet, they did grant a loan without requesting guarantees from the government and the federal state of Lagos that the same thing wouldn't happen again.

A number of major donors to the WB, most of them European (like Germany) insist that this institution should place human rights on top of its priority list, before planning its projects. There is currently a concerted pressure on other contributors to follow suit, so hopes are high that there will be noticeable changes in the way the World Bank conducts its activities. The WB has already come up with a reform plan, although human rights watchers remain skeptical if these intentions would be realised. Mostly because of a fundamental problem: the World Bank by definition puts economic growth on top of human rights, and that is not going to change soon.

And, as experience keeps teaching us over and over again, economic growth alone is not enough. Much more important is that prosperity should be accessible to all segments of society - as the World Bank has itself admitted in an earlier investigations.

Comments

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

After a while, I find it hard to think such things are really mistakes and oversights. I cannot help thinking that this is the way it is meant to work. And all this 'We're sorry!' talk is just public relations.

I'm reminded of a poem.

~ ~ ~

Beauty is sexual, and sexuality
Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
Outside the Shangri-la Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
“How about a party, big guy?”

Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam’s great turbines, beautifully tooled
In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
By Lazard Frères in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco
Or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.

-- "Ezra Pound's Proposition" by Robert Haas