World Bank President - Out Of Touch With Reality

Over one hundred organisations have issued a statement addressed to World Bank president, Jim Kim, questioning the Bank’s support for a multinational chain of low-fee, profit-making private primary schools targeting poor families, which Kim recently praised as a means to alleviate poverty. 
“IT IS NOT JUST $6. IT GOES A LONG WAY”
 
In his speech of 7 April 2015 titled “Ending Extreme Poverty by 2030: The Final Push” delivered ahead of the 2015 World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, praised the for-profit, fee-charging chain of private primary schools based in Kenya and Uganda, Bridge International Academies (BIA). He argues that thanks to these academies, where nearly 120,000 pupils are enrolled, “[a]fter about two years, students’ average scores for reading and math have risen high above their public school peers”. And these results, he said, are achieved for “just” $6 a month.
 
The figure given of $6 is not accurate. Schools fees at BIA range from about $6.5 to $9, depending on the grade. To this should be added the cost of uniforms, sold by Bridge, which cost about $18.5 per year, the equivalent of another $2 per month over 9 months, and exam fees of $2 to $3 per term. Other costs for textbooks, payment transfers, or other items may be added, and so a conservative estimate of the real monthly amount received by BIA for each child ranges rather between $9 and $13 a month – excluding food, which BIA provides for an additional $7 per month. The total monthly bill including school meals thus ranges between $16 and $20.
 
Nevertheless, even assuming a cost of $6 per month, the speech reveals the World Bank’s profound lack of understanding of the reality of poor people’s lives. When President Kim argues that schooling at Bridge costs “just” $6, the underlying message is that $6 a month is a small amount of money worth paying for schooling, even in contexts of great poverty. Such a statement is ill-informed and dangerous, especially coming from a world leader with the power to influence directions in global development. It is alarming that charging poor people school fees—something that the global community has worked particularly hard to abolish over the last two decades due to their negative impact on the poor—is being promoted as a means of ending poverty.
 
“My honest view is this: if the World Bank was genuinely keen in promoting access to basic education for every child, especially those in vulnerable areas, then they would focus more on supporting and enhancing access to free public primary schools rather than supporting private schools which only operate to make profits out of our poor pockets.” - Interview of Hakijamii organization with a resident of Kibera informal settlement (Africa’s largest informal settlement) in Nairobi, Kenya, who is also a member of the community based organization “Soweto Forum”.
 
We, civil society organisations and citizens of Kenya and Uganda, are appalled that an organisation whose mandate is supposed to be to lift people out of poverty shows such a profound misunderstanding and disconnect from the lives and rights of poor people in Kenya and Uganda. We, who live in Kenya and in Uganda, can testify that $6 per month is much more money than most of our families, friends, and community members can afford without making huge sacrifices. If the World Bank is serious about improving education in Kenya and Uganda, it should support our governments to expand and improve our public education systems, provide quality education to all children free-of-charge, and address other financial barriers to access.

whole article here

THE WORLD BANK’S HYPOCRISY IN ETHIOPIA

The World Bank proclaims its mission is to strive to end extreme poverty at the global level and promote shared prosperity. But a leaked report reveals a conspiracy of silence to cover up crimes against humanity committed against the Anuak people in Ethiopia with the complicity of the World Bank itself.Ethiopians have been the object of a cruel bureaucratic joke by the World Bank.

Last week, an official investigative report surfaced online showing World Bank bureaucrats in Ethiopia have been playing ‘Deception Games’ of displacement, deracination, forced resettlement and a kinder and gentler form of ethnic cleansing in the Gambella region of Western Ethiopia. Tens of thousands of Anuaks in Gambella have been removed illegally and in violation of policy from their ancestral homelands and left high and dry and twisting in the wind, courtesy and cash of the World Bank!

The World Bank proclaims its mission is to “strive to end extreme poverty at the global level within a generation” and promote “shared prosperity”. The Bank purportedly seeks to accomplish this mission in Ethiopia through its “Ethiopia Protection of Basic Services Project (BPS).” According to the World Bank, the BPS in Ethiopia has four components: 1) “maintain delivery of basic services provided by regional and local governments”, 2) “provide predictable financing for critical inputs for the primary health service delivery subprogram”; 3) “supports activities at the Regional and city Administration, Woreda and sub- Woreda levels to significantly enhance transparency around public budget procedures and foster broad engagement and citizen representation on public budget processes and public service delivery”; and 4) promote “capacity building for and piloting of selected approaches to strengthen the voice of citizens and civil society organizations and also builds the capacity of citizens to engage in public budgeting processes. The World Bank has been supporting its PBS program in Ethiopia since May 2006 with a commitment of more than $2bn. In the last two years, the Bank has spent a cool USD$600 million.

The truth of the matter is that the World Bank’s managers have failed miserably in their mission. They have failed to “carry out the required full risk analysis to manage the concurrent roll-out of the villagization program in four PBS III regions.” They have failed to follow or comply with the Bank’s operational policies and guidelines. They have failed to interact or consult with the Anuak communities adversely impacted by the Banks’ programs. They are clueless about the “operational interface between PBS III and CDP as required by the Operational Risk Assessment Framework (ORAF).” They do not give a rat’s behind about “livelihoods, well-being and access to basic services, which are closely tied to the Anuak’s access to land and natural resources.” In their “Joint Review and Implementation Support” (JRIS) reports, they sugarcoat, finesse and massage facts or outright bury unfavorable facts to avoid transparency and evade accountability. They don’t do much planning, monitoring or supervision of the Bank’s program. They have abdicated their professional duties and obligations and transferred their fiduciary duties to corrupt woreda officials to ensure hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent properly. I am just curious: What do the World Bank managers in Ethiopia do all day, anyway?

For crying out loud, what kind of a mickey mouse operation is the World Bank running in Ethiopia?

In December 2013, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim declared, “In the developing world, corruption is public enemy number one… We will never tolerate corruption, and I pledge to do all in our power to build upon our strong fight against it… Every dollar that a corrupt official or a corrupt business person puts in their pocket is a dollar stolen from a pregnant woman who needs health care; or from a girl or a boy who deserves an education; or from communities that need water, roads, and schools. Every dollar is critical if we are to reach our goals to end extreme poverty by 2030 and to boost shared prosperity.”

I wish Kim would visit my Anuak brothers and sisters in Gambella in 2015 and tell them how many schools, hospitals, clinics, roads and water wells his Bank's USD$600 million has provided the people of Gambella.

For crying out loud, could someone tell me if there is anyone minding the World Bank store in Addis Ababa?

 By Professor Alemayehu G. Mariam from here

Go to the link for the detail of the leaked report in legalise and an understandable translation of it and discover why the WB didn't want the information made public.

Leaked Report - World Bank Violated Own Rules In Ethiopia

Internal watchdog finds link between World Bank financing and Ethiopian government's mass resettlement of indigenous group

The World Bank repeatedly violated its own rules while funding a development initiative in Ethiopia that has been dogged by complaints that it sponsored forced evictions of thousands of indigenous people, according to a leaked report by a watchdog panel at the bank.

The report, which was obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, examines a health and education initiative that was buoyed by nearly $2 billion in World Bank funding over the last decade. Members of the indigenous Anuak people in Ethiopia’s Gambella province charged that Ethiopian authorities used some of the bank’s money to support a massive forced relocation program and that soldiers beat, raped and killed Anuak who refused to abandon their homes. The bank continued funding the health and education initiative for years after the allegations emerged.
The report by the World Bank’s internal Inspection Panel found that there was an “operational link” between the World Bank-funded program and the Ethiopian government’s relocation push, which was known as “villagization.” By failing to acknowledge this link and take action to protect affected communities, the bank violated its own policies on project appraisal, risk assessment, financial analysis and protection of indigenous peoples, the panel’s report concludes.
“The bank has enabled the forcible transfer of tens of thousands of indigenous people from their ancestral lands,” said David Pred, director of Inclusive Development International, a nonprofit that filed the complaint on behalf of 26 Anuak refugees.
The bank declined to answer ICIJ’s questions about the report.

Ethiopian officials who carried out the villagization program “always went with armed policemen and soldiers,” Kurimoto said. “It is very clear that the regional government thought that people would not move happily or willingly. So they had to show their power and the possibility of using force.”
Inclusive Development International’s Pred said it is now up to World Bank president Jim Yong Kim to decide whether “justice will be served” for the Anuak.  “Justice starts with the acceptance of responsibility for one’s faults – which the Inspection Panel found in abundance – and ends with the provision of meaningful redress,” he said.

- See more : 

When aid pays for land-grabbing

A major UK- and World Bank-funded development programme in Ethiopia may have contributed to the violent resettlement of a minority ethnic group, a report reveals. The World Bank’s internal watchdog said that due to inadequate oversight, bad audit practices, and a failure to follow its own rules, the Bank has allowed operational links to form between its programme and the Ethiopian government’s controversial resettlement programme.

Multiple human rights groups operating in the region have criticised the Ethiopian government’s programme for violently driving tens of thousands of indigenous people, predominantly from the minority Anuak Christian ethnic group, from their homes in order to make way for commercial agriculture projects. Bank funds – which included over £300m from the UK’s Department for International Development, the project’s largest donor  – could have been diverted to implement villagisation. Crucially for the Anuak people, the bank did not apply required safeguards to protect indigenous groups.

David Pred of Inclusive Development International – the NGO which filed the original complaint on the Anuak group’s behalf – said: “The Bank has enabled the forcible transfer of tens of thousands of indigenous people from their ancestral lands. The Bank today just doesn’t want to see human rights violations, much less accept that it bears some responsibility when it finances those violations.”

Anuradha Mittal, the founder of the Oakland Institute, a California-based development NGO which is active in the region, said DfID was an active participant in the programme, and should share responsibility for its failings. “Along with the World Bank and other donors, DfID support constitutes not only financial support but a nod of approval for the Ethiopian regime to bring about ‘economic development’ for the few at the expense of basic human rights and livelihoods of its economically and politically most marginalised ethnic groups,” she said. Mittal was also critical of the World Bank panel’s draft findings, falling short of directly implicating the World Bank and its fellow donors in the resettlement programme. “It is quite stunning that the panel does not think that the World Bank is responsible for villagisation-related widespread abuses in Ethiopia resulting in destruction of livelihoods, forced displacement of Anuaks from their fertile lands and forests.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/20/ethiopia-human-rights-groups-development-programme-world-bank-villagisation

IMF Austerity Helped Fuel Ebola Crisis

In a report published online last week in The Lancet Global Health the four researchers, professors from three British universities, accuse the International Monetary Fund (IMF) through its strict lending policies of contributing to the Ebola crisis. "A major reason why the Ebola outbreak spread so rapidly was the weakness of healthcare systems in the region, and it would be unfortunate if underlying causes were overlooked," said lead author Alexander Kentikelenis. "Policies advocated by the IMF have contributed to under-funded, insufficiently staffed, and poorly prepared health systems in the countries with Ebola outbreaks."

Kentikelenis and co-authors explain that IMF's economic reform programs forced reduced government spending, IMF may put caps on funds for government wages, including healthcare professionals, and it pushes for decentralization of healthcare systems, which "can make it difficult to mobilize coordinated, central responses to disease outbreaks. All these effects are cumulative, contributing to the lack of preparedness of health systems to cope with infectious disease outbreaks and other emergencies," they write.

Other observers have also made a connection between such economic policies and the deadly outbreak. Emira Woods, a Liberian director at ThoughtWorks, a technology firm committed to social and economic justice, in an interview with Common Dreams explained "A crisis of the proportion we've seen since the beginning of the Ebola catastrophe shows this model has failed." While years of war played a role in weakening public systems, it is the "war against people, driven by international financial institutions" that is largely responsible for decimating the public health care system, eroding wages and conditions for health care workers, and fueling the crisis sweeping West Africa today, said Woods.

Even the World Health Organization, which is tasked by the United Nations with directing international responses to epidemics, acknowledges the detrimental impact these policies have had on public health systems. "In health, [structural adjustment programs] affect both the supply of health services (by insisting on cuts in health spending) and the demand for health services (by reducing household income, thus leaving people with less money for health)," states the organization. "Studies have shown that SAPs policies have slowed down improvements in, or worsened, the health status of people in countries implementing them. The results reported include worse nutritional status of children, increased incidence of infectious diseases, and higher infant and maternal mortality rates. Depressing peoples' access to healthcare greatly increases their susceptibility to all diseases and pathologies.

The important thing to remember is that the destruction of the healthcare systems in these countries has not been accidental; it has been deliberate. This epidemic was as much a man-made disaster as a natural one. Austerity kills. Capitalism kills 

Carbon Offsetting: Who Wins? Who Loses?

World Bank and UN REDD programme behind genocidal land grabs

Between 2000 and 2010, a total of 500 million acres of land in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean was acquired or negotiated under deals brokered on behalf of foreign governments or transnational corporations.
Many such deals are geared toward growing crops or biofuels for export to richer, developed countries – with the consequence that small-holder farmers are displaced from their land and lose their livelihood while local communities go hungry.
The concentration of ownership of the world's farmland in the hands of powerful investors and corporations is rapidly accelerating, driven by resource scarcity and, thus, rising prices. According to a new report by the US land rights organisation Grain: "The powerful demands of food and energy industries are shifting farmland and water away from direct local food production to the production of commodities for industrial processing."
Less known factors, however, include 'conservation' and 'carbon offsetting.'

A damning new report from the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) based in Washington DC warns that the UN and World Bank approach to REDD is paving the way for large-scale "carbon grabs" by foreign governments and investors, putting at risk the land rights, livelihoods and lives of indigenous communities.
The report surveyed 23 low and middle income countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, covering 66 percent of the developing world's forests, concluding that REDD had not established laws or mechanisms by which indigenous peoples and local communities could profit from the carbon in the forests they inhabited.
"Their rights to their forests may be few and far between, but their rights to the carbon in the forests are non-existent", said Arvind Khare, RRI executive director.
At the United Nations climate negotiations in Warsaw in November 2013, delegates reached an agreement that would allow REDD to move forward which, however, excluded questions around who should control and benefit from the new carbon value found in standing forests.
Instead, the World Bank Carbon Fund's approach to defining carbon rights has been widely criticised by civil society groups for creating conflict between new property rights to carbon, and existing statutory and customarily held rights of local communities. The lack of clear safeguards and measures opens up an unprecedented opportunity for corporate and government land grabbing.

Read more here and specifically about Kenya's experiences of land grab.

DRC: Inga 3 Dam 'High Risk Project'

Even though only 9 percent of the DRC population has access to electricity, the power generated by Inga 3 will primarily benefit mining companies and export markets

Today, the World Bank Group's Board of Directors approved a grant of US$73.1 million for the Inga 3 Dam on the Congo River – the biggest hydropower project the World Bank has ever funded. International Rivers denounces the decision as support for a risky mega-project that will not benefit the local population.

The 4,800-megawatt Inga 3 Dam is the first phase of the giant Grand Inga scheme in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Including the financing costs, Inga 3 will cost $14 billion. The Bank’s $73 million grant will finance technical studies and legal work to prepare for the construction of the dam, which is expected to start in 2016 and take seven years. Even though only 9% of the DRC population has access to electricity, the power generated by Inga 3 will primarily benefit mining companies and export markets.

Rudo Sanyanga, Africa Director of International Rivers, said: “By approving Inga 3, the World Bank shows it has not learnt lessons from the bad experience of previous dams on the Congo River despite its claims to the contrary. The Bank is turning a blind eye to the DRC’s poor governance and is taking short-cuts to the environmental assessment of the project.”

Peter Bosshard, Policy Director of International Rivers, said: “Solar, wind and micro-hydropower are more effective at reducing energy poverty in Africa, and don’t suffer the cost and time overruns that are typical for large dams. We will continue to push the World Bank and the DRC government to support clean local energy solutions rather than Africa’s next white elephant.”

On March 10, four researchers from Oxford University published a study which found that the large dams built since 1934 suffered average cost overruns of 96% and delays of 44%. In a conversation with International Rivers, the Oxford study's co-author, Atif Ansar, cautioned against Inga 3. "It is a very high-risk project typical of dam disasters," he said. Using the findings of the Oxford study to forecast cost overruns, he suggested that Bank's $14 billion estimated cost of Inga 3 should be uplifted to $28 billion to obtain 80% certainty that the budget is not exceeded. Given the cost risks, the dam is a non-starter in terms of economic viability. Congo is at risk of drowning its fragile economy in debt.

From here

World Bank Favours Mining Corporations Over DRC Population

In a strange twist, the World Bank’s biggest ever hydropower project is now set to serve the interests of mining corporations rather than the people of DR Congo

International Rivers has learned that the World Bank has abruptly decided to develop the Inga 3 Dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a private investment through the International Finance Corporation, rather than as a public sector project. The Bank withdrew a US$73 million IDA grant for the project, which was scheduled for approval by its board of directors on February 11. The move will compound the problems of the World Bank’s biggest ever hydropower project, and ensure the project will serve the interests of mining corporations rather than the DRC population.

According to internal sources, the IFC will support a private investment in the Inga 3 Dam by Chinese companies in a deal that was brokered by the administrator of USAID. International Rivers decries the World Bank’s decision for the following reasons:

The International Finance Corporation has a poor social and environmental track record. In recent months, the Corporation was admonished by its own ombudsperson for serious abuses in the Tata Mundra thermal power plant in India and the Dinant palm oil project in Honduras. The IFC does not have the safeguard policies or the expertise to ensure proper social and environmental impact assessments for this huge project. Handing the Inga 3 Dam over to the private sector will lead to further environmental shortcuts and compromises in the project.

The Inga 3 Dam would generate electricity for mining companies and the South Africa market, not for the more than 90% of the DRC population with no access to electricity. Expanding energy access for the Congolese population is a development priority, but is not of commercial interest to investors. Handing the project over to a private investor will make it even less likely the country’s poor people would benefit from the project.

The IFC deal was arranged behind closed doors without any accountability to the DRC parliament, the World Bank’s board of directors, or civil society. It was reportedly brokered in a personal initiative by USAID administrator Rajiv Shah, just weeks after the US Congress instructed the US government to oppose supporting large hydropower projects such as Inga 3 through international financial institutions. Non-transparent deals such as the Inga 3 Dam are the best recipe for deepening corruption in the DRC. They will not strengthen the public accountability that is necessary for social and economic development.

Working with civil society partners in the DRC, International Rivers will continue to oppose destructive megaprojects such as the Inga 3 Dam, and will promote clean local energy solutions that are more effective at reducing poverty and protecting the environment.

From here

Foreign Investment - At What Cost?

World Bank’s Land Strategy: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
by Alice Martin-Prevel

Released on July 22, 2013, the World Bank’s report, Securing Africa’s Land for Shared Prosperity, provides a ten-step program to “boost governance,” “step up comprehensive policy reforms,” and “accelerate shared and sustained growth for poverty reduction” in sub-Saharan Africa. [1] At first glance, these ambitious objectives, aimed at addressing the ongoing crisis of land grabbing on the African continent seem promising; however, the report’s substance fails to deliver.

Departing from the paradox that although Africa is endowed with vast natural resources yet the continent remains very poor, Franck Byamugisha, the author of the report, identifies “poor land governance” in African countries as the root of the problem. Land governance, according to Byamugisha, refers to “the manner in which land rights are defined and administered.” Thus, the report outlines a program aimed at “scaling-up land administration” in sub-Saharan Africa. Hiding behind this ambiguous goal, the prescribed program is nothing more than World Bank’s old paradigm of enhancing efficiency by “transferring land from less to more productive users at low cost.”
The report rekindles the assumptions that land registration would somehow give farmers access to low-cost credit to invest in their parcels, improve their yields, and that Africa has abundant “surplus land” which should be delineated and identified in order to be acquired by land developers. (In its 2012 report Our Land, Our Lives, Oxfam debunked the myth of Africa’s “unused land,” showing that most areas targeted by land deals were previously used for small-scale farming, grazing and common resources exploitation by local communities. [2]) Not only are these postulations yet to be proven, but they also assume that customary rights and traditional landownership are part of an underefficient system that needs transformation. The report’s recommendations thus include proposals such as “demarcating boundaries and registering communal rights,” “organizing and formalizing communal groups,” and “removing restrictions on land rental markets.”
“An important challenge to policy makers,” adds Byamugisha, “is to balance landowners’ rights with the necessity and capacity of the government to regulate land use in the best interests of society.” Hence, significant pressure remains on African governments to enable foreign investors’ entry in the Continent. The report advocates improving mapping, registration, and efficiency of land administration services and management of expropriations in order to reduce transaction costs of parcel acquisition in Africa.
Previous reports by the Oakland Institute exposed the role played by the World Bank Group in facilitating land grabbing. [3] (GRAIN’s 2012 report Who is behind the Land Grabs? can also be consulted on this issue. [4]) The World Bank’s new report shows that the emperor has no new clothes. Despite the introduction of a new politically correct vocabulary and some shallow proclamations around “land vulnerability” in Africa, the World Bank remains an accomplice in global land grabs.
Bibliography
[1] F. F. K. Byamugisha, Securing Africa’s Land for Shared Prosperity: A Program to Scale Up Reforms and Investments, World Bank Publications, Washington DC, Africa Development Forum series 78085, 2013.
[2] K. Geary, "Our Land, Our Lives": Time Out in the Global Land Rush. Oxfam, 2012.
[3] S. Daniel and A. Mittal, (Mis)Investment in Agriculture: The Role of the International Finance Corporation in Global Land Grabs, Oakland Institute, 2010.
[4] Who’s Behind the Land Grabs? A Look at Some of the People Pursuing or Supporting Large Farmland Grabs around the World, GRAIN, 2012.

        

Source:	Oakland Institute
Short URL:	http://farmlandgrab.org/22606

World Bank’s Land Strategy: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

by Alice Martin-Prevel

Released on July 22, 2013, the World Bank’s report, Securing Africa’s Land for Shared Prosperity, provides a ten-step program to “boost governance,” “step up comprehensive policy reforms,” and “accelerate shared and sustained growth for poverty reduction” in sub-Saharan Africa. [1] At first glance, these ambitious objectives, aimed at addressing the ongoing crisis of land grabbing on the African continent seem promising; however, the report’s substance fails to deliver.

Departing from the paradox that although Africa is endowed with vast natural resources yet the continent remains very poor, Franck Byamugisha, the author of the report, identifies “poor land governance” in African countries as the root of the problem. Land governance, according to Byamugisha, refers to “the manner in which land rights are defined and administered.” Thus, the report outlines a program aimed at “scaling-up land administration” in sub-Saharan Africa. Hiding behind this ambiguous goal, the prescribed program is nothing more than World Bank’s old paradigm of enhancing efficiency by “transferring land from less to more productive users at low cost.”
The report rekindles the assumptions that land registration would somehow give farmers access to low-cost credit to invest in their parcels, improve their yields, and that Africa has abundant “surplus land” which should be delineated and identified in order to be acquired by land developers. (In its 2012 report Our Land, Our Lives, Oxfam debunked the myth of Africa’s “unused land,” showing that most areas targeted by land deals were previously used for small-scale farming, grazing and common resources exploitation by local communities. [2]) Not only are these postulations yet to be proven, but they also assume that customary rights and traditional landownership are part of an underefficient system that needs transformation. The report’s recommendations thus include proposals such as “demarcating boundaries and registering communal rights,” “organizing and formalizing communal groups,” and “removing restrictions on land rental markets.”
“An important challenge to policy makers,” adds Byamugisha, “is to balance landowners’ rights with the necessity and capacity of the government to regulate land use in the best interests of society.” Hence, significant pressure remains on African governments to enable foreign investors’ entry in the Continent. The report advocates improving mapping, registration, and efficiency of land administration services and management of expropriations in order to reduce transaction costs of parcel acquisition in Africa.
Previous reports by the Oakland Institute exposed the role played by the World Bank Group in facilitating land grabbing. [3] (GRAIN’s 2012 report Who is behind the Land Grabs? can also be consulted on this issue. [4]) The World Bank’s new report shows that the emperor has no new clothes. Despite the introduction of a new politically correct vocabulary and some shallow proclamations around “land vulnerability” in Africa, the World Bank remains an accomplice in global land grabs.
Bibliography
[1] F. F. K. Byamugisha, Securing Africa’s Land for Shared Prosperity: A Program to Scale Up Reforms and Investments, World Bank Publications, Washington DC, Africa Development Forum series 78085, 2013.
[2] K. Geary, "Our Land, Our Lives": Time Out in the Global Land Rush. Oxfam, 2012.
[3] S. Daniel and A. Mittal, (Mis)Investment in Agriculture: The Role of the International Finance Corporation in Global Land Grabs, Oakland Institute, 2010.
[4] Who’s Behind the Land Grabs? A Look at Some of the People Pursuing or Supporting Large Farmland Grabs around the World, GRAIN, 2012.

        

Source:	Oakland Institute
Short URL:	http://farmlandgrab.org/22606

- See more at: http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/22606#sthash.r6Mf7jQT.dpuf

US - Crisis Management Strategy In East Africa's Red Sea Region

Interesting perspective from Thomas Mountain, US journalist, resident for a number of years in Eritrea. A dominant global power, resource control, destabilisation of large areas, control at any cost - far removed from any basic principles of democracy. JS

 

Destabilizing Egypt is part and parcel of Pax Americana’s “Crisis Management” strategy in Africa. The USA wasn’t about to sit back and watch as the beginnings of a transition to an independent government in Egypt was taking place under the Morsi led Muslim Brotherhood so voila! coup de grace! 

Pax Americana always preferred the brute force policy of Mubarak and following the popular explosion in January, 2011 that brought down their vassal they were waiting in the wings ready to bring back the old regime.

The Egyptian military didn’t have to think this one up on their own, they got it right out of a manual at one of the many sessions they have attended for the past 30 plus years at various military war colleges in the USA. Cut off electricity during the hot weather, deliberately restrict fuel supplies and of course full watts of propaganda on how “25 million people signed a petition against” the Morsi government. Classic destabilization campaign.

To be blunt, the USA will cause the Egyptian people to wage war against themselves before it will allow any sort of transition to an independent government in Egypt. The Egyptian Army will still get its salaries and if matters become so unstable that it can no longer be relied upon to “protect” the Suez Canal, through which all the trade between Europe and Asia flows, then there are always UN “peacekeepers” to do the job. So let the Egyptians kill each other, its called crisis management, as in create a crisis and then manage the ensuing chaos to better enforce Pax Americana in a most critical region of the world.

The USA’s destabilizing of Egypt is just a part of the greater “crisis management” strategy in East Africa’s Red Sea region, the best example of which is the giant “Millennium Dam” being built by Ethiopia on the Nile river.

It wasn't that long ago that threats of war were being made by heads of state here alongside the Red Sea over the threat posed by cutting off Egypt's historic use of the Nile waters by Ethiopia’s new mega dam. A closer look at this new dam, something one will not find in the western media, reveals that it was the creation of the World Bank, 51% owned by the USA. The dam itself is supposed to produce 6000 megawatts when its is done, yet no one has tried to explain who is going to use this huge energy surplus. To start with 75% of Ethiopia’s 80 million+ people have never, ever, had electricity and there are no plans let alone multi billions of dollars to build an electrical distribution system for over 60 million people. And even if they did the rural, agricultural based Ethiopian economy would still only need 2000 megawatts. Ethiopia could build two or three dams a fraction of the size and price of the “Grand Millennium Dam” that would be more than sufficient for its needs and would not threaten Egypts use of the Nile waters.

It was all Pax Americana’s doing to start with, helped along by some “Abyssinian Imperialist” ambitions, that now posses such a serious threat to Egypt's survival that dire threats of regional warfare were made. Its called “crisis management”, take a perfectly solvable problem and turn it into a potential explosion that will prevent any further attempts at regional economic and political integration ie Pan African cooperation.

That the USA is behind the destabilization of Egypt is no secret here along the Red Sea with senior leadership from our region speaking publicly about the problem. Pursuing peace is never popular with Pax Americana, especially along strategically critical choke points like the Suez Canal and the “Gate of Tears”, Baab Al Mandeb, the mouth of the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean. Crisis management won't allow it. The saying goes “All Roads to Peace in the Horn of Africa and Red Sea run through Asmara”, Eritrea which is trying its best to promote principled dialogue and diplomacy to try to prevent the damage inflicted upon us under the strategy of “crisis management” by the purveyors of destabilization and violence, the USA.

Thomas C. Mountain

from here 

The World Bank

At the World Bank, we have made the world’s most pressing development issue—to reduce global poverty—our mission,” the bank proclaims. Why, then, did the IFC give a Saudi prince’s company an attractively priced $26 million loan to help build the Mövenpick hotel in Accra, Ghana. The five-star Mövenpick hotel opened in 2011, fits the model of a modern international luxury hotel, with 260 rooms, seven floors, and 13,500 square feet of retail space displaying $2,000 Italian handbags and other wares. It was financed by a combination of a multibillion-dollar investment company largely controlled by a Saudi prince, and the poverty-fighting World Bank.

The investment company, Kingdom Holding Company, has a market value of $12 billion, and Forbes ranks its principal owner, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, as the world’s 29th-richest person, estimating his net worth at $18 billion. The World Bank contributed its part through its International Finance Corporation (IFC), set up back in 1956 to muster cheap loans and other financial support for private businesses that contribute to its planet-improving mandate.

The IFC likes to work with huge corporations, funding projects these companies could finance themselves. Its partners are billionaires and massive multinationals, from oil giants like ExxonMobil to Grupo Arcor, the huge Argentine candy-maker. Its projects include not only glitzy hotels and high-end shopping malls, but also gritty gold and copper mines and oil pipelines, some of which end up benefiting the very corrupt, authoritarian regimes that the rest of the World Bank is urging to change. Nearly a quarter of the IFC’s paid-in capital from member governments—now standing at $2.4 billion—came from U.S., and every president in the World Bank’s 69-year history has been an American.
The World Bank’s internal watchdog sharply criticized the IFC’s approach, saying it gives little more than lip service to the bank’s poverty-fighting mission. The report, a major 2011 review by the bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, found that fewer than half the IFC investments it studied involved fighting poverty. “Most IFC investment projects generate satisfactory returns but do not provide evidence of identifiable opportunities for the poor to participate in, contribute to, or benefit from the economic activities that the project supports,” the report concluded. In fact, it said, only 13 percent of 500 projects studied “had objectives with an explicit focus on poor people,” and even those that did, the report found, had a “limited” impact. The IFC did not dispute the conclusions.

Ghana's per capita GDP ranks in the bottom third of the world, with life expectancy in the bottom 15 percent and infant mortality in the bottom fourth. The IFC committed about $145 million in loans and equity in Ghana just in fiscal year 2012. Yet Takyiwaa Manuh, who advises the Ghanaian government on economic development as a member of the National Development Planning Commission, told me she doesn’t think of the IFC’s investments “as fighting poverty. Just because some people are employed, it is hard to say that is poverty reduction.”

In Accra, Mary-Jean Moyo, the IFC’s in-country manager for Ghana, told me the new hotel fights poverty by creating jobs. To illustrate, she recalled how the Mövenpick’s manager “noticed that a few boys roller-skate on Sundays outside the hotel. The manager decided to hire them to work at the pool. That is development and helping local people.” How many were hired? Six, Moyo responded. There is no hotel school and no vocational training in the country. As a result, all the top staff members among his 300 employees are foreign.
The IFC’s booming list of business partners reads like a who’s who of giant multinational corporations: Dow Chemical, DuPont, Mitsubishi, Vodafone, and many more. It has funded fast-food chains like Domino’s Pizza in South Africa and Kentucky Fried Chicken in Jamaica. It invests in upscale shopping malls in Egypt, Ghana, the former Soviet republics, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. It backs candy-shop chains in Argentina and Bangladesh; breweries with global beer behemoths like SABMiller and with other breweries in the Czech Republic, Laos, Romania, Russia, and Tanzania; and soft-drink distribution for the likes of Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and their competitors in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Mali, Russia, South Sudan, Uzbekistan, and more.

But the IFC’s money-generating strategy has at least one benefit: It sustains the jobs of the people who work for it. The “more money the IFC makes, the more the bank has available to invest,” says Griffiths, the director of Eurodad. “Staff is incentivized to make money.” The IFC sets annual targets for the number, size, and types of deals employees should complete, and it awards performance bonuses for reaching these targets, according to several current and former IFC staffers. “If you don’t reach the target, you don’t get a bonus,” says Alan Moody, a former IFC manager

Francis Kalitsi, a former IFC employee recalls of his time at the IFC. “The IFC is very profit-focused. The IFC does not address poverty, and its investments rarely touch the poor.”

R. Yofi Grant, executive director of Databank, one of Ghana’s largest banks, told me that the IFC’s practice of providing loans at attractive terms to multinational companies “crowds out local banks and private-equity firms by taking the juiciest investments and walking away with a healthy return.” The IFC recently organized a $115 million financing package for global telecom giantVodafone to expand its operations in Ghana, even though six telecom companies already operate in the country. Despite such robust private investment, the IFC’s loan package for Vodafone was its second in two years. “That is not poverty reduction, and these are not frontier investments,” Grant says, referring to the IFC’s refrain that it invests where other financiers might not. “The IFC says all the right things and does all the wrong things.”

The example of Chad and Cameroon, however, offers a more complicated picture. In 2000, the IFC invested roughly $200 million with ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others, along with the governments of Chad and Cameroon, to support the construction of a nearly $4 billion oil-pipeline project that experts estimate will generate more than $5 billion in revenue over the 25-year life of the project from wells mainly in landlocked Chad to a port in Cameroon.

The two countries are even poorer than Ghana to the west. Per capita income in Chad ranks 193rd in the world, compared with 185th place for Cameroon and 172nd for Ghana. Life expectancy at birth in Chad, at 48.7 years, is the world’s absolute worst, and the country has been ruled for the last two decades by heavy-handed dictator Idriss Déby.  The bulk of the oil revenue was supposed to be set aside for food, education, health care, and infrastructure. But in the face of attacks from rebel groups supported by neighboring Sudan, and asserting a need to defend the pipeline, Déby instead channeled substantial chunks into arms purchases.

Just in 2012, the IFC announced investments in mining projects for gold, copper, and diamonds in places like Mongolia, Liberia, and South Africa, as well as investments in oil and gas projects in Colombia, Ivory Coast, the Middle East, and North Africa.

In Accra, not far from the new Mövenpick, the IFC’s posh offices—sporting a lawn, flowers, and private parking—sit amid a slum, surrounded by an imposing concrete wall topped by coils of barbed wire. The only paved part of the road to the IFC is directly in front of the guarded complex, which has no sign announcing its identity. The rest of the road is a winding, dusty dirt path filled with potholes and surrounded by hovels erected out of battered metal or wood. Barefoot children sit amid goats and roving chickens, on ground dotted by garbage and litter. Women cook tiny fish strung onto sticks over an open fire, ignoring the near-100-degree temperatures. Some of them said they had lived there for 15 years. When asked whether they knew what the World Bank is, they said no. When told that it fights poverty, many of them laughed.

Africa can feed its people

Africa could feed itself if trade restrictions were reduced and fertile land was put to good use, according to the World Bank.

Just 5% of African cereal imports come from other African countries, it said. “The potential to increase agricultural production in Africa is enormous,” the bank said in the report. “Yields for many crops are a fraction of what farmers elsewhere in the world are achieving and output could easily increase two to three times if farmers were to use updated seeds and technologies.”

 "Too often borders get in the way of getting food to homes and communities which are struggling with too little to eat," said Makhtar Diop, World Bank vice-president for Africa.

Biofuel Blues

A new World Bank report (8 September 2010) explicitly identifies biofuels as one of the driving forces of land grabs in Africa and acknowledges its detrimental impact on local livelihoods.

Friends of the Earth's food campaigner Kirtana Chandrasekaran said:
"This World Bank report confirms that high Western demand for biofuels and grain for animal feed is causing land grabbing in Africa - at the expense of local people, who are left hungry and unable to afford inflated food prices..."

Five million hectares of land - an area the size of Denmark - stretching across 11 African countries, is currently being acquired for biofuels. More land will be required for biofuels if the European Union is to reach its target of obtaining 10 per cent of transport fuels from renewable sources by 2020.

No easy escape from poverty

People are still stuck in poverty despite the intervention of multilateral organisations.

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) were initiated in 1999 by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for the eradication of poverty in Heavily Indebted Poor Countries. However, research shows that PRSPs are failing to deliver. Millions of dollars have been spent on development programmes that are having no real impact on the ground. Research suggests little or no political will to take forward policies that benefit the poor and marginalized. At the same time, the process has suffered from corruption and misuse of funds, with little accountability to the populations of recipient countries. More than 10 years on, PRSPs have thus failed to move communities out of poverty and, crucially, have largely ignored the plight of minorities and indigenous peoples, who are usually among the most marginalized and poor. The report gave two specific examples.

The Endorois of Kenya , who have been removed from their ancestral lands by successive governments, remain impoverished, with elevated levels of illiteracy, high HIV prevalence, poor health, and high maternal and child mortality rates.
The Karamoja of Uganda, the study found that they still lack basic social services and have endured marginalisation from the political, social and economic mainstream of Uganda despite a long-standing poverty reduction plan in the country.

the world crisis

Chief Economist of the World Bank, Africa region, Dr Shanta Devarajan in regard to the Millennium development goals said “The crisis has put us further off track...the estimated poverty rate in Africa would have been 36 per cent by 2015 but now we re-estimated it to be about 38 per cent.”

Two percentage points is 20 million people. So there is 20 million additional people who will be in poverty as a result of the crisis.

Another 30,000 to 50,000 African babies will die before their first birthday.

WHEN AID IS NO FIRST AID

Extracts from this article.

In 1960, South Korea was as poor as the African countries, but thirty years later, the country was wealthy enough to offer aid to Africa.

The African continent has struggled with chronic poverty and under-development since the advent of political independence more than fifty years, and many Africans view this problem as one of Africa's own making. African development experts and academics have blamed foreign aid for the continued and seemingly intractable development crisis confronting the continent. Africa's war on poverty is perceived as amounting to begging and submissiveness, leading to reforms that have made Africans poorer. The contention among many African experts is that the more the developed north co-operated with the south, the poorer Africa became. Foreign aid has generally benefited the ruling elites in Africa, by among other things, enabling and perpetuating corrupt governments' hold on power, and by extension, entrenching the pervasive underdevelopment. Poverty is a justification for aid, but it is seldom the main criterion used for allocating it.

Over the past five decades, foreign emergency assistance to Africa has helped to avert hardship for many of Africa's poor, but failed to promote any significant economic development.Providing assistance to Africa's poor is a noble cause, but the five decades long campaign of aid has turned out to be what one critic called “a theater of the absurd.” To-date, the record of western aid to Africa has been significant, amounting to more than $500 billion between 1960 and 1997, which is the equivalent of four Marshall Plans being pumped into Sub-Saharan African. And today, the national budgets of most Sub-Saharan African countries are dependent on foreign aid for up to eighty percent of the annual budgets. Apart from the relief aid and economic development, foreign aid assistance was also provided to support reforms and policy adjustment programs. And between 1981 and 1991 alone, The World Bank provided $20 billion towards Africa's structural adjustment programs. The purpose of the programs was to make public institutions, government agencies, and bureaucracies in Africa more transparent, effective, efficient and accountable. It is baffling that Africa still suffers from a poverty trap, considering the depth of governments' corruption and the missing billions in export earnings from oil, gas, diamonds and other resources.

The disadvantages of aid include the fact that funding provided is usually tied to the fact it must be spend in the donor countries regardless of the high cost of goods and services. Rather than create wealth, prosperity and economic development, most Africans have over the past few decades realized a net decline in their standards of living. Research shows that over the period that foreign aid was being pumped into Africa, the per capita GDP declined by an averaged of 0.59 percent annually, between 1975 and 2000. The Heritage Foundation in 1985 concluded that foreign aid is not the answer to Africa's economic troubles; and in fact, the organization maintained that aid was contributing to Africa's underdevelopment woes. It is now a popular belief that foreign aid has been found to do more harm, leading to the situation where Africans have failed to set their own pace and direction of development; free of external interference. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development admits that aid to Africa has not been successful and despite many years of policy reform, no Sub-Saharan country has completed its adjustment program or achieved any sustained economic growth. Similarly, a Heritage Foundation study found that foreign aid retards the process of economic growth and the accumulation of wealth. The Foundation argued aid dependency pulls entrepreneurship and intellectual capital into non-productive activities, thereby blunting the entrepreneurial spirits of many Africans.In 1976, Tanzania began the $220 million Mufundi paper mill factory project financed by the World Bank. The project turned out to be a total failure, yet for twenty years, Tanzanians paid the bill for that ill-thought out experiment. In the early 1990's, the UNDP spent $900,000 over a three year period trying unsuccessfully to show farmers in north-east Ivory Coast how to cultivate onions. Meanwhile, 90 miles north, in neighboring Burkina Faso, the farmers there were growing onions profitably under similar agricultural conditions, but without any foreign aid. The decades of financial and technical aid transfers to Africa have not fostered economic growth, rather, it has left seventy countries, primarily in Sub-Saharan African, poorer than they were in 1980, and 43 are worst off than they were in 1970. The United Nations Development Program describes the 1980's, the period of highest foreign aid transfer to Africa, as the “lost decade.” Over much of that decade, 100 countries mostly in Africa, suffered major economic decline or net stagnation, and the conclusion is that foreign aid failed to create economic growth in aid recipient countries. The old belief that aid transfer allowed poor countries to escape the poverty trap has been refuted, because research has proved that poverty, contrary to the popular belief, is not caused by capital shortage. In fact, studies show that there is no correlation between aid and economic development, rather, most aid recipient countries have become and remained more dependent of foreign aid. Additionally, a World Bank study showed that food aid budgets in developed nations were mainly guided by prospects for commercial exports of surplus from donor countries, and not determined in accordance with the needs and objectives of recipient countries' to reduce dependence on imported food. Donors reduce food aid budgets when the prospect for commercial exports are good, and increase them when the prospects are poor. A U.S 1997 General Accounting Office report, criticized USAID for having no strategies for the assessment of the impact of its programs in enhancing the food security, and further, the Agency could not determine whether food aid was an efficient means of accomplishing food security goals in aid recipient African countries. Poor policy choices in Africa have caused development there to first stagnate and decline over the past several decades.The public image of foreign aid is of Western beneficence; nevertheless, studies show in some cases, foreign worker remittance to their countries of origin far exceeds the annual aid transfers from some European countries. In 1998, the officially recorded remittance from the Netherlands to forty-two low-income developing countries exceeded U.S. $1 billion; a sum equivalent to 115 percent of Dutch aid to those countries.

Foreign aid serves a useful purpose when it is provided to alleviate temporary hardship as in cases of natural disasters such as droughts, but, experience in Africa has proved that aid recipients could easily construe foreign aid as a substitution to their own productivity. Across the continent, food aid has suppressed food production, undermining the prices of local produced foods. A World Bank finding on food import into Somalia in 1998 concluded that aid had methodically undermined Somalia's civil society. Somalia had become more dependent on imported food than any other country in Sub-Saharan Africa. The report noted that until food aid began to arrive in Somalia, the economy was predominantly an agricultural and pastoral economy. And up until the early seventies, Somalia was self-sufficient in food grains production; however, Somalia's share of food imported in total volume of food consumption rose from less than 33 per cent in 1979 to over 63 per cent in 1984. This sea change ironically coincided with the period of highest food aid distribution to that country. By increasing the supply of food aid, Somalia's domestic food prices were dampened, and the prices of local food crops were prevented from rising, thus reducing the incentives for domestic food crop producers. This exacerbated Somalia's food deficit.

Studies show that there is overwhelming evidence that foreign aid has helped to under-write the misguided policies of the corrupt and bloated government bureaucracies across Africa. The Oxford International Group study revealed that the external stock of capital held by Africans in overseas accounts, was between $700billion and $800 billion in 2005, and nearly 40% of Africa's aggregate wealth was stacked in foreign bank accounts in Europe, United States and Japan. A former U.S Ambassador to Ghana, Edward P. Bryan, admitted that foreign donors have allowed what he describes as “a small, clever class that inherited power from the colonial masters to take us to the cleaners.” It will take a lot of resources and time to turn Africa around. In March 1990, a Paris daily, Le Monde wrote, “Every franc given to impoverished Africans, comes back to France or is smuggled into Switzerland by African bureaucrats and politicians.” And critics contend that donor agencies knew or should have known the motivation and activities of corrupt African leaders who spirit away billions into Swiss Banks and other western bank accounts. Even famine relief aid is not spared. As early as the late 1980's, a former head of Medicine Sans Frontiers, Dr. Rory Branman, lamented the failure of aid to Africa, saying, “We have been duped.” The Western governments and humanitarian groups”, he said, have “unwittingly fueled and are continuing to fuel an operation that will be described in hindsight in a few years' time as one of the greatest slaughters of our time.” The World Bank admitted that in most cases Western donors knew that up to 30 per cent of the loans to African countries and governments went directly into the bank accounts of corrupt officials, yet The Bank considered these officials and their governments as partners in development.A major debilitating by-product of foreign aid to Africa is the culture of corruption that has taken root at every level of every government. Today, corruption has become the way of life in every country in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the theft, bribery and embezzlement of aid, and other government resources are so endemic, they are not considered as crimes. African politicians and government officials have engaged in corruption practices, and a 2004-2005 World Bank Report showed that $148 billion were embezzled out of Africa by politicians and bureaucrats; a significant amount of it being aid and loans earmarked for development activities to benefit Africa's poor. Without transparency, accountability, and good governance, Africa's future will continue to remain bleak.

Because it is tied with geo-politics, trade and banking, foreign aid cannot be classified purely as gift-giving. During its first four decades, victory in the Cold War was the compelling and pre-eminent drive in the regime of aid giving. Today, experts have identified the predominant motives for aid giving as strategic socio-political, mercantile, and humanitarian and ethical. Official aid is seldom the tool of altruism alone, because the direction of foreign aid is dictated by political and strategic considerations, much more than the economic needs and policy performance of the recipient. However, the motives behind aid never come in fixed and stable proportions. Perhaps the one safest generalization to make is that foreign aid, when used alone or in combination with other policy instruments, has a unique ability to allow the donors to demonstrate compassion, while simultaneously pursuing a variety of other ulterior motives and objectives.

world capitalism 2 - babies die

In studying economic, health and governance data for 45 sub-Saharan African countries from 1975-2005, World Bank senior economist Jorge Arbache found that during multi-year economic collapses, infant deaths increased on average by almost three percent, from 86 deaths per 1,000 live births to 114.
The World Bank calculates that some 28 million children are born in Africa every year, which would mean up to 700,000 more deaths because of the recession, which is caused in part by risky US mortgage lending, said Arbache. But even by conservative estimates, “Some 200,000 more babies may die in sub-Saharan Africa this year because of the economic fallout,” the economist said.
“I know these days it seems economists are blaming everything on the recession,” said Arbache. “But there is historical proof that sustained periods of deceleration [economic slump] have a direct impact on governance, small conflicts, life spans and, also, mortality.”

“Economic growth collapse in sub-Saharan Africa may mean more than a financial downturn – it can be deadly,” Arbache said.

World Bank and African Agricuture

Extracts from an article here

A recent evaluation of the World Bank’s research output challenged the institution’s reputation as the world’s ‘knowledge bank’ referring to its habit of taking ‘new and untested results as hard evidence that its preferred policies work’, singling out the flagship World Development Reports published annually as a medium through which advocacy of the World Bank’s favoured policy recommendations sometimes takes precedence over balanced analysis.

WDR 2008 espouses a continuation of World Bank rural policies of the last quarter century. First, it argues that agriculture is key to poverty alleviation, especially for African smallholder farmers. The majority of Africa’s poor live in rural areas and farm to varying extents. Second, it stresses that liberalized national markets will remain the primary force for achieving productivity increases and poverty alleviation. Accelerated growth will be achieved through agricultural productivity improvement but the ‘green revolution’ model of state investments and subsidized support for agricultural inputs are discounted. African states are seen to be seriously flawed and therefore best restricted in scope and decentralised to preclude government intervention in the national economy. Smallholder households will participate in commodity, capital, land and labour markets, to seek multiple pathways out of poverty; either through encompassing agricultural production, rural non-agricultural enterprises or out-migration.

Beneath these entirely business-as-usual policies, there are starkly contradictory objectives: the humanitarian concerns of poverty alleviation clash with a Darwinian market fundamentalism. ‘Market fundamentalism’ is defined here as the unshakeable belief in the innate nature of the market as a prime mover of exchange and optimizer of production without regard for the political imbalances and social biases of markets as historical institutions. States are seen as potential concentrations of vested interests and power in stark contrast to markets as neutral forums of exchange...

...In global agricultural commodity markets, African smallholder producers have been losing market share continually over the last three decades. Africa’s traditional export crops, the beverage crops: coffee, cocoa, tea, as well as cotton, tobacco, cashew, etc. have steadily declined to now quite negligible export levels. The comparative advantage that African smallholders held in these crops has been undermined by far more efficient producers elsewhere. There is no evidence provided to suggest that the broad masses of African small-scale peasant farmers will experience anything other than continuing difficulties in meeting the rigours of global commodity market chains with their highly regulated standards and time schedules...

...Under current market fundamentalist thinking, large-scale agriculture is deemed to be competitive, not small-scale family production. The WDR 2008 infers that the lack of competitiveness of African smallholder commodity production will necessarily catapult many farmers into contract farming or agricultural wage employment. The wider relevance of contracting in an African context lies in its potential for increasing economies of scale and assuring quality. Contract farming and agricultural wage labour are recommended when accompanied with fair remuneration and working conditions. The question remains how such just conditions are to be secured. Large-scale farms and agri-business are not charities. A deluge of farmers, exiting the smallholder sector as ‘refugees’, and flooding rural labour markets, will meet with extremely low returns and harsh working conditions. Contract farming is usually selective in its outreach, often restricted to locations near big cities or major roads. Socially, over time it tends to exclude smaller, poorer producers, and the crops grown are primarily export cash crops rather than food staples. It constitutes a top-down take-it-or-leave-it approach with limited technical transfer. Undoubtedly it can benefit some farmers, but it is not an omnibus solution to low productivity and food insecurity for the majority of African peasant farmers. Similar arguments are made for the efficiency of large-scale farm and plantation production. In relinquishing their autonomy, do smallholders gain in terms of income and security of employment? Smallholders’ bargaining power in contract farming can be very limited particularly in relation to the increasing influence of supermarket value chains. Agricultural wage labourers tend to have even less room for manoeuvre with casualization of the agricultural wage labour a common tendency. The WDR 2008 admits that agricultural wage labourers have been known to face highly exploitative working conditions...

... WDR 2008 suffers from a logical inconsistency between its acclaimed goal of poverty alleviation for African smallholder farmers and its conviction that large-scale commercial farming is the inevitable future of farming. African small-scale family farmers must meet the productivity levels, rigorous product standards and delivery schedules of international value chains to compete effectively, yet without necessary support. At present hundreds of millions of African peasant smallholders are not competing successfully in global commodity markets. The World Bank adopts a matter-of-fact position that they will relinquish their autonomy as agricultural producers and work as contract farmers or wage labours in large-scale agribusiness or alternatively leave agriculture to seek their livelihood elsewhere. Their sanguine attitude towards peasant labour redundancy does not tally with their professed concern for the African rural poor. Beneath the WDR 2008’s public relations spin about poverty alleviation, they are conferring carte blanche support to a ‘survival of the fittest’ economic trajectory in which the grossly imbalanced commercial interests of large-scale OECD subsidized farmers, supermarket chains and agribusiness have full scope to compete against unsubsidized peasant farmers engaged in rural ways of life that that have managed hitherto to endure for millennia...

...African smallholders have a ‘loser’ status in the WDR2008, but the World Bank appreciates that allowing the global market to fully decimate African peasant agriculture would spell political and human disaster in the weak African national economies where farmers’ only option is to join over-crowded rural and urban informal sectors where average levels of capitalization, skills and productivity are exceptionally low. Thus the African countryside of the future is in effect likely to be relegated to a large ‘holding ground’ to ensure basic welfare of the rural population and provide labour for other sectors of the economy as and when needed...

... The reality is that customary land rights are no longer the central issue in many African countries. Smallholder farmers are often in competition with large-scale farmers who receive preferential state support. Small farmers have already been or are currently being pushed into vulnerable ecological areas outside their traditional home areas...

...The World Bank has not been held accountable for the agricultural policy misjudgements and blunders they have enforced in Africa over the last 25 years through structural adjustment policy and debt conditionality. Now, with impunity, they are throwing their weight behind the rapid redundancy of a potentially massive number of peasant smallholders in the name of African development...

...In other words, those left in the countryside live on tribal communal ‘holding grounds’, akin to the Bantustans of the apartheid period of South African history, eking out an existence on the basis of exceptionally low-yielding, uncapitalized agriculture. Like the Bantustans, these holding grounds could function as labour reserves for the mainstream national economy and would most likely be based on conservative tribal customary legal frameworks not only with respect to land but in wide array of other spheres as well. It is indeed an irony that such a possibility resurfaces little more than a decade after South Africa managed to rid itself of this ‘separate and unequal’ model of rural exploitation in the name of development.

Aid - the road to no-where

"Foreign assistance is far from charity," J. Brian Atwood, the USAID director under former President Clinton, told Congress in 1995. "It is an investment in American jobs, American business."

Just in case it was not already quite apparent we read here .

Under the Buy American Act, the U.S. Agency for International Development must spend aid money to buy products and services from U.S. suppliers whenever possible, and then deliver them aboard expensive U.S.-flagged ships or planes.

The World Bank estimates that throughout the 1980s, more than half of all aid was tied to what donor countries wanted to export, often at higher prices than could be found on the market. This practice reduced the value of aid by anywhere from 11 to 30 percent.

Often donors did not understand Africa or talk to Africans. The Norwegian government built a fish processing plant on Lake Turkana in the 1970s to provide jobs for nomadic cattle herders — soon doomed in part because the local community had no fishing culture.
In a self-assessment in 1987, the World Bank found 106 out of 189 African development projects audited — almost 60 percent — had serious shortcomings or were complete failures. African agriculture projects failed 75 percent of the time. A recent report on aid from the World Bank's private arm, the International Finance Corporation, found only half of its Africa projects succeed.

In the 50 years since the first African countries won independence, the world has spent $568 billion on Africa. Yet Africans are poorer now than a quarter century ago

"Africans do not want to be viewed as a charity case," adds Okonjo-Iweala, a World Bank managing director. "Ninety-nine point nine percent of Africans are people who are getting on with their own lives. All they are asking for is....a set of tools."

We in Socialist Banner will add that what also is required is a new social system , something that the World Bank cannot deliver , only the workers themselves .

World Bank Woes

According to Christian Aid the World Bank risks doing more harm than good, if it is allowed to continue attaching harmful economic conditions to its development loans.

At issue is the Bank's practice of requiring countries to modify their economic policies in exchange for loans and debt relief. These changes often benefit European and US investors much more than the people living in developing countries.

The European Network on Debt and Development (a network of 51 non-governmental organisations from 16 European countries ) has found that more than two thirds of International Development Association loans and grants (71%) remain conditional on economic reforms that can adversely affect the poor.

Olivia McDonald, Christian Aid's World Bank expert, said: "European governments should not be taken in by the Bank's assurances that the imposition of harmful economic conditions has stopped. Using the Bank's own figures we've found that the evidence quite clearly states the opposite. And stories from poor communities around the world demonstrate the continued impoverishment that dictating inappropriate economic policies to poor countries causes."

Christian Aid calls on the UK government to withhold funds until the Bank stops demanding that recipient countries implement economic reforms such as privatisation and trade liberalisation.