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St. Cloud State University
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“Forgive loans,” urge protesters
Published:
Monday, September 30, 2002
Media Credit: CHUCK KENNEDY/ KRT
Demonstrators march down I Street Washington, D.C., Saturday, protesting the meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Ben Finley
KRT
Protesters gathering in Washington this weekend will argue that International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans to poor countries have failed to alleviate poverty and should be forgiven completely.
Poor countries have been forced to neglect health care and education because they must spend large amounts of money to pay off the loans, protest organizers said.
They also said that in many cases undemocratic governments arranged for the loans and misused the money.
The protests will also call for greater accountability from multinational companies on such problems as sweatshop labor and environmental devastation.
Police estimated up to 25,000 protesters would gather Friday and Saturday during the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank.
Last year's meetings and protests were canceled after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
On Friday, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence and other groups planned to try to block traffic on the Beltway and other main roads and disrupt the city's Metro subway system.
Mobilization for Global Justice planned to hold a large rally Saturday outside the World Bank and IMF buildings and prevent officials from attending annual meetings, said Soren Ambrose, a spokesman for the protest group.
The two institutions have changed some of their anti-poverty programs in recent years in response to criticism. Debt relief will be one of the main topics at the meetings.
"There has been incredible reform here in the last seven years, and we may not have achieved as much as some people would like,” World Bank president James Wolfensohn said at a news conference Thursday.
“But I can tell you that this institution is a very different place than it was 10 or 20 years ago,"
The World Bank and IMF have started debt relief programs for 26 countries in Africa, South America and Eastern Europe.
One program, called the Initiative for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries, has reduced the total debt of 26 countries by two-thirds since 1996.
The result has been a "tremendous increase" in the amount of money those countries have spent for education and health care, said Horst Kohler, managing director of the IMF.
Many of the World Bank and IMF's poverty-alleviation strategies have failed, but other smaller programs have succeeded, said William Easterly, an author and a former World Bank economist.
“There are specific types of grants that we can give directly to poor people, bypassing all these huge international and national bureaucracies," Easterly said Monday at a conference at the Brookings Institution, a centrist research organization.
Jeni Klugman, another World Bank spokeswoman, said even if poor countries were granted complete debt relief, the world's worst poverty would not end overnight.
