Activists Mobilize for Debt Cancellation

by April Knutson, WAMM

On Sunday, April 16, and Monday, April 17, activists from around the country and the world will convene in Washington, DC, for the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Inspired by the spirit of the December protests in Seattle, protesters will attempt to shut down the meeting through massive peaceful protest and direct action.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, along with the World Trade Organization, are the key architects of the corporate global economy that has impoverished peoples around the world and devastated the environment.

The structural adjustment policies (SAPs), conceived by the corporate interests that control the IMF and the World Bank and imposed on more than 100 countries, force nations to focus on export-based, sweatshop, plantation economies that devastate the people and the land. At the same time, these SAPs help create the pool of desperately poor unemployed workers that transnational companies seek when they move production facilities out of the United States and Europe to avoid high labor costs and environmental regulations.

In Nicaragua, IMF privatization policies have completely destroyed the gains made during the Sandinista Revolution. The universal education and health care systems are wiped out; unemployment rates are 60 percent on the Pacific Coast and 90 percent on the Atlantic Coast. Nicaragua owes $6.5 billion dollars to the World Bank, and annual payments on the interest alone are two and a half times the budget for education and health.

In Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where the annual per capita income is under $300, people stood together against the IMF privatization plans and the dictates to develop export crops and assembly plants for Disney and Walmart. They elected Aristide, head of the Lavalas movement, whose alternative development plans included doubling the minimum wage and developing sustainable agricultural production of food for consumption. Aristide called the IMF, which is Fond Monétaire International in French and Créole, the "Front de Misère Internationale" (the Front for International Misery). He was toppled by a coup in 1991.

In conjunction with this April,s protest, the national organization 50 Years is Enough has issued the following demands:

• That the IMF and the World Bank cancel all debts;
• That the IMF and the World Bank immediately cease imposing economic austerity measures (structural adjustment policies);
• That the IMF and the World Bank accept responsibility for the disastrous impact of their structural adjustment policies by paying reparations to the peoples and communities harmed;
• That the World Bank Group pay reparations to peoples relocated and otherwise harmed by its large projects (e.g. dams).
• That the World Bank Group immediately cease providing advice and resources to private-sector investments;
• That agencies and individuals within the World Bank Group and the IMF complicit in corruption be prosecuted and that those responsible provide compensation for resources stolen and damaged; and
• That the future existence, structure, and policies of international institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF be determined through a democratic, participatory, and transparent process.

These demands are endorsed by the Campaign for Labor Rights in Washington, DC, by Food First in Oakland, CA, and by organizations for debt relief and alternative development around the world, including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Mauritius, Thailand, and the Philippines.