World Bank Chum into the Global Food Crisis Frenzy

World Bank Chum into the Global Food Crisis Frenzy: The Four Horses Ride Again

by C. L. Cook

The World Bank today charged out of the wilderness at the fourth International Conference on African Development (TICAD) in Tokyo to announce its 1.2 billion dollar (US) top up of a loans fund aimed at the heart of Africa, (including a few juicy throw-away grants to poverty-poster children in Haiti, Djibouti, and Liberia) with promises of more to come.

Well they had to come back, and honesty be told, we all know they had never really gone away; from the darkened wings today rose again the four-headed monster of the world's miserable, the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Food Programme (WFE), the Food and Agricultural Association (FOA), joined by a conglomeration of various other UN and EU international poverty pimps doing business under the rubric of "international institutions."

Drawn to the media limelight like so many fish brought to the surface by the full-mooned brilliance of the growing Global Food Crisis (GFC), the organizations that proved the agency of incalculable suffering and misery around the planet over the last few decades are back.

Amazingly though, the tools the paragons of economic prowess profer as cure to the ills of the backward blacks of Africa and the Caribbean are the same loans-for-social-sacrifice instruments known at the peak of IMF/WB influence as Structural Adjustment Plans (SAPS).

In a performance worthy of the Reagan era, today the World Bank's current numero uno, president Robert Zoellick outlined his gang's plan for Africa's future, as the Voice of America quotes him;

* "[T]he assistance being provided Liberia is intended to help boost agricultural production in the country, by providing farmers all the requisite support they need to grow more food. Haiti, the World Bank President announced, will also receive similar support.

* Mr. Zoellick disclosed that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Food Programme (WFP) and other international institutions are drawing up a comprehensive program to determine an efficient and effective approach in dealing with the situation."

The Situation

In the guise of rescuers of economic basket cases around the world, these international operators lever national disasters into promising opportunities for perpetual control over the lives and livelihoods of the "beneficiaries" of their largess, once those suckers are duly saddled with impossible loan repayments. It's a phenomena recently outlined in great detail in Naomi Klein's best-seller, 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,' (an expansion, among other things, of points emphasized at every rally against globalization since at least last century's 'Battle of Seattle') made grotesquely lucrative in places like Iraq, Louisiana, and more recently, Burma.

The principle is surprisingly simple: Find someone desperate enough to agree to any terms for survival, then make them an offer they can't refuse. As Klein chillingly informs; these disasters need not be nature's doing, nor need they be waited for; necessarily.


The Guardian's Julian Borger reports the World Bank will "fast-track" monies, "bypassing the normal vetting procedures." Among the normal procedures left behind seems to be any sense of shame, or propriety. Borger quotes the redoubtable Zoellick;

* "The fast-track World Bank money would be available immediately, bypassing the normal project vetting procedures, and would help fund safety net support for the hungry, in the form of school feeding programmes or food-for-work schemes. Zoellick said priority would be given to pregnant women and infants, who were most vulnerable. The money would also be spent on seeds and fertiliser for farmers for the next few harvests."

Work for Food Schemes?

So, 220 million of the 1.2 billion is destined to feed the pregnant and infants in the form of "grants" for now, the bulk of further aid presumably coming later in the form of loans, certainly not of the sub-prime variety; and in a new twist, "work for food schemes."

Zoellick's a little short on the details of that one, but we can all but hope the WB will learn from the failures of the UN's Food for Oil programme.

This time, as in the past the spotlight is trained on Africa and benighted Haiti. Following years in decline, especially in the Americas, the figurative smell of blood in the water accompanying the recent spike in oil and fuel prices affecting most the world economy's hardest done-by, president Zoellick seems poised to pounce to solve problems largely created by the system he sits atop.

The invocation to stir good Zoellick from his Swiss perch seems Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's plea for assistance. Just the enticement to gain the doorway. Sirleaf will doubtless discover: Some guests never leave once invited in; not without a good measure of blood.

Whether Work for Food, Food for Oil, or Blood for Oil, today's backdated gesture by the World Bank and its old order coterie reveals just how far from reality these global string-pullers have drifted: There is no more "there" there fellas. The blood is all gone.

But, Zoellick persists;

* "This is not an issue like HIV/AIDS where you need some research breakthrough. People know what to do, and we need to get the resources out quickly to where they are needed."


Another scheme kicking around is the idea to introduce "management tools such as hedge funds and insurance schemes to protect poor countries and their farmers."

Makes you want to weep for the humanity of it.

The nabobs of the world's economy will meet in Rome next week to chart this and scheme that. Robert Zoellick laid out his organization's game plan, saying;

* "As we go into the Rome meeting next week it is crucial that we focus on specific action. Along with our partners, these initiatives will help address the immediate danger of hunger and malnutrition for the 2 billion people struggling to survive in the face of rising food prices, and contribute to a longer-term solution that must involve many countries and institutions."


Doubtless that "longer-term solution" will be short in coming.


notes:

Oil price is a bubble that will burst soon: Soros

Is free trade answer to food woes?
Commodity Online

Liberia: World Bank Pledges Us$10 Million to Country At TICAD
The Analyst (Monrovia)
29 May 2008

World Bank Boosts Aid To Fight Hunger
By VOA News
29 May 2008

World Bank's $1.2bn fund to feed the poor· Rapid response facility to help developing countries Liberia, Haiti and Djibouti receive first three grants
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
The Guardian, Friday May 30 2008