1bn people go hungry in wake of crisis

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

1bn people go hungry in wake of crisis

(Monday 13 October 2008)

THE World Bank has warned that the world economic crisis will increase the number of malnourished people globally to nearly a billion this year.


A new World Bank report states that the soaring cost of living will make it impossible for 967 million people, an increase of 44 million, to get the minimum level of nutrition required for a healthy existence.

Bank president Robert Zoellick presented the report, entitled Rising Food and Fuel Prices: Addressing the risks to future generations, to the development committees of the bank and the International Monetary Fund at the institutions' AGMs in Washington DC on Sunday.

Mr Zoellick stressed that the "man-made catastrophe" is "pushing poor people to the brink of survival.

"One hundred million people have already been driven into poverty this year and that number will grow," he warned, adding that the effect of the crisis would be "lifelong" on some families.

He emphasised that growing children in underdeveloped countries would be hardest hit.

But Mr Zoellick insisted that effective responses to overcome it "lie in all our hands."

Making the case for decisive government intervention to mitigate the social costs of the economic meltdown, the report observed that "malnourished children cannot develop into healthy adults and become productive members of society who can contribute to the growth needed to lift themselves and their country out of poverty."

The report insisted that governments should prioritise the expansion of welfare programmes over spending in other areas.

It stressed that investments in welfare programmes now would enable governments to mitigate the worst effects of both the current crisis and future ones.

Mr Zoellick called for "concerted global action now not just to deal with this crisis but to put in place new architecture, new norms and new oversight to ensure that this crisis never happens again."

He urged rich countries not to forget their avowed commitment to provide billions in aid to underdeveloped countries.

"Aid flows must be maintained," Mr Zoellick said, adding that the "meeting of ministers was unanimous in that regard."

Japan announced at the meeting that it will provide $150 million (£87m) over the next five years to increase agricultural productivity in poor countries and support disaster prevention through a World Bank trust fund.

Tokyo will give $100 million (£58m) to develop new rice varieties, enhance the use of fertilisers and train agricultural researchers and $50 million (£29m) to assist disaster-prevention projects aimed at combating climate change.

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Capitalism and Crisis. http://www.rinf.com/forum/showthread...italism+crisis

Chapter 1: Capitalism and crisis.

We live in a world of enormous economic and social contrasts. The combined wealth of the top 300 people now exceeds the total annual income of the world's one billion poorest. The richest one-fifth own 85% of the world's wealth, while the poorest one-fifth control less than 2%.

[Nostalgia]

If anyone is expecting the world bank to do anything then I guess they will be waiting for a while.
Lets face it, it wasn't to long ago that George W Bush placed Paul Wolfowitz at the head of the snake, only for him to have to resign later, and thank god he did otherwise you can be sure that Bush, Wolfowitz, Cheney et al would have siphoned every last dollar from the World Bank and redirected it to their Neo-Con perpetual wars!
Let us not kid ourselves into thinking that the World Bank might actually do anything to help 1 billion starving people, it just isn't how capitalism works, and never will be.

Poorest Pay for World Bank Corruption - US Senator

by Emad Mekay
WASHINGTON - The World Bank has lost about 100 billion dollars slated for development in the world's poorest nations to corruption since 1946, nearly 20 percent of its total lending portfolio, according to a U.S.. Senate committee.

”It is critical that every development bank dollar reaches its intended recipient,” said Sen Dick Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Thursday. ”Unfortunately, that is not happening - corruption remains a serious problem.”

Lugar cited one of the panelists as the source for the massive figure. Jeffrey Winters of Northwestern University, who testified before the hearing, estimated the World Bank ”has participated mostly passively in the corruption of roughly 100 billion dollars of its loan funds intended for development.”

Other experts estimate that between five and 25 percent of the 525 billion dollars the Bank has lent since 1946 has been misused. This amounts to 26-130 billion dollars.

”Even if corruption is at the low end of estimates, millions of people living in poverty may have lost opportunities to improve their health, education and economic condition,” Lugar said.

A World Bank spokesman vehemently disputed the estimate. ”We completely reject the figure offered by one of the panelists,” said Damian Milverton. ”It has no basis in fact.”

Corruption has become a global issue as developing countries, watchdog groups and some economists complain that poor nations lose huge funds from multilateral development banks (MDBs) like the World Bank because of misuse of money. Yet taxpayers in those borrowing countries have to still to repay the banks.

”So, not only are the impoverished cheated out of development benefits, they are left to repay the resulting debts to the banks,” Lugar added.

The estimates emerged at the first in a series of oversight hearings into the anti-corruption efforts of the World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs), which include the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Testifying at Thursday's hearing were the U.S. representatives to the World Bank and the IDB, as well as four outside experts.

Manish Bapna, executive director of the Washington-based watchdog group Bank Information Center (BIC), said corruption threatens the core mission of those banks: poverty alleviation.

”While MDBs profess 'zero tolerance' for corruption in their projects and programs, this rhetorical commitment has not always been meaningfully implemented,” Bapna said.

Corruption can also undermine the development impact of the banks' projects, for example, if contractors use diluted cement in civil works like road-building, officials permit illegal timber harvesting in restricted forest areas, or grant profitable public contracts to well-connected cronies of government officials.

Another example mentioned at the hearing is a project in Lesotho, Africa. Last year a court in that country convicted the director of the Lesotho Highland Water Authority, as well as two international contractors who had paid bribes, of corruption in the awarding of contracts. The World Bank financed part of the project.

Professor Jerome I Levinson of the Washington College of Law at the American University referred to that particular case, and suggested there is a remedy for such actions.

”The World Bank, potentially, has an effective, if draconian, remedy,” he said. ”It could place the international contractors on a proscribed list barring them from bidding on any future World Bank financed projects anywhere in the world.”

The bank says its list of barred companies and individuals now includes 90 names.

Levinson also noted that such projects are usually financed or administered through an auxiliary of a parent company, which is created just to carry out a particular project and then dissolved once the work is completed. That parent should be held responsible for any corrupt activities, he added.

”If we are serious about addressing the cancer of corruption in projects even partially financed with public international funding, I think that it is reasonable to insist upon the entire project being subject to procurement guidelines that assure transparency in the award of international contracts and thus minimize the risk of corrupt payments in connection with such contracts,” he added.

Some of the witnesses also urged multilateral banks to ensure that funds released for non-specific purposes are not subject to corruption, and suggested audits of how that money was eventually spent, admitting that last step could prove difficult.

”Realistically, however, this is the weakest link in the system,” Levinson said. ”Money is fungible. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible to trace the ... disbursed funds.”

Winters, on the other hand, suggested that the MDBs be supervised by an independent auditing body.

”The MDBs must do a much better job supervising and auditing projects and loans,” he said. ”But the only effective way to protect against corruption of development funds is to establish an international auditing body that is independent of the MDBs and of private sector auditing firms -- nearly all of which have deep conflicts of interest.”

Milverton said the World Bank already has multiple layers of oversight mechanisms, including audits, an inspection panel that reviews complaints against Bank projects, and the institution's governing board, among others.

Carole Brookins, the U.S. executive director to the World Bank, told the hearing that combating corruption and building good governance have been major priorities of the Washington-based institution since 1996.

”The World Bank continues to be the leader among international development institutions in a broad range of country-based initiatives to strengthen governance, build effective local institutions and increase transparency,” she said.

In the last fiscal year, the MDBs financed projects worth more than 35 billion dollars in the areas of public administration, transportation, health and education, among others.

The United States contributes more than one billion dollars a year to the banks, with a large majority of that money going to the World Bank's International Development Association, which lends to the very poorest countries at subsidized rates.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0514-07.htm

[Nostalgia]

And what the fuck ever happened to “Make Poverty History.”?

G8 fails to meet aid pledges to Africa

By Barry Mason
6 June 2007

British Prime Minister Tony Blair had hoped that the G8 summit to be held in Heiligendamm, Germany, in June would provide a booster shot to the campaign hailing his supposed “legacy” before leaving office. He is to stand down as British prime minister in June.

Blair created an Africa Commission, and at the G8 summit held in Scotland in 2005, he won commitments from the assembled heads of state to increase aid and debt relief to some of the world’s poorest nations, which includes most sub-Saharan African countries.

The 2005 G8 summit was to be the culmination of a campaign by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and church groups to “Make Poverty History.” The campaign was fronted by the rock musicians Bob Geldof and Bono. Geldof’s assessment at the summit’s end was “10 out of 10” on aid relief and “8 out of 10” on debt relief. Blair declared that “great progress had been made.”

The communiqué issued by the G8 countries following the 2005 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, stated, “There are now just ten years...to meet the goals agreed at the Millennium Summit in 2000. We should continue the G8 focus on Africa which is the only continent not on track to meet any of the goals of the Millennium Declaration by 2015.”

Many of the commitments have been reneged on or only partly met. The Guardian ran a report of the recent meeting of the so-called sherpas in Berlin—G8 officials who meet to prepare the summit proper. According to the 16 May Guardian article, British delegates who raised the question of aid budgets were met with little sympathy. The report quotes a Russian sherpa saying, “We only made those promises because we felt sorry for Tony Blair after the terrorist attacks on 7/7.” This was a reference to the bombings of a bus and tube trains in London, which had happened the previous day.

Bono has called for an emergency session to be held at the G8 summit to address the failure to meet the aid pledges. Speaking to the Guardian, he said, “It’s not just the credibility of the G8 that’s at stake. It’s the credibility of the largest non-violent protest in 30 years. Nobody wants to go back to what we saw in Genoa, but I do sense a real sense of jeopardy.”

Several reports recently published show the extent of the shortfall. One report is from the organisation established by Bono and Geldof, Debt AIDS Trade Africa, or DATA. The report’s aim is to put pressure on the G8. It states, “We hope that its findings will be taken to heart by Chancellor Merkel (of Germany) when she chairs the crucial session on Africa at the forthcoming G8 Summit in Heiligendamm.”

The DATA report monitors how the G8 countries are falling short of the commitments it promised to deliver—$25 billion a year in development aid by 2010. It notes:

“Collectively, the G8 are badly off track with their development assistance promise to Africa. In total G8 assistance to sub-Saharan Africa has increased by only $2.3 billion since 2004, when it should have increased by $5.4 billion over that period.... Concern is heightened by the small increases in aid that are in the pipeline for many G8 countries for 2007 and 2008. If G8 does not react quickly to get back on track with the needed scale-ups in assistance, the early successes...will be squandered....”

Regarding trade it adds, “the lack of global agreement and failure to focus on Africa mean that we can report no genuine progress...we must hold all G8 members accountable for this collective failing.”

A report issued by CONCORD, an umbrella organisation representing development NGOs based in Europe, analyses the aid programmes of European Union nations. The report is entitled “Hold the Applause.”

It states that the amounts promised by European governments do not match the amounts actually paid: “If European governments do not improve on current performance, poor countries will have received 50 billion Euros less from Europe by 2010 than...promised.” It accuses European government aid programmes of having “security, geopolitical alliances and domestic interests” as the main objectives.

The analysis shows 30 percent of the figure for aid claimed by European governments was not genuine aid. Amongst the methods used to inflate the aid figures is the inclusion of debt relief as aid. Another is to count cancellation of export credit debts as aid relief. As the report points out, export credits are used to support domestic companies seeking to do business in developing countries offering insurance against often very lucrative, if somewhat risky, ventures.

Another means of inflating aid figures is to include monies spent on refugees within Europe and money spent on educating overseas students within Europe. The report cites Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) figures showing the percentage of European aid going to Africa is actually falling. For 2004 it was 41 percent, and in 2005 it was 37 percent.

CONCORD also makes the point that “tied food aid is often linked to trade dumping of surplus food from donor countries.” A recent article in the Observer newspaper food magazine accused the American government of doing the same thing. It noted, “America’s food aid volumes increased massively (up to 20 percent of cereal production)...when prices in the US were depressed...but when domestic prices are high this figure falls to just five per cent.”

A report by the development charity Oxfam is headlined, “The World is Still Waiting. Broken G8 promises are costing millions of lives.”

The report notes that two years since the Gleneagles G8 summit, “the unacceptable truth is that they are breaking their promises, with terrible consequences.” Oxfam calculates that shortfall in money promised equates to 1 million women dying in pregnancy or childbirth for the want of simple medical care and 21 million children under five dying because of extreme poverty.

Writing in the Scotsman in April, Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York, said, “The first year after the Gleneagles meeting, aid numbers were padded by misleading accounting on debt cancellation.... The data are now revealing the stark truth: development aid to Africa and to poor countries more generally is stagnant....”

Much was made of the debt cancellations announced at the 2005 G8 summit, and yet according to the Jubilee Debt Campaign using the latest information available, “The poorest 54 countries have debts totaling between US$300 and US$400 billion, whilst for the poorest 152 countries, it is over US$ 2.5 trillion.”

They add, “The total external debt of the very poorest countries (the ‘low income countries’ which have an annual average income of less than $875 per person) was US$412 billion at the end of 2005. During 2005, these countries paid nearly $43 billion to the rich world in debt service (payments of interest and principal)—that is $118 million a day.”

The run up to the conference has seen the usual “generous” gestures. Bush has announced an extra $30 billion to fight HIV/Aids. Bush set up the President’s Emergency Programme for Aids Relief (Pepfar) in 2003 with a budget of $15 billion over five years. It is due to end in September. The new money will be allocated over the next five years. However, as a Guardian news article of May 31 noted, “Although Mr. Bush announced the $30 billion, he has to ask Congress to find the money. With Iraq costing billions it will be hard for Congress to find the sum in an already over-stretched US budget.”

Also, by US law, at least a third of the spending must go to Christian organisations promoting abstinence and opposing the use of condoms. Dr. John Santelli from the public health school at the University of Columbia explained: “You can’t run a good programme if you are sending mixed messages. You advocated abstinence in one place and distribute condoms at a clinic nearby, and the US is funding both.”

Aditi Sharma, head of campaigns for Action Aid, the international anti-poverty agency, commented: “People living with HIV are tired of piecemeal promises and will accept nothing short of a long-term funding plan providing significant additional and predictable finances to achieve the goal of universal access to prevention, treatment and care by 2010.”

A recent Action Aid report noted that the G8 countries would need to treble amounts donated to AIDS treatment/prevention to achieve this goal. Sharma noted, “Even with [Bush’s] announcement, the US will fall short of its share.”

An open letter organised by the Universal Access Aids campaign, on behalf of more than 250 HIV relief and related organisations, has been sent to the G8 leaders. In it they note, “UNAIDS estimates that the global AIDS response needs $20-30 billion per annum, but on current commitments we are $8 billion short in 2007 and $10 billion short from 2008-2010.”

With Germany the current chair of the G8, Angela Merkel was under pressure to make some pronouncement. She has promised to increase development aid by 750 million euros a year over the next four years. Max Lawson of Oxfam said this was “not enough.” To reach Germany’s target of spending 0.51 percent of GDP on aid, its increase would need to be nearly double the proposed amount.

In April, the Africa Progress Panel (APP) was established. Amongst its leading personnel are Kofi Annan, former head of the United Nations, Michael Camdessus, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund and Bob Geldof. In a recent statement, it noted only 10 percent of the pledges made at the Gleneagles G8 summit had been fulfilled. Annan met with Merkel at the end of April. After the meeting, she commented, “We are going to take things up where Gleneagles ended...we don’t need to have more conferences and set more goals.”

The fact that G8 countries have fallen so far behind pledges of aid highlights the fraudulent character of their concern for poverty in Africa. The G8 countries do have a renewed interest in Africa, but what is developing is a new scramble for Africa’s resources. America has recently reorganised its military command structure in line with its growing strategic and resource interests in that continent. It is becoming increasingly dependent on African oil to meet its needs. The G8 finance ministers recently met in Germany ahead of the summit. A BBC News report noted, “Germany singled out China, which relies on access to raw materials to feed its fast-growing economy, as one of the biggest risks to mineral-rich Africa.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/ju...afri-j06.shtml