The Western Myth of Aid and the Silent War against the Third World"Who decides that a hue and cry must be made about one kind of atrocity while another gets away unpublicised? Who sets the agenda which sees imprisonment and torture as human rights violations while torture and death by starvation are not? And what gives some countries the right to become international arbiters, ignoring the blood on their own hands?… It's time for people who care about human rights to adopt a new cause: the Third World person's right to exist. Our people are under fire from global terrorism of a terminal new order. Many have already been wiped off the face of the earth."
- MARI MARCEL THEKAEKARA, Tamil Nadu State, India.
"Never before in history have the poor financed the rich on such a massive scale and paid so dearly for their servitude as today."- JOHN PILGER
As the twentieth century draws to a close, the world is guilty of a colossal failure of compassion for its poorest people. Today, more than a thousand million people live in extreme poverty. A quarter of the world's people are starving. One in three children are being denied adequate food, education and health care. More than half a million children die each year as a result of austerity programmes imposed by the West on the Third World. Every three seconds a child under five dies due to poverty. In the time it took you to read that last sentence, another child's life was lost due to policies that Western governments have decided to enforce on the rest of the world.
1998 marked 50 years of the global trading system which was set up under the 1948 General Agreement On Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). While the bankers and leaders of the world's richest countries toasted the "success" of this economic system at the 1998 Ministerial Conference in Geneva, the people of the Third World saw little cause for celebration. Not only is this global economic system directly responsible for the starvation of millions throughout the Third World - it can be said that it actually depends on the impoverishment of these people. There is no more apt description for such a deliberate and calculated agenda than genocide.
Up to the mid 1970s, the worst excesses of the capitalist system were held in check by democratic national governments and strong unions. Big business was forced by legislation, regulations and labour contracts to share its profits, at least on some minimal basis, with workers, consumers and the state.
Over the past two decades, however, all these external constraints have been disposed of. Globalisation, free trade, deregulation and the conversion of nearly all political parties to the free market agenda have combined to subvert democracy and disempower unions. Unchallenged, corporate domination has quickly spread across the planet, causing disparities and inequalities on an unsurpassed scale. Poverty, crime, violence, ethnic conflict and environmental destruction have escalated as a result.
Inequality is on the increase. In 1960 the ratio of the world's richest 20% of the population to the poorest 20% was 30 to 1. In 1993 that ratio had doubled to 61 to 1. Today, a citizen of the richest country is over 500 times better off than one from the poorest. The gap between rich and poor countries has never been so vast.
THE ORIGINS OF THE THIRD WORLD DEBT CRISIS
The impoverishment of the Third World can be traced back to the 1960s when the US government spent more money than it earned. To make up for this, Washington printed more dollars. Thus, the world's stocks of dollars fell in value. This was bad news for the major oil-producing countries of OPEC, whose oil was priced in dollars. The money they made from exports now bought less. So in 1973 they hiked their prices, making huge sums of money which they deposited in Western banks. Meanwhile, the world was plunged into a recession. As interest rates plummeted, the banks were faced with an international financial crisis. They lent the money out fast, to stop the slide, and turned to the Third World, whose economies were doing well but who wanted to maintain development and meet the rising costs of oil. The banks lent lavishly, eager to make use of their surplus capital, offering loans by the barrowload at very low interest rates to the leaders of any developing country they could find, without much thought about how the money would be used or whether the recipients had the capacity to repay it.
In the end, little of the money benefited the poor. The money was almost entirely wasted; roughly a quarter of it went on increased oil bills; a quarter on misconceived large-scale development schemes such as dams, many of which proved of little value; a quarter on the military (often to shore up oppressive regimes); and a quarter went into the private banks of corrupt leaders.
The world's economic system is in fact based on debt. Every country in the world is in the red, even the richest and most successful. Most of the money is owed to multinational banks and financial institutions. Rich countries can survive periods of high indebtedness if there is confidence and investment in their economies, but poorer countries are crippled by their foreign debts. Some now owe more to the West than their total Gross National Product (GNP). The five countries with the biggest debt burdens (as a percentage of GNP) are: Cote d'Ivoire (338.9%), Guinea-Bissau (340.7%), Mozambique (450.4%), Congo (454.2%) and Nicaragua (a staggering 800.6%).
At the current rates of interest, it is a mathematical impossibility for most Third World countries to pay off their debt. Many have had to agree to the process known as "structural adjustment" by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - the two main financial institutions of the West - who have insisted on these countries' conversion to free-market economics.
By the mid 1970s, Third World countries, encouraged by the West to grow cash crops, suddenly found that they weren't getting the prices they were used to for raw materials like copper, coffee, tea, cotton, and cocoa. Too many countries - advised by the West - were producing the same crops, so prices fell. Then interest rates began to rise, pushed further by an increase in US interest rates, and oil prices rose again. Third World countries were now earning less than ever for their exports while paying more than ever on their loans and imports. They had to borrow money just to pay off the interest. Debts piled up and the repayments mounted ever more as the commodity prices that most developing countries depended on sank through the floor (by mid 1987, they were at their lowest level for 50 years).
New loans by the World Bank and IMF have only added to the burden. Since 1980 debt to the World Bank has increased five times; in effect the poorest countries became bankrupt. The oldest human rights organisation in the world, the Anti-Slavery Society, has declared that debt is "contemporary slavery" and interest payments a form of national bondage.
IN THE GRIP OF THE WORLD BANK
The World Bank is run from Washington by a hierarchy of rich shareholders from the developed countries, and it is under the constant influence and manipulation of the United States. Loans from the World Bank and the IMF come with draconian conditions aimed at diverting the borrower's resources away from meeting domestic needs and towards fulfilling the Bank's corporate agenda. Elected governments have been forced to impose very strict economic policies, known as Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) which have opened their markets to "free trade" - a euphemism for exploitation by transnational corporations (TNCs).
SAPs supposedly consist of measures designed to help a country repay its debts by earning more hard cash, but in most countries SAPs have worsened the economic situation and the poor have been hit the hardest. SAPs have particularly affected the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, whose economies are already the poorest in the world. In 1980 sub-Saharan Africa owed the West $60 billion. By 1997, after the introduction of structural adjustment, this had risen to $219 billion - $357 for every man, woman and child in the region, much more than a year's wage for many.
In the eyes of the people running the World Bank and the IMF, services that are "public" (i.e. those that people don't pay for directly, such as health, education, welfare, transport services, etc.) are deemed to be an unfair subsidy by the government. The private provision of services (which people do have to pay for) is looked on much more favourably. Other areas, such as clean air, reasonable conditions of work and health and safety considerations, are deemed irrelevant to trade.
Under the terms of the World Bank and IMF's structural adjustment programmes, the governments of poor countries are forced to cut spending on health, education, social services and welfare; to devalue the national currency; to cut back on food subsidies; to cut jobs and wages for workers in government industries and services; and to take over small subsistence farms growing staple foods and replace them with large-scale export crop farms. The SAPs also demand lower taxes on high income earners, privatisation of public industries (including their sale to foreign investors) and lower tariffs on imports. Third World nations have been forced by the IMF and World Bank to sell off state-owned enterprises at bargain basement prices. In 1990, more than 7O countries had privatisation programmes in place and sold off state firms worth $185 billion.
The results are lucrative for the West but socially disastrous for the poor countries, who have sunk deeper into recession, with mass unemployment, starvation and ill health. Millions of people in the developing world are trapped into a life of poverty and misery with little hope of improving their quality of life. Nonetheless, IMF loans are withheld if a country does not accept the terms of the West's plans. If ordinary people oppose these policies, the Bank and IMF are quite prepared to tacitly support violent suppression of demonstrations or protests. Thousands of people have been arrested or injured in protests in more than 30 countries implementing SAPs.
More at:
http://www.wakeupmag.co.uk/articles/cleanshirts.htm
Author
