international finance institution

How can African governments regain control of the aid process?

In the last three decades, changes in the global economy have led to debt and balance of payments crises in many African countries. They desperately needed foreign exchange which they could only get from the World Bank and the IMF. These institutions used this opportunity to expand their influence over the recipients’ national policies. This paper discusses country ownership which is a central issue of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. It looks at the contradictory and competing (...) read

Africa and global finance: potential resistance?

> by Patrick Bond

Far-reaching strategic debate is underway about how to respond to the global financial crisis, and indeed how the North’s problems can be tied into a broader critique of capitalism. At minimum, the ongoing chaos offers new ideological space and material justifications for African finance ministries to re-impose exchange controls and re-regulate finance, and to find sources of hard currency not connected to the Bretton Woods Institutions or Western donors. The 2008 world financial meltdown (...) read

The destruction of African agriculture

Biofuel production is certainly one of the culprits in the current global food crisis. But while the diversion of corn from food to biofuel feedstock has been a factor in food prices shooting up, the more primordial problem has been the conversion of economies that are largely food-self-sufficient into chronic food importers. Here the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) figure as much more important villains. Read (...) read

Manufacturing a food crisis

> The Nation

When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by (...) read

Love, Lies, Wolfowitz, and the World Bank

> The Zeleza Post

The unfolding corruption scandal of the World Bank President, Paul D. Wolfwitz, is an intriguing and entangled tale of love: the personal love life of Mr. Wolfowitz himself, the current love affair between neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism, and the long-standing marriage between capitalism and corruption, the development industry and the military-industrial complex, and the Northern-dominated international financial institutions and the institutionalization of dependency and poverty in (...) read