27 November 2007
The World Bank touted it's meeting with a delegation of Pygmies from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during the Bank's Annual Meetings in October. But as Simon Counsell of Rainforest Foundation UK points out, the Bank has consistently ignored the findings of the quasi-independent Inspecition Panel and violated its own "safeguard policies."
Reprinted here in full
Comment: Try as it might, the World Bank cannot hide its failings
by Simon Counsell
The Guardian
Wednesday November 21 2007
Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, has a strange way of showing he cares about the protection of the environment and the world's indigenous people. Just days after he declared these issues were top priorities for the bank, I and a delegation of Congolese Pygmies went to Washington ahead of the bank's annual meeting. We were armed with a leaked copy of a damning report of the bank's activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
We were hopeful we could persuade Zoellick that the time had come for a radical new approach to rainforest management in DRC. Surely, we thought, he would have to recognise that things needed to change in the light of a homegrown and detailed expert review that had cited catastrophic failings on the bank's behalf?
The report - produced by the World Bank's internal watchdog, the Inspection Panel - was devastating. It listed an astonishing catalogue of failures, including the fact that, by exaggerating the potential value of timber to the country's economy, the bank had encouraged the Congolese government to hand vast areas of rainforest to logging companies, which risked destroying much of the Pygmies' homelands.
Zoellick's organisation had, it said, broken or ignored most of its own "safeguard" policies intended to prevent harm to the planet, wasting tens of millions of aid dollars in the process.
But when asked to respond to the panel's findings, Zoellick recited a list of "positive" things that, he claimed, the bank had been doing to protect Congo's forests. The problem was, he was wrong on many counts. He said the bank had "always worked to protect forest peoples' rights", but the panel had found that the bank had completely overlooked the presence of Pygmies in Congo's forests.
The next day, we met the bank's Africa vice-president, Obiagele Ezekwesili, along with a dozen of her advisers. But the meeting quickly descended into chaos as bank staff made increasingly inconsistent and inaccurate claims. For example, they suggested the bank had had nothing to do with Congo's new pro-logging forestry laws, when the development of these very laws was identified as an outcome of a bank project.
If this meeting had been a chance of "speaking Truth to Power", here was Power bellowing straight back into Truth's face. And all the while, the Inspection Panel's 133-page indictment of the bank lay on the boardroom table, eliciting no comment.
This encounter ended with a commitment by the bank to "hold discussions" with Congo's Pygmies in the future, but the bank has subsequently managed to turn even this new opportunity into a conflict. When one of our delegation returned to the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, he organised an informal discussion with the local bank staff but, along with other Pygmy spokespeople, they abandoned it when they realised the bank was secretly video-recording the meeting.
The UK government, which is one of the World Bank's most generous donors, might like to reflect on this when Zoellick comes begging for more British aid money to replenish the bank's coffers.
Simon Counsell is director of the Rainforest Foundation UK
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