10 December 2008
Free market policies as part of the Structural Adjustment Programs that the World Bank attached to their aid throughout the 1980s are partially to blame for increased world hunger.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has said that there are 40 million more undernourished people in the world in 2008, relative to 2007, raising the total figure of the world’s hungry to 963 million. Many have argued that it is the World Bank’s free market policies that are largely to blame for this increase.
In El Salvador for example, as part of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), the Bank told leaders to privatize grain storage, import staples such as corn and rice, and export crops including cocoa, coffee and palm oil. But bringing a poor nation like El Salvador into global grain markets, where prices have surged, have left a population of Salvadorians unable to afford these high prices, and farmers unable to sell their crops. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute argues that very poor countries need to be brought up above the survival threshold before being brought into the international free market.
While farmers in several developing countries were hurt by World Bank-imposed agricultural policies that made it impossible for them to compete with the international market, World Bank officials have consistently rejected the assertion that structural adjustment loans hurt developing nations’ self-sufficiency.
Though Bank President Robert Zoellick has promised to double agriculture spending, he continues to tout free trade as a solution to rising food prices. Meanwhile, countries remained skeptical of open markets during the latest round of World Trade talks in Geneva, in July. They insisted that they be allowed to raise tariffs to protect domestic agriculture, stalling the negotiations.
source:
World Bank’s ‘Wrong Advice’ Left Silos Empty in Poor Countries, by Alison Fitzgerald and Helen Murphy, December 10, 2008 (Bloomberg)
related articles:
Number of hungry people rises to 963 million, December 9, 2008 (FAO website)