World Bank President to visit Dublin

national | anti-capitalism | news report

Saturday January 15, 2005 12:59

by Terry - NUIG Ecology Society/Anarcist Federation/Organise

James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, immortalised in anarcho riot porn classic Crowd Bites Wolf, is due to be in Dublin at the end of the month.

According to a source within the World Council of Churches James Wolfensohn president of the World Bank is soon to be in Dublin Castle for a top level meeting with religious leaders. The World Council of Churches is an ecumenical movement embracing Orthodox and Protestant churches, and has, over the last three years, been engaged in a dialogue with the World Bank and International Monetary Federation (I.M.F.), around the theme of ‘faith and development’.

According to the source other attendees at the meeting include the Most Rev. Diarmuid Martin, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Lord Carey of Clifton, former head of the Church of England, and Rev. Dr. Sam Kobia, general secretary of the World Council of Churches. The alleged meeting takes place on the 31st of January and the 1st of February, with a pre-conference reception in the Shelbourne hotel on the evening of the 30th. This reception takes place at 6.30pm

Both the World Bank and International Monetary Federation have come across sustained condemnation in recent years. Criticism of the World Bank for funding environmentally and socially destructive projects such as the Narmada dams in India. Dams which are to displace millions and have encountered massive opposition from the local population, criticism is also directed at the World Bank and the I.M.F. for their ‘structural adjustment policies’ which are imposed on indebted states.

Structural Adjustment Policies, or SAPs, seek to deflate domestic demand and hence promote exports to earn hard currencies to pay debts. SAPs also divert public spending away from social purposes to debt payment.
These are imposed by the I.M.F. and the World Bank both as means of paying off loans, and as conditions on new loans, this possible as without the green-light from these institutions a state will be much less likely to receive loans from elsewhere or to receive foreign investment.
The privatisation of public services is a key part of structural adjustment.
Water service privatisation has been a recent I.M.F./World Bank imposition in a number of African states, leading to a situation where, according to the Integrated Social Development Centre of Ghana, “Water has increasingly become a commodity in Ghana – a commodity that many people in both urban and rural areas cannot afford on a regular basis.”. This is the context where according to the World Health Organisation 2 million people die annually from diseases associated with poor water supply.

The continuing series of conferences with religious leaders is perhaps best seen as a public relations response to this image problem. Certainly the World Bank in particular has changed it language and worked to improve its appearance to a considerable extent recently.
In Ireland for instance it currently works with campus based charity Suas.

The N.G.O. World Development Movement has documented widespread civil unrest against World Bank and I.M.F. policies in the “developing world”.

In the North these institutions have been the target of globalisation protests, most notably in Prague in 2000 where street battles saw a major I.M.F./World Bank conference cut short, and in Barcelona where in 2001 the mere announcement of planned demonstrations caused the cancelling of a World Bank summit.
As recently as November 2004 a World Bank consultation meeting in Berlin was shelved due to planned protests by environmental groups, most likely in view of all this, and in view of similar events in Ireland, the meeting in Dublin has thus far been unpublicised, with seemingly no mention of it on the World Bank or World Council of Churches websites.
Similarly Dublin Castle and church organisations in Ireland are not offering any information on the meeting, having apparently not heard of it.
This apparent secrecy is best seen in the context of the actions last June at the E.U.-U.S. summit in Clare, and in Dublin on Mayday, as well as protests during more minor events such as the ‘less lethal’ weapons conference at the Berkeley Court Hotel last October, or the E.U. education ministers meeting in Dublin Castle last March.
However the Shelbourne Hotel confirms that the Irish wing of the World Council of Churches has booked rooms for a reception there on the evening of January 30th.