How Badly Can the 'Experts' Ruin the Planet?

By Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, AlterNet. Posted October 10, 2008.

Remember the World Bank, that global "development" institution based in Washington, D.C., that dispenses billions of dollars a year to poorer nations with the declared intent of ending global poverty? We -- and many of you -- spent decades protesting the World Bank and documenting the bank's projects and policies that exacerbated economic, social and environmental problems. In the United States, thousands of protesters took to the streets in the years prior to 9/11 to condemn the financial behemoth. Across the Third World, where the impacts of World Bank lending are felt on the ground every day, such protests began even earlier.

This weekend, World Bank President Robert Zoellick will use the occasion of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's annual meetings in Washington, D.C., to announce that critics like us were oh so wrong and that we should look to the World Bank to play a key role in solving the world's food, climate, poverty and other crises. Were we indeed wrong? Could millions of our allies in developing countries, including so-called beneficiaries of the development mega-agency, have possibly been so wrong? Is it a time for a mea culpa? Having taken a close look at the World Bank past and present in our recently published book, Development Redefined: How the Market Met Its Match, we'd say it's not. But in the great tradition established by David Letterman, we now offer 10 reasons why we progressives can stop our worrying about poverty, food and climate crises and leave such problems to the World Bank:

10. The U.S. government chooses the World Bank president and has a superb track record in picking great ones, like war architects Robert McNamara and Paul Wolfowitz.

Remember Paul Wolfowitz, the first president tapped by George W. Bush for the top World Bank job? Wolfowitz had demonstrated his smarts at the Pentagon by launching "shock and awe" on Iraq. We all know how well that went. At the World Bank, he proved so good at steering six-figure salaries to his friends and girlfriend that he got an early retirement. And Wolfowitz was simply following the footsteps of the World Bank's most famous president, Robert McNamara, a former secretary of Defense who likewise paved his way to the presidency by waging war on a poor nation, in his case Vietnam.

9. The current World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, also knows how to get the job done, as demonstrated by his key role in helping George Bush steal Florida in the 2000 election.

A high-priced lawyer in the Bush campaign in 2000, Zoellick was dispatched by the Republican Party to Florida to help sort out hanging chads and butterfly ballots in W's favor. He was a crucial figure in prolonging the negotiations over who won the state until the Supreme Court could hand the presidency to George Bush. Zoellick subsequently was appointed as Bush's trade representative and helped ensure the demise of the World Trade Organization's so-called "Development Round" by pushing a U.S. agenda that had everything to do with advancing corporate interests rather than those of the marginalized and dispossessed.

8. The World Bank has proven expertise on one of today's major challenges: climate change. After all, it spent billions of dollars helping countries increase their emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

When the Institute for Policy Studies started monitoring World Bank greenhouse gas emissions in 1997, the Bank was investing roughly 100 times more in fossil fuel energy projects than in clean energy. Tens of billions of dollars of dirty energy lending later, the Bank certainly has demonstrated its ability to contribute to climate chaos. As to its willingness to change course? Well, when an expert outside panel chosen by the World Bank to look into the impact of its fossil fuel lending counseled it to end its oil, gas and coal lending, Bank management simply said: thanks, but no thanks.

7. Likewise, on food, the Bank has tons of expertise -- going back to the "green revolution" of the 1960s -- pushing agricultural "development" models that hooked farmers on costly petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides.

Such agricultural "modernization" proved a boon for those (including giant export-oriented agribusiness firms) who could afford the inputs, while small farmers lost their land or went bankrupt. (Inequality increased. And, as for the environment, well ...) Many politicians are now calling for a second "green revolution" as food prices rise around the globe and are looking to the World Bank to stand center-stage in such an initiative. Why spend time learning the lessons from a first "green revolution" gone wrong when the World Bank stands ready to repeat the mistakes?

6. For those who worry that the World Bank is increasing the divide between rich and poor through unfettered "free trade," have no fear: The World Bank has embraced what Zoellick calls "inclusive globalization."

Here, Zoellick is onto a truth of some sorts. If you really get down to the basics, over the course of its history, the World Bank has been all about "inclusive globalization." For example, over the past two decades, the economic-globalization free-market model it pushed on its borrowing countries has propelled the total number of billionaires in the world from around 100 to 1,125, with a far more inclusive group of countries being home to the billionaires today. So too does the World Bank now acknowledge that its math was wrong and the number of people living in poverty today is actually much higher than the Bank's prior calculations asserted. In other words, "inclusive globalization" has helped create a larger, more inclusive class of poor people. Way to go, World Bank.

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Robin Broad is a professor of international development at American University in Washington, D.C. John Cavanagh directs the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies. They are co-authors of Development Redefined: How the Market Met its Match (Paradigm Publishers), which travels through the past 30 years of World Bank lending and policies to discover just how right its critics were.