Multilateral Banks

The International Monetary Fund has retracted criticism of Brazil's anti-poverty plan in the wake of national indignation and calls for IMF representative Lorenzo Perez to be kicked out of the country. Read More

Activist groups that paralyzed downtown Seattle during the World Trade Organization conference late last year plan to converge on Washington in April to protest a joint meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Read More

This is not merely about whether the dam should be constructed or not. It is about condoning state inaction and then blaming the victim. Read More

Every year the World Bank and its regional counterparts such as the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, collectively known as Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), lend $45 billion to the so-called ''developing'' world. Read More

Tanzania, a country twice the size of California, is located in East Africa, just south of Kenya. Last year I was there for 3 months researching the impact of World Bank and IMF economic policies on the country's small farmers who make up the overwhelming majority of the population. Recently, Tanzania overtook South Africa to become Africa's third biggest producer of tobacco, after Zimbabwe and Malawi. Read More

Anti-tobacco campaigners argue that profitable alternatives to tobacco exist but have received little attention. Through their development aid programmes, industrialised countries have helped developing countries to increase their output of tobacco, rather than help them switch to suitable alternatives. Through the imposition of structural adjustment programmes, the World Bank has encouraged governments to support farmers who grow crops for export. While the Bank no longer lends directly to tobacco production projects, its adjustment policies have encouraged additional output. Read More