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2 articles taken from Radical Economics (Newsletter of the New Economics Foundation�www.neweconomics.org ).

1) Taking on the IMF & the World Bank all at the same time

Ann Pettifor

"It happened in Monterrey", goes the song�and when a team from the New Economics Foundation took on the decision-makers of world finance there, it did.� Ann Pettifor reports.

Sadly, old Mexico is not quite what it was when Paul Whiteman's song conjured up romance, stars and steel guitars� long time ago.� But it was here, at the UN's Financing for Development Conference, held in this vast, sprawling, impoverished maquilador, just two hours from the US border, that NEF's Jubilee Research team took on the leaders of the EU, the IMF and the World Bank.

We also, I hope, offered a new radical framework for financing development, and for easing the crisis in Argentina.�

The setting ws the first ever United Nations' Round Table of discussants, with heads of state, leaders of the IMF and World Bank, the UN, the EU�and representatives from civil society.� Prime Minister Aznar, representing EU leaders, was at the table.� So was President Obasanjo of Nigeria and Prime Minister Verhofstadt of Belgium, Jim Wolfensohn of the World Bank, Eduardo Aninat�number 2 at the IMF and an ex-Chilean finance minister�and Foreign Ministers from a range of countries. Michel Camdessus, ex-chief of the IMF, represented the Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan.

Before the meeting started, copies of Jubilee Research/NEF publications�in English, Spanish and French�were placed on every chair, and as the meeting slowly assembled, they were eagerly taken up by the leaders, ministers and their advisers (see further article below about NEF's new Jubilee Research report entitled "The US as an HIPC [Heavily Indebted Prosperous Country]: How the Poor are financing the Rich").

Michel Camdessus began the meeting by arguing that "partnership (between countries, north and south) is not enough; nor is mutual support. There also has to be mutual accountability". This gave me my cue to argue that there should be greater accountability to poor developing countries for the mistakes made by powerful international institutions, dominated by G7 leaders. I drew attention to the crisis in Argentina, and argued that the IMF's role and advice had helped precipitate the crisis�by bolstering an unsustainable

multinational companies control over the foodchain, leaving their people still more vulnerable to hunger. But the US, seizing the opportunity for its biotech firms, told them that they must either accept this consignment or starve.

Malawi has also been obliged to take GM maize from the US, partly because of the loss of its own strategic grain reserve. In 1999, the IMF and the European Union instructed Malawi to privatise the reserve.

The private body was not capitalised, so it had to borrow from commercial banks to buy grain. Predictably enough, by 2001 it found that it couldn't service its debt. The IMF told it to sell most of the reserve.

The private body sold it all, and Malawi ran out of stored grain just as its crops failed. The IMF, having learnt nothing from this catastrophe, continues to prevent that country from helping its farmers, subsidising food or stabilising prices.

The same agency also forces weak nations to open their borders to subsidised food from abroad, destroying their own farming industries. Perhaps most importantly, it prevents state spending on land reform.

Land distribution is the key determinant of food security. Small farms are up to 10 times as productive as large ones, as they tend to be cultivated more intensively. Small farmers are more likely to supply local people with staple crops than western supermarkets with mangetout.

The governments of the rich world don't like land reform. It requires state intervention, which offends the god of free markets, and it hurts big farmers and the companies that supply them. Indeed, it was Britain's refusal either to permit or to fund an adequate reform programme in Zimbabwe that created the political opportunities Mugabe has so ruthlessly exploited. The Lancaster House agreement gave the state to the black population but the nation to the whites. Mugabe manipulates the genuine frustrations of a dispossessed people.

The president of Zimbabwe is a very minor devil in the hellish politics of land and food. The sainted Nelson Mandela has arguably done just as much harm to the people of Africa, by surrendering his powers to the IMF as soon as he had wrested them from apartheid.

Let us condemn Mugabe's attacks upon Zimbabwe's whites by all means, but only if we are also prepared to condemn the far bloodier war that the rich world wages against the poor.

www.monbiot.com

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