The Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN) and the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) Philippines join various peoples’ movements today in a Global Day of Action against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which are holding their Annual Meetings in Bangkok, Thailand, from October 12 to 16.
At a protest march this morning from España Boulevard to Mendiola bridge, BAYAN led various groups in airing the call to shut down these U.S.-controlled multilateral institutions for the oppression they have wrought upon the world’s peoples, especially in poor countries, for the past 81 years.
Contrary to the meeting’s theme, “Thailand’s New Horizons: Empowering People, Building Resilience,” the IMF-World Bank has systematically disempowered the people through their conditional lending and policy impositions that favor creditors, corporations, and powerful economies. Their lending programs and structural adjustment policies have pressed governments to open markets, deregulate industries, privatize public services, implement austerity measures, and restrain public spending, thereby facilitating plunder by private monopoly capital. The only type of resilience that these institutions build is the capacity of people to bear the impacts of their blatantly oppressive programs and policies.
In the Philippines, the IMF-World Bank helped entrench the liberalization of agriculture and food, deregulation of the oil industry, privatization of water and electricity, and imposition of the highly regressive value-added tax (VAT). These measures have left farmers unduly exposed to unbridled import competition, families vulnerable to rising fuel and food prices, and the general public paying more for essential products and services. They even shape our labor and education programs to create a cheap and docile workforce at the expense of workers’ families and the country’s development requirements.
The IMF-WB’s economic development model treats people’s vital needs as costs to be contained and public assets as opportunities for private profit. It weakens local production, deepens dependence on imported goods and foreign capital, and gives corporations greater access to the country’s land, energy, infrastructure, and other resources. The costs fall on workers facing insecure jobs and low wages, farmers and fisherfolk losing markets and livelihoods, and poor communities struggling to afford food, water, electricity, health care, education, and other basic services. Additionally, many of the initiatives that the IMF-World Bank funds also cause displacement, such as massive infrastructure projects like mega dams and power plants.
The IMF-World Bank also plays a role in human rights violations. Development finance from these institutions complements the government’s counter-insurgency efforts that target civilian communities that resist their anti-people programs and projects. Such militarization of development initiatives is evident in World Bank projects like the Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan-Comprehensive and Integrated Delivery of Social Services (KALAHI-CIDSS), a supposed poverty reduction scheme used in the government’s counter-insurgency strategy.
We should shut down the IMF and World Bank as instruments of imperialist economic control and domination, cancel illegitimate debts, end oppressive loan conditionalities and austerity programs, stop the use of development programs to legitimize displacement and counterinsurgency, and bring back our resources under democratic control.
The world needs international cooperation that respects self-determination and sovereignty, provides resources without imposing harsh neoliberal conditions, supports public services and local livelihoods, and puts the people’s rights and welfare ahead of profit. Such cooperation means that the government must be accountable to the peoples affected by its decisions and not dominated by the agenda of an imperialist power.