How the World Bank Makes Everything Worse
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After reviewing classified World Bank documents, Raj Patel concluded that a loan from this organization is more of a punch to the face than a help to poor nations.
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Raj Patel:
Raj Patel has worked for the World Bank and WTO and been tear-gassed on four continents protesting against them. Writer, activist, and academic, he is currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Centre for African Studies, a researcher at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Question: What causes hunger today?
Raj Patel: So this goes back to the question of root causes. I’m very keen to, as I say, to learn about ways in which we can address the root causes of poverty. And when I was a graduate student, I was offered the opportunity to intern for and work for the World Bank. And I was given the opportunity to examine a range of classified World Bank documents to see how the World Bank was talking about poverty, about the ways that it was tackling the poor. And I thought, I’ll do that. Classified documents, insight into one of the world’s largest organizations designed to tackle poverty. I’ll do that.
Now it turns out that the examination of these documents wasn’t going to be a critical examination of these documents. Instead it turned out that those documents were used to create, basically, a sort of puff piece called “Voices of the Poor, Can Anyone Hear Us?” Now, it’s important to get a sense of what the World Bank does and how it operates. If you don’t know anything about the World Bank, I have a small contribution to the world of pedagogy and it relies on a metaphor that comes from the Terry Gilliam film, “Time Bandits.” Now, if you don’t know about “Time Bandits,” “Time Bandits” is a film about disgruntled former employees of God. Now the story is that God built the world in six days, so it was a rush job and God couldn’t do it by himself, he had help. But he treats his labor very badly, and so they run off with a map of the universe with its imperfections and they use the holes in the universe to rob people. So, in one scene, they rob Napoleon and they jump through a hole in time with all of Napoleon’s stuff and they end up in Sherwood Forest where they are met by Robin Hood, who is played by John Cleese as a sort of upper class twit. He’s wearing a sort of bright green hat and he calls himself “Hood.” And Hood’s very excited by all of Napoleon’s stuff and he says, “This is tremendous. Thank you very much indeed. The poor will love this. Have you met the poor? They’re charming people, of course they don’t have too pennies to rub together but that ‘s because they’re poor.” And there’s a scene where Napoleon’s stuff is given away to the poor. And Hood works the line and he’s gilded, and he says, “How long have you been poor? Jolly good. Congratulations. Here, rubies for you.” And right next to him is this big hulking bloke who takes whatever Hood has given and punches the poor person in the face.
So, that’s kind of how the World Bank works. It’s in the business of making these large loans, but it is also a bank so it takes those loans back. And the punch in the face comes from the policies that this organization imposes on developing countries. Policies that have, for example in agriculture, have led to decimation in agriculture in say, Africa. It’s not me making this assessment, in fact, the World Bank a couple of years admitted that its policies have been a disaster in Sub-Saharan Africa. I say all of this because there is this sort of need within the World Bank to have reassurance that what it’s doing is right. A moment of saying, “Well, some of our best friends are poor people, have you met the poor? We had lunch with them yesterday, they love us.” And that’s what I ended up doing. My job was to be part of a research team looking at these research reports on poverty. And the reports that we wrote - the voices of the poor “Can Anyone Hear Us?” was basically a long way for the World Bank to say, “Well have you me - we had lunch with the poor, they love us.”
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