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Uniting Food, Farm and Hotel Workers World-Wide
Iraq and the World Bank: the Looting Continues
Posted to the IUF website 24-Oct-2003Share this article.
The periodic rumors of fundamental policy change at the World Bank have again proved to be premature. Those in search of evidence for a kinder, gentler World Bank should check out the United Nations/World Bank Joint Iraq Needs Assessment recently published by the Bank and available on their website (www.worldbank.org).
The study was written for the international donor conference held in Madrid October 23-24. It aims to identify key reconstruction needs by sector and encourage "appropriate" investment and macroeconomic policies.
Those familiar with the Bank's history and overall approach will find no surprises here. The section on food and agriculture is a case in point. In a country ravaged by malnutrition and unemployment, agriculture (which normally employs over 20 percent of the workforce) receives a scant three pages (oil receives no pages - that dossier has already been dealt with). The Bank's "Key Policy and Institutional Issues" are summarized as follows:
Given the right support and policy environment, Iraq's agriculture sector could contribute significantly to economic growth and job creation�With well-paced economic liberalization and open markets, it is very likely to contribute significantly to the country's income, food security, and poverty reduction. The current minister has taken the first steps by pricing fertilizer for the winter crops of wheat and barley at higher values than last year, but at the same time recommended that crop prices be closer [i.e. higher] to the border prices, signaling that the market will, over time, be the main driver in agriculture. He will also be beginning wide ranging consultations on policies for the reduction of food subsidies".
The study is padded out with references to social safety nets, but the mechanisms are never spelled out. That there should be no confusion on the key food policy issues, the section on "Immediate Needs - 2004" calls for "immediate" work on "policy and institutional reform options including "increased role for the private sector, competitive production, [and] phasing out subsidies." Moving on to "Medium-Term Priorities" through 2007, the goal is an agricultural sector "characterized by dominant private sector operations under free market conditions."
The reader will search in vain for any insight into the structures of ownership, employment, inputs or marketing in Iraqi agriculture. For the authors, it is simply irrelevant who owns the land or how it is worked, who is hungry and who is not. Anytime, anywhere, the policy prescriptions are the same: prices must be freed and food subsidies eliminated. The World Bank has always strenuously denied that it pursues a one-size-fits-all, cookie cutter approach to policy. However, the agricultural section of the report concludes that "Many of the priorities for the agriculture sector are picked up in other sector recommendations including land management, employment creation and investment climate."
If this looks familiar, it's because we've seen it all before. World Bank prescriptions for agriculture have failed spectacularly wherever they have been applied. The Bank alone is not exclusively responsible, but there is more, not less, food insecurity in the world today after decades of "free market" nostrums in agriculture. Applied in Iraq, they will bring hunger and violence, not democracy and development. The "shock and awe" promised by the US military is now being programmed for the country's food sector.
Whose needs are being addressed by this investor's manual posing as a "needs assessment"? Investment was supposed to bring jobs to the more than 7 million unemployed Iraqis. But US companies are importing migrant workers to "reconstruct" Iraq. Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, US Vice-President Cheney's former company, has contracted the catering for US soldiers to the Saudi-based Tamimi Company. Tamimi employs 1,800 South Asian workers to prepare and serve meals. According to the Financial Times, it has a "few dozen" Iraqis as�cleaning staff. Workers are paid the equivalent of 3 dollars a day, and granted leave once every two years. According to a Tamimi manager, the company can't employ Iraqis because they are a "security threat".
Iraq was systematically looted under decades of Baath party dictatorship. Now a new round of systematic institutional looting is being prepared. Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer's Order 39, issued in September, gives foreign investors the unrestricted right to repatriate profits and other forms of earnings, immediately and in full, while abolishing all restrictions on foreign ownership outside the energy sector
An international reconstruction fund has been established under the aegis of the UN and the World Bank to encourage investment in Iraq by governments who wish to be seen as independent of US and UK policy. International oversight is supposed to provide increased transparency. The World Bank "Needs Assessment" for Iraq inspires little confidence that the benefits will accrue to the Iraqi people. The US congress has begun investigations into reports of rigged contract bidding and profit gouging by the Defense Department crony corporations that were the first to get their foot in the door. It's time to bring the World Bank's policies in Iraq into the full light of day if a new round of looting is to be prevented.