| Business |
World Bank hypocrisy on display
A WORLD Bank media release says
its newly appointed president, Robert B. Zoellick, will make his
first official trip overseas when he visits the Asia Pacific from
July 30-Aug 9. It suggests he will have only three ports of call –
Australia, Cambodia and Vietnam. He will be in Australia for the
Asia Pacific finance ministers conference so, the release says, he
can gain insights from officials across the Asia Pacific.
The release makes no mention of any individual developing Pacific
Island nation but it appears his agenda will include discussions
with Australian treasury and AusAID officials “to identify
opportunities for stronger cooperation, particularly in helping
Pacific states address their unique development challenges”.
It seems at odd with current day realities that the newly
appointed American head of the World Bank would adopt the stance
of a colonialist in that organisation’s relations with Papua New
Guinea and other Pacific Island nations.
Because Australia provides significant amount of aid to Pacific
Island nations it certainly does not mean that the knowledge and
wisdom regarding the region’s “unique development challenges”, as
the World Bank puts it, resides purely in the corridors of power
in Canberra.
Many Papua New Guinean leaders would find it somewhat insulting
that Zoellick is about to hold discussions with Australian
bureaucrats that will determine his, and the World Bank’s,
attitude towards this country.
The visit nevertheless comes at an important juncture in this
country’s history. For the first time since independence 32 years
ago, PNG has seen its latest government last its full term in
office. Also for the first time the incumbent National Alliance
appears set to get the mandate to form the new government.
PNG will have some serious thinking to do about its relationship
with the World Bank. Despite its inability to come up with
sensible long-term strategies and programmes for Pacific Island
nations generally, and PNG in particular, the executive board of
the World Bank two years ago endorsed an interim strategy for PNG.
Under this strategy the Bank put a stop to direct loans for
projects the government wished to undertake and involved itself in
analysis and capacity building projects, which in reality has been
a do-nothing policy notwithstanding two recent loans under
auspices of the International Development Agency.
The Bank does have similar interim strategies for various other
countries but it appears there is only one other country,
Zimbabwe, that suffers the same fate of not being able to access
World Bank loans.
The Bank has raised a variety of reasons for this stance,
including cancellation of its ideologically-based Forest &
Conservation Programme, claims of a lack of cooperation on issues
of governance and Australia’s erstwhile Enhanced Cooperation
Programme. The latter was on the premise that an Australian police
presence in PNG, that has long since been abandoned, “has altered
the aid paradigm” as the Bank put it.
It claimed “chronic political stability” in PNG had made sustained
dialogue difficult with the government on the development reform
agenda or a common development assistance framework with
development partners. This stupid statement is an indication of
the Bank’s intransigent attitude towards PNG, because as we are
aware the Bank is able to have a sustained dialogue with war-torn
nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
There appears to be no respect for the massive task facing
successive PNG governments of trying to forge a cohesive nation
out of a population made up, as they say, of a thousand tribes and
exemplified by some 820 different languages. Some political
scientists describe this country as “a persevering third world
democracy”.
The Bank, though, does acknowledge poverty and unemployment have
been rising over the years but for the last two years, arguably
with the most stable government PNG has ever seen, it has refused
to become engaged in government-led economic programmes.
It is easy from this perspective to understand why Zoellick is
skirting the Pacific to only visit Vietnam and Cambodia, two of
Asia’s communist countries that have adopted western style free
market economies and made rapid economic progress in recent years.
Ironically, both countries would have been successful in their
endeavours with or without the World Bank.
But, of course, it would be nice to bask in the glory of their
recent successes than take a trip down memory lane to Indonesia,
where World Bank policies had a rather notorious and nasty impact
in the aftermath of Asia’s 1997 economic crisis.
 
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