On one side of Addis Ababa is the ethnic Amhara FANO (patriot) fighters. On the other side of Addis Ababa is the Oromo rebels. Being that these two ethnic groups, nations really, are the two largest in Ethiopia you can get an idea of just how desperate the situation the gangster regime of Abiy Ahmed finds itself in.

Inflation is raging with electricity rates having just doubled with food shortages, runaway prices and corruption ruling the roost.

Its not a good time to get seriously sick in Ethiopia because all the doctors have gone on strike demanding enough salaries to survive on. 165 of the top doctors in the country have been arrested with dozens of the top leadership of the medical profession having had to skip town, one jump ahead of the secret police, many taking refuge in next door Eritrea.

All the teachers have also gone on strike, demanding wages that some of them have never received, ever. That’s right, the gangsters who are running what’s left of the Ethiopian government, stopped paying the teachers quite a while back with new hires having never been paid.

Owing billion$ and with little in the way of foreign currency earnings (coffee is he number one income generator) the Abiy gangster regime can’t pay its bills, all too typical of Ethiopia over the decades since 1991. The western banksters at the IMF just promised another “emergency loan” for $260 million, adding on to the many billion$ already owed.

The banksters in the west are talking about having to hold another conference on “debt reduction for Africa” knowing all to well just how impossible it is for those African countries still in their debt bondage to make even their interest payments. As in the past, Ethiopia “debt reduction” is at the top of the forgiveness list, bailing out, once again, their gangster on the beat.

These financial bloodsuckers have been borrowing from their central banks for almost 20 years at little more than 0% interest while making tens of billion$ of “high risk loans” to Ethiopia at interest rates of 7-8% so its hard to feel sorry for them if they have to write of a few billion$ after deducting their “losses” from their tax bill.

The only thing keeping the Abiy regime afloat, able to continue to stave off the growing rebel army’s surrounding it, is the military largess of the United Arab Emirates, whose supply of Chinese drones and bombers leave a trail of death and destruction. But even these, mostly used against civilians, have been unable to stem the tide of rebellion and the circle around Addis Ababa continues to tighten.

You could be excused for being a little doubtful about what I write for almost none of this is making its way into the MSM in the west, or internationally. Hey, its the Horn of Africa, right, about which the world has grown weary of tales of famine, plagues and bloodshed. Even the so called “alternative” media has had little coverage of how things are falling apart in Ethiopia.

So don’t be surprised when, not if, the western backed gangster regime of Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed collapses. It could be a lot sooner than most of us expect.

What comes next looks more and more like the original Abyssinian Empire, only renamed “Ethiopia” in the mid-20th century, will tear itself apart into new African nations with names like Oromia, Amhara, Tigray, Afar and several others. We are talking about 120 million people in today’s Ethiopian empire, with the Oromo’s, 50+million strong, Africa’s largest nation and second largest language, being a major part of these changes.

At the forefront of this revolution against Africa’s largest indigenous empire are the Amharas and their army of “FANO/Patriots”, who have recently combined their regional militias as well as their political leadership into one unified force. Amhara nationalism has become so strong the Ethiopian army has stopped training Amhara units because once they have completed their military training they desert en masse with their weapons, slipping of to join the growing FANO armed forces.

The one bright light in this darkness is the role what I have called “the oasis of Africa”, Eritrea, has and will be playing in helping advise and mediate the perils to come. As the saying goes “All roads to peace in the Horn of Africa run through Asmara, Eritrea”, once again. Eritrea will do its duty to its fellow Horn of Africans and continue to shoulder its responsibilities to establish a peace based on mutual respect and cooperation between people in this up to now blighted part of the world. One thing the west doesn’t want is a strong, united, independent Horn of Africa, a strategically critical part of the world. So don’t be surprised when Eritrea starts to bring order to all this chaos the banksters in the west and their minions in the media start to rant and rave, once again spewing vile lies and slanders about Eritrea and trying to make sure that no good deed in Africa goes unpunished.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Thomas C. Mountain.

Three staffers from Papua New Guinea’s peak anti-corruption body are embroiled in a standoff that has brought into question the integrity of the organisation.

Police Commissioner David Manning has confirmed that he received a formal complaint.

Commissioner Manning said that initial inquiries were underway to inform the “sensitive investigation board’s” consideration of the referral.

• READ MORE: Other ICAC reports

That board itself is controversial, having been set up as a halfway point to decide if an investigation into a subject should proceed through the usual justice process.

Manning indicated if the board determined a criminal offence had occurred, the matter would be assigned to the National Fraud and Anti-Corruption Directorate for independent investigation.

Local news media reported PNG Prime Minister James Marape was being kept informed of the developments.

Marape has issued a statement acknowledging the internal tensions within ICAC and reaffirming his government’s commitment to the institution.

Long-standing goal
The establishment of ICAC in Papua New Guinea has been a long-standing national aspiration, dating back to 1984. The enabling legislation for ICAC was passed on 20 November 2020, bringing the body into legal existence.

Marape said it was a proud moment of his leadership having achieved this in just 18 months after he took office in May 2019.

The appointments process for ICAC officials was described as rigorous and internationally supervised, making the current internal disputes disheartening for many.

Marape has reacted strongly to the crisis, expressing disappointment over the allegations and differences between the three ICAC leaders. He affirmed his government’s “unwavering commitment” to ICAC.

These developments have significant implications for Papua New Guinea, particularly concerning its international commitments related to combating financial crime.

PNG has been working to address deficiencies in its anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) framework, with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) closely monitoring its progress.

Crucial for fighting corruption
An effective and credible ICAC is crucial for demonstrating the country’s commitment to fighting corruption, a key component of a robust AML/CTF regime.

Furthermore, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) often includes governance and anti-corruption measures as part of its conditionalities for financial assistance and programme support.

Any perception of instability or compromised integrity within ICAC could hinder Papua New Guinea’s efforts to meet these international requirements, potentially affecting its financial standing and access to crucial development funds.

The current situation lays bare the urgent need for swift and decisive action to restore confidence in ICAC and ensure it can effectively fulfill its mandate.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Several weeks ago, Michael Langley, the head of US Africa Command (or AFRICOM), testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and stated that Ibrahim Traoré, the current president of Burkina Faso, “is using the country’s gold reserves for personal protection rather than for the benefit of its people,” an absurd claim, considering that the US Department of Defense, which Langley works for, has stolen $1 trillion from US taxpayers in this year’s budget alone. What’s more, AFRICOM itself has a deadly, well-documented history of plundering the African continent, often in coordination with NATO.

Take a guess why Langley might want to delegitimize Traoré’s governance and the larger project of the Alliance of Sahel States/AES (made up of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, all of which have recently allied under a confederation after recent seizures of power). Any takers? Hint: the answer is natural resources and military presence. Traoré has nationalized Burkina Faso’s foreign-owned gold mines in an attempt to actually use the land’s resources to benefit its people. Similarly, upon taking power in Niger, the current president, Abdourahamane Tchiani, nationalized uranium and banned foreign exports. Notably, a quarter of Europe’s uranium, crucial for energy usage, comes from Niger. Considering Traoré’s crucial role in developing the identity of the AES as one of the more vocal and charismatic leaders, targeting Traoré is part of a larger project by the US/EU/NATO axis targeting the AES project at large. Recently, this new AES leadership has launched new green energy and educational initiatives. Meanwhile, the US has pulled out of the Sahel states as the AES asserts its sovereignty in defiance of decades of Western-backed instability.

Traore’s Burkina Faso is not the first Pan-African project to come under attack by the US/EU/NATO axis of power. Just as the vague claims from Langley serve to cast doubt on Traore’s ability to lead a nation, past Pan-African leaders who have dared to challenge imperialism and prioritize their citizens have also come under fire. For instance, former president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, was assassinated in 1987 after putting the Burkinabè people’s needs first by rejecting IMF loans and demands, implementing nationwide literacy and vaccine campaigns, and spearheading housing and agrarian reform. Time and again, France and the US have taken decisive action against leaders who have promoted Pan-Africanism and environmental stability over the interests of Western powers. We’re watching it happen live now, and have a responsibility to stand up for Traorè and the AES before it’s too late.

When a country doesn’t bend its knees to Washington, the standard US playbook is one of environmental death, either via hybrid or classic warfare. Venezuela has refused to grant US corporations unfettered access to its oil reserves – the world’s largest –  and thus has been forced to use them as a lifeline. The US has punished Venezuela by imposing unilateral sanctions that have prevented the proper maintenance of the country’s oil pipelines, resulting in harmful leaks. In the Congo–one of the lungs of the Earth–the West’s decades-long quest for uranium and other rare minerals has led to mass deforestation, destroyed water quality, and unleashed military forces that have killed millions. And of course, the US is backing the ecocide/genocide in Palestine in order to maintain the existence of a proxy-state in an oil-rich region.

When the US military – the #1 institutional polluter in the world – “intervenes”, the only environmental outcome is climate collapse. And even when countries play by Washington’s rules, the US will still militarize, build more toxic bases, seek continued extraction, and create mass poverty. For the survival of the people and planet, we must resist this imperial expansion.

Any movement concerned with transitioning from an extractive to a regenerative economy must stand against US and Western intervention in the Sahel and advocate for Pan-African projects and a multilateral world. The emergence of a multipolar world means that projects like the AES have partners beyond the region: during Traoré’s most recent visit to Moscow, he met with the heads of state of Russia, China, and Venezuela. The US, of course, threatened by the loss of its dominion, insists on pursuing a dangerous cold war against China, to contain China’s influence, refuses to cooperate on green technology, and plows through any region that it views as a battleground, be it the Asia-Pacific or the Sahel. And always at the expense of life in all forms.

So if we are in a project for life, why, then, are we often met with hesitation in climate spaces to stand against this imperialist extraction? We need to reflect on a few questions. Whose lives do we sacrifice for “strategy”? Which environmental sacrifice zones are we silent about because of the “bigger picture?” What extraction and militaristic build-up do we let happen to theoretically prevent planetary death that is already happening via our own government down the road? Are we avoiding building connections with popular movements because of donors who only fund dead ends? We have a choice to make: allow the doomsday clock threatening climate death and total catastrophe to keep ticking or reverse course and breathe life into something new.

Traorè’s historic meeting with China, Russia, and Venezuela is a glimpse of what’s on the horizon. As people of the world rise against imperialism and neocolonialism, it is up to us in the US climate movement to stand unequivocally in support of projects of self-determination.

Although our lifestyles will certainly look different once we no longer have uninhibited access to the gold, cobalt, uranium, and other resources that are routinely extracted from the African continent and its people, we must prioritize building a more just and healthy relationship with the planet and all its people. If leaders such as Traore succeed in revolutionizing agriculture and resource extraction at a sustainable pace that benefits workers, what might that signal for a new world order in which exploited Africans and their lands do not form the cheap material base for the world? What might we build in place of extractive economies to usher in a green future for all?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Aaron Kirshenbaum and Jasmine Butler.

He was addressing reporters after the 10th governing council meeting of the Niti Aayog, a government think tank. The theme for this meeting, Subrahmanyam said, was ‘Viksit Rajya for Viksit Bharat’ which meant states must present their own growth visions in order for India to be a developed economy.

“It is only US, China, Germany, which are larger than India and if we stick to what is being planned and what is being thought through, in 2.5-3 years, we will be the third largest economy,” he added.

Subrahmanyam’s statements created a wave of euphoria. On May 27, even Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the achievement, emphasising how India moved from being the 11th-ranked economy to the 4th-ranked economy during his tenure.

#WATCH | Gandhinagar: Prime Minister Narendra Modi says “On 26th May 2014, I took the oath as the Prime Minister for the first time. At that time, India’s economy was at the 11th position…Today, India has become the world’s fourth-largest economy. It is a matter of pride for… pic.twitter.com/OFNMPEKXvq

— ANI (@ANI) May 27, 2025

Some prominent personalities who reiterated Subrahmanyam’s claims on social media include Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan, Mahindra Group chairperson Anand Mahindra, RPG Group chairperson Harsh Goenka, tech entrepreneur Kunal Bahl who has appeared on Shark Tank India and Mamaearth CEO Ghazal Alagh. Several BJP leaders, or politicians associated with BJP allies and some journalists also parroted the statements, celebrating India’s growth trajectory. Note that most social media posts on this also shared a graphic where the source was IMF’s World Economic Outlook Report, April 2025.

Fact Check

Alt News first thoroughly looked at International Monetary Fund’s latest publication, the World Economic Outlook Report, that was released on on April 22, 2025. Nowhere in that report does it say that India is the fourth-largest economy or that it has surpassed Japan.

We also found no statistical chart in the 190-page report that ranked countries’ gross domestic product (GDP) as indicated in the social media posts. Note that GDP is the sum total of the value of goods and services produced by a country annually and is often used to refer to the size of an economy.

However, the World Economic Outlook (WEO) section allows downloading economic database by country. Alt News downloaded the database for gross domestic product (at current prices expressed in US dollars) for all countries. The excel sheet mentioned the countries alphabetically and gave us the GDP (in US$) for all countries between 2022 and 2029. However, for India, the GDP figures after 2024 were estimates.

Also, note that for India, the year 2025 refers to the financial year 2025-26 or FY26 (April 2025 to March 2026), for which GDP numbers are estimates because we’re barely two months into this financial year. It does not refer to the calendar year 2025 (January to December). This is clarified in the report and in the statistical index.

So, in 2024 or financial year 2024-25 (FY25), India’s GDP was $3.91 trillion, going by IMF’s World Economic Outlook data. According to the same IMF data, India is estimated to reach $4.187 trillion at the end of FY26.

We compared the data with Japan. Even for Japan, data after 2024 are all estimates. In the calendar year 2024, Japan’s GDP was $4.03 trillion. At the end of 2025, Japan’s GDP is estimated to reach $4.186 trillion.

A close reading of International Monetary Fund’s data clearly shows that India has not yet surpassed Japan, in terms of gross domestic product. According to estimates, it may overtake Japan at the end of financial year 2025-26 or FY26. Again, these are estimates and even then, the difference in the GDP of the two is fairly narrow. Currently, India remains in the fifth position

According to IMF’s WEO data, based on official GDP figures for 2024 (which we sorted in descending order; IMF gives data alphabetically), countries with the highest GDP are (1) the United States of America, (2) China, (3) Germany, (4) Japan, (5) India and the (6) United Kingdom (in that order). Rows 1-5 in the screenshot below are not rankings but appear on top owing to lack of data (denoted by n/a).

It’s strange then that Niti Aayog CEO Subrahmanyam, an Indian Administrative Service officer since 1987, who has served in several government positions, including at the PMO, and had a stint at the World Bank, used projections to refer to current rankings. We say this because other members of the policy think tank, such as Arvind Virmani, were careful to say that India would become the fourth-largest economy only by the end of 2025.

“India is in the process of becoming the fourth largest economy, and I am personally confident that will happen by the end of 2025 because we need (data) of all 12 months GDP to say that, you know, to assert that. So to say till then, it remains a forecast,” Virmani told news agency PTI. On Niti CEO BVR Subrahmanyam’s remark that India is already there, he said: “…I really do not know what the words anybody has used. Perhaps there was some word which was missed or something.”

Note that the IMF presents data from government figures and estimates and makes projections based on these. It does not collect or gather data on its own.

Also, even if we do surpass Japan in terms of GDP, experts have warned against reading too much into it or using that data as the marker of a country’s progress. That’s because a roaring GDP does not guarantee an overall high per capita income, nor does it take a holistic view of income inequalities and unemployment. That, however, is a much longer discussion.

To sum up, Niti Aayog CEO BVR Subrahmanyam’s claim that India is currently the fourth-largest and a $4-trillion economy, citing IMF data, is misleading. India is currently the fifth-largest in terms of GDP. Projected estimates suggest that it could surpass Japan by the end of the 2025-26 fiscal.

The post India is not the fourth-largest or a $4-trillion economy yet; NITI Aayog CEO’s claim citing IMF data misleading appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Diti Pujara.

It’s now clear to the whole world that China is the main target of Trump’s trade wars. The U.S. has slapped massive tariffs—up to 245%—on Chinese goods. China hit back with 125% tariffs of its own and refuses even to negotiate until U.S. tariffs are lifted.

Ever since President Obama announced a U.S. “pivot to Asia” in 2011, both U.S. political parties have seen China as the main global competitor, or even as a target for U.S. military force. China is now encircled by a staggering 100,000 U.S. military personnel in Japan, South Korea and Guam (plus 73,000 in Hawaii and 415,000 on the U.S. West coast) and enough nuclear and conventional weapons to completely destroy China, and the rest of us along with it.

To put the trade war between the U.S. and China in context, we need to take a step back and look at their relative economic strength and international trading relations with other countries. There are two ways to measure a country’s economy: nominal GDP (based only on currency exchange rates) and “purchasing power parity” (PPP), which adjusts for the real cost of goods and services. PPP is now the preferred method for economists at the IMF and OECD.

Measured by PPP, China overtook the U.S. as the largest economy in the world in 2016. Today, its economy is 33% larger than America’s—$40.7 trillion compared to $30.5 trillion.

And China isn’t alone. The U.S. is just 14.7% of the world economy, while China is 19.7%. The EU makes up another 14.1%, while India, Russia, Brazil, Japan, and the rest of the world account for the other 51.5%. The world is now multipolar, whether Washington likes it or not.

So when Malaysia’s trade minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz was asked whether he’d side with China or the U.S., his answer was clear: “We can’t choose—and we won’t.” Trump would like to adopt President Bush’s “You’re either with us or with the terrorists” posture, but that makes no sense when China and the U.S. together account for only 34% of the global economy.

China saw this coming. As a result of Trump’s trade war with China during his first term in office, it turned to new markets across Asia, Africa, and Latin America through its Belt and Road Initiative. Southeast Asia is now China’s biggest export market. It no longer depends on American soybeans—it grows more of its own and buys most of the rest from Brazil, cutting the U.S. share of that market by half.

Meanwhile, many Americans cling to the idea that military power makes up for shrinking economic clout. Yes, the U.S. outspends the next ten militaries combined—but it hasn’t won a major war since 1945. From Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the U.S. has spent trillions, killed millions, and suffered humiliating defeats.

Today in Ukraine, Russia is grinding down U.S.-backed forces in a brutal war of attrition, producing more shells than the U.S. and its allies can at a fraction of our cost. The U.S.’s bloated, for-profit arms industry can’t keep up, and our trillion dollar military budget is crowding out new investments in education, healthcare and civilian infrastructure on which our economic future depends.

None of this should be a surprise. Historian Paul Kennedy saw it coming in his 1987 classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Every dominant empire, from Spain to Britain to Russia, eventually confronted relative decline as the tides of economic history moved on and it had to find a new place in a world it no longer dominated. Military overextension and overspending always accelerated the fall.

“It has been a common dilemma facing previous ‘number one’ countries that even as their relative economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes out productive investment…,” Kennedy wrote.

He found that no society remains permanently ahead of all others, but that the loss of empire is not the end of the road for former great powers, who can often find new, prosperous positions in a world they no longer dominate. Even the total destruction suffered by Germany and Japan in the Second World War, which ended their imperial ambitions, was also a new beginning, as they turned their considerable skills and resources from weapons development to peaceful civilian production, and soon produced the best cars and consumer electronics in the world.

Paul Kennedy reminded Americans that the decline in U.S. leadership “is relative not absolute, and is therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust sensibly to the newer world order…”

And that is exactly how our leaders have failed us. Instead of judiciously adapting to America’s relative decline and carving out a new place for the United States in the emerging multipolar world, they doubled down—on wars, on threats, on the fantasy of endless dominance. Under the influence of the neocons, Democrats and Republicans alike have marched America into one disaster after another, in a vain effort to defy the economic tides by which all great powers rise and fall.

Since 1987, against all the historical evidence, seven U.S. presidents, Democrats and Republicans, have blindly subscribed to the simplistic notion peddled by the neocons that the United States can halt or reverse the tides of economic history by the threat and use of military force.

Trump and his team are no exception. They know the old policies have failed. They know radically different policies are needed. Yet they keep playing from the same broken record—economic coercion, threats, wars, proxy wars, and now genocide—violating international law and exhausting the goodwill of our friends and neighbors around the world.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. It took the two most deadly and destructive wars in human history to put an end to the British Empire and the age of European colonialism.

In a nuclear-armed world, another great-power war wouldn’t just be catastrophic—it would very likely be final. If the U.S. keeps trying to bully its way back to the top, we could all lose everything.

The future instead demands a peaceful transition to international cooperation in a multipolar world. This is not a question of politics, right or left, or of being pro- or anti-American. It’s about whether humanity has any future at all.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

[This article titled The History of Regime Change in Ukraine and the IMF’s Bitter “Economic Medicine” by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky was first published by Global Research. You may read it here.]

Author’s Introduction

We must understand the history of the U.S.-sponsored February 2014 Coup d’Etat which paved the wave for the adoption of IMF-World Bank shock treatment, namely the imposition of devastating macro-economic reforms coupled with conditionalities. This process –imposed by the Washington Consensus– was applied in developing countries since the 1980s, and in Eastern Europe and in the countries of the Soviet Union starting in the early 1990s.

Below is an the article describing the IMF reforms which I wrote in early March 2014, in the immediate wake of the Euromaidan Coup d’Etat which was led by the two major Nazi “parties”: Right Sektor and Svoboda, with the financial support of Washington.

What Is the End Game

The World Bank and the IMF reforms –while establishing the ground work– are no longer the main actors, representing the country’s creditors.

The traditional IMF-World Bank reforms are in many regards obsolete.

The Neoliberal Endgame for Ukraine –resulting from unsurmountable debts– largely attributable to military aid is the outright privatization of an entire country by BlackRock which is a giant portfolio company controlled by powerful financial interests with extensive leverage.

BlackRock signed an agreement with President Zelensky in November 2022.

The Privatization of Ukraine was launched in liaison with BlackRock’s consulting company McKinsey, a public relations firm which has largely been responsible for co-opting corrupt politicians and officials worldwide, not to mention scientists and intellectuals on behalf of powerful financial interests.

The Kyiv government engaged BlackRock’s consulting arm in November to determine how best to attract that kind of capital, and then added JPMorgan in February. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced last month that the country was working with the two financial groups and consultants at McKinsey.

BlackRock and Ukraine’s Ministry of Economy signed a Memorandum of Understanding in November 2022. In late December 2022, president Zelensky and BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink agreed on an investment strategy.

—Michel Chossudovsky, April 27, 2024

The February 23, 2014 Coup d’Etat

In the days following the Ukraine coup d’Etat of February 23, 2014 leading to the ousting of a duly elected president, Wall Street and the IMF –in liaison with the US Treasury and the European Commission in Brussels– had already set the stage for the outright takeover of Ukraine’s monetary system.

The EuroMaidan protests leading up to “regime change” and the formation of an interim government were followed by purges within key ministries and government bodies.

The Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) Ihor Sorkin was fired on February 25th and replaced by a new governor Stepan Kubiv.

Stepan Kubiv is a member of Parliament of the Rightist Batkivshchyna “Fatherland” faction in the Rada led by the acting Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk (founded by Yulia Tymoshenko in March 1999). He previously headed Kredbank, a Ukrainian financial institution largely owned by EU capital, with some 130 branches throughout Ukraine. (Ukraine Central Bank Promises Liquidity To Local Banks, With One Condition, Zero Hedge, February 27, 2014)

Kubiv is no ordinary bank executive. He was one of the first field “commandants” of the EuroMaidan riots alongside Andriy Parubiy, co-founder of the Neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda), and Dmitry Yarosh, leader of the Right Sector Brown Shirts (centre in image below), which now has the status of a political party.

Kubiv was in the Maidan square addressing protesters on February 18, at the very moment when armed Right Sector thugs under the helm of Dmitry Yarosh (image above, centre) were raiding the parliament building.

The Establishment of an Interim Government

A few days later, upon the establishment of the interim government, Stepan Kubiv was put in charge of negotiations with Wall Street and the IMF.

The new Minister of Finance Aleksandr Shlapak (image below) is a political crony of Viktor Yushchenko –a long-time protegé of the IMF who was spearheaded into the presidency following the 2004 “Colored Revolution”. Shlapak held key positions in the office of the presidency under Yushchenko as well as at the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). In 2010, upon Yushchenko’s defeat, Aleksandr Shlapak joined a shadowy Bermuda based offshore financial outfit IMG International Ltd (IMG), holding the position of Vice President. Based in Hamilton, Bermuda, IMG specialises in “captive insurance management”, reinsurance and “risk transfer.”

Minister of Finance Aleksandr Shlapak works in close liaison with Pavlo Sheremeto, the newly appointed Minister of Economic Development and Trade, who upon his appointment called for “deregulation, fully fledged and across the board”, requiring –as demanded in previous negotiations by the IMF– the outright elimination of subsidies on fuel, energy and basic food staples.

Another key appointment is that of Ihor Shvaika (image below), a member of the Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party, to the position of Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food. Headed by an avowed follower of World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, this ministry not only oversees the agricultural sector, it also decides on issues pertaining to subsidies and the prices of basic food staples.

The new Cabinet has stated that the country is prepared for socially “painful” but necessary reforms. In December 2013, a $ 20 billion deal with the IMF had already been contemplated alongside the controversial EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. Yanukovych decided to turn it down.

One of the requirements of the IMF was that “household subsidies for gas be reduced once again by 50%.”

“Other onerous IMF requirements included cuts to pensions, government employment, and the privatization (read: let western corporations purchase) of government assets and property. It is therefore likely that the most recent IMF deal currently in negotiation, will include once again major reductions in gas subsidies, cuts in pensions, immediate government job cuts, as well as other reductions in social spending programs in the Ukraine.” (voice of russia.com, March 21, 2014)

Economic Surrender: Unconditional Acceptance of IMF Demands by a Puppet Government

Shortly after his instatement, the interim (puppet) prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk casually dismissed the need to negotiate with the IMF. Prior to the conduct of negotiations pertaining to a draft agreement, Yatsenyuk had already called for an unconditional acceptance of the IMF package: “We have no other choice but to accept the IMF offer”.

(Image: Neo Nazi Svoboda Party glorify World War II Nazi Collaborator Stepan Bandera)

Yatsenyuk intimated that Ukraine will “accept whatever offer the IMF and the EU made” (voice of russia.com, March 21, 2014).

In surrendering to the IMF, Yatsenyuk was fully aware that the proposed reforms would brutally impoverish millions of people, including those who protested in Maidan.

The actual timeframe for the implementation of the IMF’s “shock therapy” has not yet been firmly established. In all likelihood, the regime will attempt to delay the more ruthless social impacts of the macroeconomic reforms until after the May 25 presidential elections (assuming that these elections will take place).

The text of the IMF agreement is likely to be detailed and specific, particularly with regard to State assets earmarked for privatization.

Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, according to Bloomberg, are among key individuals in the US who are acting (in a non-official capacity) in tandem with the IMF, the Kiev government, in consultation with the White House and the US Congress.

The IMF Mission to Kiev

Immediately upon the instatement of the new Finance Minister and NBU governor, a request was submitted to the IMF’s Managing director. An IMF fact-finding mission headed by the Director of the IMF’s European Department Rez Moghadam was rushed to Kiev:

“I am positively impressed with the authorities’ determination, sense of responsibility and commitment to an agenda of economic reform and transparency. The IMF stands ready to help the people of Ukraine and support the authorities’ economic program.” (Press Release: Statement by IMF European Department Director Reza Moghadam on his Visit to Ukraine)

A week later, on March 12, 2014, Christine Lagarde met the interim Prime Minister of Ukraine Arseniy Yatsenyuk at IMF headquarters in Washington. Lagarde reaffirmed the IMF’s commitment:

“[to putting Ukraine back] on the path of sound economic governance and sustainable growth, while protecting the vulnerable in society. … We are keen to help Ukraine on its path to economic stability and prosperity.” (Press Release: Statement by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde on Ukraine)

The above statement is wrought with hypocrisy. In practice, the IMF does not wield “sound economic governance” nor does it protect the vulnerable. It impoverishes entire populations while providing “prosperity” to a small corrupt and subservient political and economic elite.

IMF “economic medicine” while contributing to the enrichment of a social minority, invariably triggers economic instability and mass poverty, while providing a “social safety net” to the external creditors. To sell its reform package, the IMF relies on media propaganda as well as persistent statements by “economic experts” and financial analysts which provide authority to the IMF’s macroeconomic reforms.

The unspoken objective behind IMF interventionism is to destabilize sovereign governments and literally break up entire national economies. This is achieved through the manipulation of key macroeconomic policy instruments as well as the outright rigging of financial markets, including the foreign exchange market.

To reach its unspoken goals, the IMF-World Bank –often in consultation with the US Treasury and the State Department– will exert control over key appointments including the Minister of Finance, the Central Bank governor as well as senior officials in charge of the country’s privatization program. These key appointments will require the (unofficial) approval of the “Washington Consensus” prior to the conduct of negotiations pertaining to a multibillion IMF bailout agreement.

Beneath the rhetoric, in the real world of money and credit, the IMF has several related operational objectives:

1) to facilitate the collection of debt servicing obligations, while ensuring that the country remains indebted and under the control of its external creditors.

2) to exert on behalf of the country’s external creditors full control over the country’s monetary policy, its fiscal and budgetary structures,

3) to revamp social programs, labor laws, minimum wage legislation, in accordance with the interests of Western capital,

4) to deregulate foreign trade and investment policies, including financial services and intellectual property rights,

5) to implement the privatization of key sectors of the economy through the sale of public assets to foreign corporations,

6) to facilitate the takeover by foreign capital (including mergers and acquisitions) of selected privately owned Ukrainian corporations, and

7) to ensure the deregulation of the foreign exchange market.

While the privatization program ensures the transfer of State assets into the hands of foreign investors, the IMF program also includes provisions geared towards the destabilization of the country’s privately-owned business conglomerates. A concurrent “break up” plan entitled “spin-off” as well as a “bankruptcy program” are often implemented with a view to triggering the liquidation, closing down or restructuring of a large number of nationally-owned private and public enterprises.

The “spin off” procedure –which was imposed on South Korea under the December 1997 IMF bailout agreement– required the break up of several of Korea’s powerful chaebols (business conglomerates) into smaller corporations, many of which were then taken over by US, EU and Japanese capital. Sizeable banking interests as well highly profitable components of Korea’s high tech industrial base were transferred or sold off at rock bottom prices to Western capital. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, Global Research, Montreal, 2003, Chapter 22).

These staged bankruptcy programs ultimately seek to destroy national capitalism. In the case of Ukraine, they would selectively target the business interests of the oligarchs, opening the door for the takeover of a sizeable portion of Ukraine’s private sector by EU and US corporations. The conditionalities contained in the IMF agreement would be coordinated with those contained in the controversial EU-Ukraine Association agreement, which the Yanukovych government refused to sign.

Ukraine’s Spiraling External Debt

Ukraine’s external debt is of the order of $140 billion.

In consultations with the US Treasury and the EU, the IMF aid package is to be of the order of $15 billion dollars. Ukraine’s outstanding short-term debt is of the order of $65 billion, more than four times the amount promised by the IMF.

The Central Bank’s foreign currency reserves have literally dried up. In February, according to the NUB, Ukraine’s foreign currency reserves were of the order of a meagre $13.7 billion, its Special Drawing Rights with the IMF were of the order of $16.1 million, its gold reserves $1.81 billion. There were unconfirmed reports that Ukraine’s gold had been confiscated and airlifted to New York, for “safe-keeping” under the custody of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

Under the bailout, the IMF –acting on behalf of Ukraine’s US and EU creditors– lends money to Ukraine which is already earmarked for debt repayment. The money is transferred to the creditors. The loan is “fictitious money.” Not one dollar of this money will enter Ukraine.

The package is not intended to support economic growth. Quite the opposite: Its main purpose is to collect the outstanding short-term debt, while precipitating the destabilization of Ukraine’s economy and financial system.

The fundamental principle of usury is that the creditor comes to the rescue of the debtor: “I cannot pay my debts, no problem my son, I will lend you the money and with the money I lend you, you will pay me back”.

The rescue rope thrown to Kiev by the IMF and the European Union is in reality a ball and chain. Ukraine’s external debt, as documented by the World Bank, increased tenfold in ten years and exceeds 135 billion dollars. In interests alone, Ukraine must pay about 4.5 billion dollars a year. The new loans will only serve to increase the external debt thus obliging Kiev to “liberalize” its economy even more, by selling to corporations what remains to be privatized. (Ukraine, IMF “Shock Treatment” and Economic Warfare by Manlio Dinucci, Global Research, March 21, 2014)

Under the IMF loan agreement, the money will not enter the country, it will be used to trigger the repayment of outstanding debt servicing obligations to EU and US creditors. In this regard, according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) “European banks have more than $23 billion in outstanding loans in Ukraine.” (Ukraine Facing Financial Instability But IMF May Help Soon – Spiegel Online, February 28, 2014)

What Are the “Benefits” of an IMF Package to Ukraine?

According to IMF’s managing director Christine Lagarde, the bailout is intended to address the issue of poverty and social inequality. In actuality what it does is to increase the levels of indebtedness while essentially handing over the reins of macro-economic reform and monetary policy to the Bretton Woods Institutions, acting on behalf of Wall Street.

The bailout agreement will include the imposition of drastic austerity measures which in all likelihood will trigger further social chaos and economic dislocation. It’s called “policy based lending”, namely the granting of money earmarked to reimburse the creditors, in exchange for the IMF’s “bitter economic medicine” in the form of a menu of neoliberal policy reforms. “Short-term pain for long-term gain” is the motto of the Washington-based Bretton Woods institutions.

Loan “conditionalities” will be imposed –including drastic austerity measures– which will serve to impoverish the Ukrainian population beyond bounds in a country which has been under IMF ministrations for more than 20 years. While the Maidan movement was manipulated, tens of thousands of people protested they wanted a new life because their standard of living had collapsed as a result of the neoliberal policies applied by successive governments, including that of president Yanukovych. Little did they realize that the protest movement supported by Wall Street, the US State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was meant to usher in a new phase of economic and social destruction.

History of IMF Ministrations in Ukraine

In 1994 under the presidency of Leonid Kuchma, an IMF package was imposed on Ukraine. Viktor Yushchenko –who later became president following the 2004 Colored Revolution– had been appointed head of the newly-formed National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). Yushchenko was praised by the Western financial media as a “daring reformer”; he was among the main architects of the IMF’s 1994 reforms which served to destabilize Ukraine’s national economy. When he ran in the 2004 elections against Yanukovych, he was supported by various foundations including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). He was Wall Street’s preferred candidate.

Ukraine’s 1994 IMF package was finalized behind closed doors at the Madrid 50 years anniversary Summit of the Bretton Woods institutions. It required the Ukrainian government to abandon State controls over the exchange rate leading to a massive collapse of the currency. Yushchenko played a key role in negotiating and implementing the 1994 agreement as well as creating a new Ukrainian national currency, which resulted in a dramatic plunge in real wages:

Yushchenko as Head of the Central Bank was responsible for deregulating the national currency under the October 1994 “shock treatment”:

• The price of bread increased overnight by 300 percent,
• electricity prices by 600 percent,
• public transportation by 900 percent.
• the standard of living tumbled

According to the Ukrainian State Statistics Committee, quoted by the IMF, real wages in 1998 had fallen by more than 75 percent in relation to their 1991 level. (http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft /scr/2003/cr03174.pdf )

Ironically, the IMF sponsored program was intended to alleviate inflationary pressures: it consisted in imposing “dollarised” prices on an impoverished population with earnings below ten dollars a month.

Combined with the abrupt hikes in fuel and energy prices, the lifting of subsidies and the freeze on credit contributed to destroying industry (both public and private) and undermining Ukraine’s breadbasket economy.

In November 1994, World Bank negotiators were sent in to examine the overhaul of Ukraine’s agriculture. With trade liberalization (which was part of the economic package), US grain surpluses and “food aid” were dumped on the domestic market, contributing to destabilizing one of the World’s largest and most productive wheat economies, (e.g. comparable to that of the American Mid West). (Michel Chossudovsky IMF Sponsored “Democracy” in The Ukraine, Global Research, November 28, 2004, emphasis added)

The IMF-World Bank had destroyed Ukraine’s “bread basket.”

By 1998, the deregulation of the grain market, the hikes in the price of fuel and the liberalisation of trade resulted in a decline in the production of grain by 45 percent in relation to its 1986-90 level. The collapse in livestock production, poultry and dairy products was even more dramatic (see this). The cumulative decline in GDP resulting from the IMF-sponsored reforms was in excess of 60 percent from 1992 to 1995.

The World Bank: Fake Poverty Alleviation

The World Bank has recently acknowledged that Ukraine is a poor country. (World Bank, Ukraine Overview, Washington DC, updated February 17, 2014):

“Evidence shows Ukraine is facing a health crisis, and the country needs to make urgent and extensive measures to its health system to reverse the progressive deterioration of citizens’ health. Crude adult death rates in Ukraine are higher than its immediate neighbors, Moldova and Belarus, and among the highest not only in Europe, but also in the world.”

What the report fails to mention is that the Bretton Woods institutions –through a process of economic engineering– played a central role in precipitating the post-Soviet collapse of the Ukrainian economy. The dramatic breakdown of Ukraine’s social programs bears the fingerprints of the IMF-World Bank austerity measures which included the deliberate underfunding and dismantling of the Soviet era health care system.

With regard to agriculture, the World Bank points to Ukraine’s “tremendous agricultural potential” while failing to acknowledge that the Ukraine bread-basket was destroyed as part of a US-IMF-World Bank package. According to the World Bank:

“This potential has not been fully exploited due to depressed farm incomes and a lack of modernization within the sector.”

“Depressed farm incomes” are not “the cause,” they are the “consequence” of the IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment Program. In 1994, farm incomes had declined by the order of 80% in relation to 1991, following the October 1994 IMF program engineered by then NUB governor Viktor Yushchenko. Immediately following the 1994 IMF reform package, the World Bank implemented (in 1995) a private sector “seed project” based on “the liberalization of seed pricing, marketing, and trade.” The prices of farm inputs increased dramatically leading to a string of agricultural bankruptcies. (Projects: Agricultural Seed Development Project | The World Bank, Washington DC, 1995)

The IMF’s 2014 “Shock and Awe” Economic Bailout

While the conditions prevailing in Ukraine today are markedly different to those applied in the 1990s, it should be understood that the imposition of a new wave of macro-economic reforms (under strict IMF policy conditionalities) will serve to impoverish a population which has already been impoverished.

In other words, the IMF’s 2014 “Shock and Awe” constitutes the “final blow” in a sequence of IMF interventions spreading over a period of more than 20 years, which have contributed to destabilizing the national economy and impoverishing Ukraine’s population. We are not dealing with a Greece Model Austerity Package as some analysts have suggested. The reforms slated for Ukraine will be far more devastating.

Preliminary information suggests that IMF bailout will provide an advance of $2 billion in the form of a grant to be followed by a subsequent loan of $11 billion. The European Investment Bank (EIB) will provide another $2 billion, for a total package of around $15 billion. (See Voice of Russia, March 21, 2014)

Drastic Austerity Measures

The Kiev government has announced that the IMF requires a 20% cut in Ukraine’s national budget, implying drastic cuts in social programs, coupled with reductions in the wages of public employees, privatisation and the sale of state assets. The IMF has also called for a “phase out” of energy subsidies, and the deregulation of the foreign exchange markets. With unmanageable debts, the IMF will also impose the sell off and privatisation of major public assets as well as the takeover of the national banking sector.

The new government pressured by the IMF and World Bank have already announced that old-aged pensions are to be curtailed by 50%. In a timely February 21 release, the World Bank had set the guidelines for old-age pension reform in the countries of “Emerging Europe and Central Asia” including Ukraine. In an utterly twisted logic, “Protecting the elderly” is carried out by slashing their pension benefits, according to the World Bank. (World Bank, Significant Pension Reforms Urged in Emerging Europe and Central Asia, Washington Dc, February 21, 2014)

Given the absence of a real government in Kiev, Ukraine’s political handlers in the Ministry of Finance and the NUB will obey the diktats of Wall Street: The IMF structural adjustment loan agreement for Ukraine will be devastating in its social and economic impacts.

Elimination of Subsidies

Pointing to “market-distorted energy subsidies”, price deregulation has been a longstanding demand from both IMF-World Bank. The price of energy had been kept relatively low during the Yanukovych government largely as a result of the bilateral agreement with Russia, which provided Ukraine with low-cost gas in exchange for Naval base lease in Sebastopol. That agreement is now null and void. It is also worth noting that the government of Crimea has announced that it would take over ownership of all Ukrainian state companies in Crimea, including the Black Sea natural gas fields.

The Kiev interim government has intimated that Ukraine’s retail gas prices would have to rise by 40% “as part of economic reforms needed to unlock loans from the International Monetary Fund.” This announcement fails to address the mechanics of full-fledged deregulation which under present circumstances could lead to increases in energy prices in excess of 100 percent.

It is worth recalling, in this regard, that Peru in August 1991 had set the stage for “shock treatment” increases in energy prices when gasoline prices in Lima shot up overnight by 2978% (a 30-fold increase). In 1994 as part of the agreement between the IMF and Leonid Kuchma, the price of electricity flew up over night by 900 percent.

“Enhanced Exchange Rate Flexibility”

One of the central components of IMF intervention is the deregulation of the foreign exchange market. In addition to massive expenditure cuts, the IMF program requires “enhanced exchange rate flexibility” namely the removal of all foreign exchange controls. (Ukraine: Staff Report for the 2012 Article IV Consultation, See also http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2012/cr12315.pdf)

Since the outset of the Maidan protest movement in December 2013, foreign exchange controls were instated with a view to supporting the hryvnia and stemming the massive outflow of capital.

The IMF-sponsored bailout will literally ransack the foreign currency reserves held by the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). Enhanced exchange rate flexibility under IMF guidance has been endorsed by the new NBU governor Stepan Kubiv. Without virtually no forex reserves, exchange rate flexibility is financial suicide: it opens the door to speculative short-selling transactions (modelled on the 1997 Asian crisis) directed against the Ukraine’s currency, the hryvnia.

Institutional speculators, which include major Wall Street and European Banks as well as hedge funds, have already positioned themselves. Manipulation in the forex markets is undertaken through derivative trade. Major financial institutions will have detailed inside information with regard to Central Bank policies which will enable them to rig the forex market.

Under a flexible exchange rate system, the Central Bank does not impose restrictions on forex transactions. The Central Bank can however decide –under advice from the IMF– to counter the speculative onslaught in the forex market, with a view to maintaining the parity of the Ukrainian hryvnia. Without the use of exchange controls, this line of action requires Ukraine’s central bank (in the absence of forex reserves) to prop up an ailing currency with borrowed money, thereby contributing to exacerbating the debt crisis.

The graph below indicates a decline of the hryvnia against the US $ of more than 20% over a six-month period.

(Source: themoneyconverter.com)

It is worth recalling in this regard that Brazil in November 1998 had received a precautionary bailout loan from the IMF of the order of $40 billion. One of the conditions of the loan agreement, however, was the complete deregulation of the forex market. This loan was intended to assist the Central Banking in maintaining the parity of the Brazilian real. In practice it spearheaded Brazil into a financial crash in February 1999.

The Brazilian government had accepted the conditionalities. Marred by capital flight of the order of $400 million a day, the money granted under the IMF loan –which was intended to prop up Brazil’s central banks reserves– was plundered in a matter of months. The IMF loan agreement to Brasilia enabled the institutional speculators to buy time. Most of the money under the IMF loan was appropriated in the form of speculative gains accruing to major financial institutions.

With regard to Ukraine, enhanced exchange flexibility spells disaster. Contrary to Brazil, the Central Bank has no forex reserves which would enable it to defend its currency. Where would the NBU get the borrowed forex reserves? Most of the funds under the proposed IMF-EU rescue package are already earmarked and could be used to effectively defend the hryvnia against “short-selling” speculative attacks in the currency markets. The most likely scenario is that the hryvnia will experience a major decline leading to significant hikes in the prices of essential commodities, including food, fuel and transportation.

Were the Central Bank able to use borrowed reserves to prop up the hryvnia, this borrowed money would be swiftly reappropriated, handed over to currency speculators on a silver platter. This scenario of propping up the national currency using borrowed forex reserves (i.e. Brazil in 1998-99) would, however, contribute in the short-term to staving off an immediate collapse of the standard.

This procedure provides “extra time” to the speculators, who are busy plundering the Central Bank’s (borrowed) currency reserves. It also enables the interim government to postpone the worst impacts of the IMF’s “enhanced exchange rate flexibility” to a later date.

When the borrowed hard currency reserves of the Central Bank run out –i.e. in the immediate aftermath of the May 25 presidential elections– the value of hryvnia will plunge on the forex market, which in turn will trigger a dramatic collapse in the standard of living. Coupled with the demise of bilateral economic relations with Russia pertaining to the supply of natural gas to Ukraine, energy prices are also slated to increase dramatically.

Neoliberalism and Neo-Nazi Ideology Join Hands: Repressing the Protest Movement Against the IMF

With Svoboda and Right Sector political appointees in charge of national security and the armed forces, a real grassroots protest movement directed against the IMF’s deadly macroeconomic reforms will, in all likelihood, be brutally repressed by the Right Sector’s “brown shirts” and the National Guard paramilitary led by Dmitry Yarosh on behalf of Wall Street and the Washington consensus.

In recent developments, Right Sector Dmitry Yarosh has declared his candidacy in the upcoming presidential elections. (Popular support for the Yarosh is less than 2%)

“Russia put Yarosh on an international wanted list and charged him with inciting terrorism after he urged Chechen terrorist leader Doku Umarov to launch attacks on Russia over the Ukrainian conflict. The ultra-nationalist leader has also threatened to destroy Russian pipelines on Ukrainian territory.” (RT, March 22, 2014)

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s State prosecutor, who also belongs to the Neo-Nazi faction, has implemented procedures which prevent the holding of public rallies and protests directed against the interim government.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michel Chossudovsky.

The Cook Islands will not pursue membership in the United Nations and the Commonwealth due to its inability to meet the criteria for UN membership and existing relationship with New Zealand, which fulfils Commonwealth membership requirements.

Prime Minister Mark Brown has clarified that the Cook Islands is not qualified for UN membership, a long-standing government proposal that has remained uncertain.

In an exclusive interview with Cook Islands News, Brown was asked to provide an update on the government’s plans for a UN membership.

• READ MORE: Other Cook Islands reports

“That’s old news now, I mean we’ve been around the block with that a few years, and a few times,” Brown said.

“So that’s again another one, we haven’t pursued that. There are a number of criteria that the UN requires for membership and according to them, we don’t meet those requirements.”

Cook Islands has maintained diplomatic ties with the UN since the 1990s. It is not currently a member of the UN.

Earlier this year, the Cook Islands government applied for membership with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a first step on the road to becoming a member of the UN.

Cook Islands Minister for Foreign Affairs Tingika Elikana then told RNZ that the decision to become a UN member would ultimately need to be decided by the general population of the Cook Islands through a referendum.

The Cook Islands is part of the realm of New Zealand, which makes Cook Islanders also New Zealand citizens. If the Cook Islands joins the United Nations as a separate member to NZ, it would potentially forfeit its citizenship rights under the current treaty which binds the nations.

“I don’t think short-term elected politicians should decide on that. I think a referendum would need to be run and then we will enter into discussions with New Zealand,” Elikana then said.

When asked about the possibility of joining the Commonwealth, an international association of 56 member states, primarily comprised of former British territories, Brown said the government would not be making another effort to try and become a member.

“We did enquire a number of years ago about it, but the understanding was because we’re part of the realm of New Zealand, that is considered our membership in the Commonwealth, even though we don’t have any place at the table, and we don’t speak at the Commonwealth,” Brown explained.

“So, they consider that our realm relationship is where we are in terms of Commonwealth membership.”

Cook Islands News understands the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration has written to the Commonwealth Secretariat about the country’s membership.

Brown confirmed that a letter had already been submitted to the Commonwealth for that purpose, but he was uncertain whether a response had been received.

“But from what I understand, that is the response that we’ve had from officials at the Commonwealth, is that they consider us through New Zealand as part of the realm of New Zealand as already being covered in the Commonwealth, even though we don’t have a seat or a voice there.”

When asked if this would be considered the government’s final attempt to gain Commonwealth membership, the Prime Minister responded “yes”.

“I think so, I mean I’ve got to weigh it up as well with what benefit we get from being part of the CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting),” he said.

Brown added that there were areas where the Cook Islands did receive support from the likes of the Commonwealth Secretariat.

“We have had support from the likes of the Commonwealth Secretariat in the past with things like technical assistance that they provided for us in the early stages of our development of our Seabed Minerals Authority office.”

Republished with permission from the Cook islands News.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The International Monetary Fund and Asian Development Bank are poring over a highly-critical audit of a multimillion dollar COVID-19 aid package in Solomon Islands, partly supported by the two institutions, that found widespread mismanagement and potential corruption. 

The report from the Solomon Islands Auditor General Office highlighted a litany of problems surrounding delivery of the SBD$309 million (US$37 million) emergency funding for businesses and households between 2020-21.

Though the audit notes the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic and the “heightened the inherent risk for expediting procurements,” it paints a damning picture of missing documentation, conflicts of interest, procedural breaches and possible fraud.

“We are currently going over the report and will be discussing it with the authorities,” an International Monetary Fund, or IMF, spokesperson told RFA affiliate BenarNews.

“The need for reforms to improve fiscal governance and public financial management in Solomon Islands has been underscored by the IMF, and we will continue to encourage and support the country in advancing these reforms.”

The audit’s findings are likely to reinforce public concern about thriving corruption in Solomon Islands. The country scored 43 out of 100 in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index last year, with 0 indicating “highly corrupt” and 100 “very clean.”

The economic stimulus package, endorsed in May 2020 by the cabinet of former Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, was funded by the Asian Development Bank, or ADB, the government and other development partners. 

At the same time, the IMF approved US$28.5 million in emergency financing to help the country address urgent balance of payments needs. Honiara agreed to publish an audit of all COVID-19 related spending as part of the deal. 

The ADB, which handed out US$20 million to the government’s COVID-19 response plan and the stimulus package, said it was aware of the audit and ready to investigate any alleged complaints of wrongdoing it received.

“The ADB’s Office of Anticorruption and Integrity takes all complaints of alleged integrity violations in ADB supported projects seriously,” it said in a statement. 

Since its release earlier this month, the auditor's report has made waves in Solomon Islands, a Pacific nation of about 700,000 people that lies some 1,750 kilometers (1,087 miles) off Australia’s east coast, between Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu.

Political pressure is growing on police to open an investigation into the findings, but Commissioner Mostyn Mangau has said he was waiting for a referral from the auditor general.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele said the report would be tabled in parliament and debated, but it had not yet been discussed in cabinet. 

“There are processes there to be followed,” he told reporters in Honiara.

He added the audit “comes under the prerogative of the Minister of Finance,” who was out of the country.

Sogavare took up the post of finance minister after serving as prime minister between 2019 and 2024.

The economic stimulus package was managed by a small, overstretched team in the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

The arrangement resulted in “many control weaknesses and control breakdowns,” Auditor General David Teika Dennis said in his report.

The audit report found, for example, that senior officials personally signed for many payments for beneficiaries but provided no evidence they had handed the payment on to the designated person. 

“This was a significant breakdown of internal control – allowing government officers to sign for payments for beneficiaries who may not even be aware they are due to receive payment or how much they are to receive was a major fraud risk,” the audit report said.

“We identified one government officer who had personally signed for 251 Imprest Account cheques worth approximately SBD$6.8 million. The officer was also involved in encouraging and preparing applications for individuals.”

Funds were also paid to members of parliament to spend in their constituencies, but there was very little documentation to show how the money was used, the report said.

Overall, less than 10% of successful grant applications for aid could be provided to auditors, who also faced obstruction and delays while trying to do their work. 

Charley Piringi contributed to this report from Honiara.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Harry Pearl for BenarNews.

On 20 June, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) condemned the attacks on civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) ‘in the strongest terms’. In its press statement, the UNSC wrote that these attacks – by both the DRC’s armed forces and various rebel groups supported by neighbouring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda – ‘are worsening the volatile security and stability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in the region and further exacerbating the current humanitarian situation’. Five days later, on 25 June, the United Nations peacekeeping force in eastern DRC withdrew, in accordance with a December 2023 UNSC resolution that pledged both to provide security for the DRC’s general elections on 20 December and to begin to gradually withdraw the peacekeeping force from the country.

Meanwhile, the Rwandan-backed M23 rebels continue to push steadily into the eastern provinces of the DRC, where there has been an active conflict since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Over the course of three decades, there has rarely been lasting peace despite several peace accords (most notably the 1999 Lusaka Agreement, the 2002 Pretoria Agreement, the 2002 Luanda Agreement, and the 2003 Sun City Agreement). The total death toll is very poorly recorded, but by all indications, over six million people have been killed. The intractability of the violence in the eastern DRC has led to a sense of hopelessness about the possibility of permanently ending the carnage. This is accompanied by an ignorance of the politics of this conflict and its deep roots both in the colonial history of the Great Lakes region and the fight over raw materials that are key for the electronic age.

Monsembula Nzaaba Richard or ‘Monzari’ (DRC), L’Aube de la résistance Congolaise (‘Dawn of the Congolese Resistance’), 2024.

To make sense of this conflict, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research partnered with the Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin, the Centre for Research on the Congo-Kinshasa (CERECK), and Likambo Ya Mabele (‘Land Sovereignty Movement’) to produce a powerful new dossier, The Congolese Fight For Their Own Wealth. Eight years ago, we assembled a team to study the ongoing war, with a particular emphasis on imperialism and the resource theft that has plagued this part of Africa for the past century. The colonisation of the Congo came alongside the theft of the region’s labour, rubber, ivory, and minerals in the 1800s under the rule of Belgium’s King Leopold II. Multinational corporations continue this criminal legacy today by stealing minerals and metals that are essential to the growing digital and ‘green’ economy. This resource wealth is what draws the war into the country. As we show in the dossier, the DRC is one of the richest countries in the world, its untapped mineral reserves alone worth $24 trillion. Yet, at the same time, 74.6% of the population lives on less than $2.15 a day, with one in six Congolese people living in extreme poverty. What accounts for this poverty in a country with so much wealth?

Drawing from archival research and interviews with miners, the dossier shows that the core problem is that the Congolese people do not control their wealth. They have been fighting against rampant theft not only since the 1958 formation of the Mouvement National Congolais (‘Congolese National Movement’), which sought freedom from Belgium and control over the Congo’s extensive natural resources, but even earlier, through working-class resistance between the 1930s and 1950s. This fight has not been easy, nor has it succeeded: the DRC continues to be dominated by exploitation and oppression at the hands of a powerful Congolese oligarchy and multinational corporations that operate with the permission of the former. Furthermore, the country suffers, on the one hand, from wars of aggression by its neighbours Rwanda and Uganda, aided by proxy militia groups, and, on the other, from interference by multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) that enforce neoliberal policies as a requirement for receiving loans.

Just days before the DRC’s elections in December 2023, the IMF provided a $202.1 million disbursement because it felt confident that whoever won the election would preserve ‘programme objectives, including limiting macroeconomic slippages and continuing implementing the economic reform agenda’. In other words, the IMF believed that it could continue to privatise electricity and draft mining codes that have been overly ‘generous’ to multinational corporations – irrespective of the election results (the word ‘generous’ is from the IMF’s own mission chief for the DRC, Norbert Toé). A pittance from the IMF is able to muffle the call for sovereignty over the DRC’s considerable resources.

M Kadima (DRC), Congo Is Not for Sale, 2024. Reference photograph by John Behets.

The Great Lakes region of Africa has been prevented, on several fronts, from solving the problems that plague it: entrenched neocolonial structures have prevented the construction of well-funded social infrastructure; the extraordinary power of mining companies, until recently largely Australian, European, and North American in origin, have derailed efforts to achieve resource sovereignty; imperial powers have used their money and military power to subordinate the local ruling classes to foreign interests; the weakness of these local ruling classes and their inability to forge a strong patriotic project, such as those attempted by Louis Rwagasore of Burundi and Patrice Lumumba of the DRC (both assassinated by imperial powers in 1961), has hindered regional progress; there is an urgent desire for the creation of such a project that would bring people together around the shared interests of the majority instead of falling prey to ethnic divisions (there are four hundred different ethnic groups in the DRC alone) and tribalism that tear communities apart and weaken their ability to fight for their destiny.

Such a project thrived following the independence of DRC in 1960. In 1966, the government passed a law that allowed it to control all unoccupied land and its attendant minerals. Then in 1973, the DRC’s General Property Law allowed government officials to expropriate land at will. Establishing a project that uses material resources for the betterment of all peoples, rather than stoking ethnic divisions, must again become the central focus. Yet the idea of citizenship in the region remains entangled with ideas of ethnicity that have provoked conflicts along ethnic lines. It was these ideas that led to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The absence of a common project has allowed the enemies of the masses to creep through the cracks and exploit the weaknesses of the people.

Monsembula Nzaaba Richard or ‘Monzari’ (DRC), Aurore Africaine (‘African Aurora’), 2024.

An alphabet soup of political and military fronts – such as the ADFL, FDLR, RCD, and MLC – catapulted the region into resource wars. Reserves of coltan, copper, and gold as well as control over the border roads between the DRC and Uganda that link the eastern DRC to the Kenyan port of Mombasa made these armed groups and a few powerful people very rich. The war was no longer only about the post-colonial consensus, but also about the wealth that could be siphoned off to benefit an international capitalist class that lives far away from Africa’s Great Lakes.

Fascinatingly, it was only when Chinese capital began to contest the companies domiciled in Australia, Europe, and North America that the question of labour rights in the DRC became a great concern for the ‘international community’. Human rights organisations that formerly turned a blind eye to exploitation began to take a great interest in these matters, coining new phrases such as ‘blood coltan’ and ‘blood gold’ to refer to the primary commodities mined by the Chinese and Russian companies that have set up shop in several African countries. Yet, as our dossier – as well as the Wenhua Zongheng issue ‘China-Africa Relations in the Belt and Road Era’ – show, Chinese policy and interests stand in stark contrast to the IMF-driven agenda for the DRC as China seeks to ‘kee[p] mineral and metal processing within the DRC and buil[d] an industrial base for the country’. Furthermore, Chinese firms produce goods that are often made for Global North consumers, an irony that is conveniently ignored in the Western narrative. The international community purports to be concerned with human rights violations but has no interest in the African people’s hopes and dreams; it is driven instead by the interests of the Global North and by the US-led New Cold War.

Young, talented artists spent weeks in the studio coming up with the illustrations featured in the dossier and in this newsletter, the result of a collaboration between our art department and the artists’ collective of the Centre Culturel Andrée Blouin in Kinshasa. Please read our fourth Tricontinental Art Bulletin to learn more about their creative process and watch the video on Artists for Congolese Sovereignty, made by André Ndambi, which introduces the artists’ work.

Monsembula Nzaaba Richard or ‘Monzari’ (DRC), Le peuple a gagné (‘The People Have Won’), 2024.
Reference photograph: Congopresse via Wikimedia.

Our dossier ends with the words of Congolese youth who yearn for land, for a patriotic culture, for critical thinking. These young people were born in war, they were raised in war, and they live in war. And yet, they know that the DRC has enough wealth to let them imagine a world without war, a world of peace and social development that surpasses narrow divisions and unending bloodshed.

Warmly,

Vijay

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Papua New Guinea’s deputy opposition leader James Nomane has accused the government of “reckless economic management” that has forced devaluation to manage loan repayments in foreign currency and placate the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Prime Minister James Marape “must stop lying to the people of Papua New Guinea”, he said in a statement responding Marape’s message that devaluation was inevitable and good for exports.

“The devaluation of the kina was planned — not inevitable. Although the kina devaluation makes PNG exports cheaper, we have not invested in agriculture to increase production and export volumes that will improve our trade deficit,” said Nomane, a former minister in Marape’s government.

• READ MORE: Other PNG reports

He was responding to a report by an ANZ economist forecasting that the unpegged the kina was expected to continue its depreciation until 2026. The lack of significant new foreign currency inflow was pushing down the kina’s value, with the currency already losing 2.1 percent against the US dollar since the end of 2023.

Nomane said the devaluation would increase the cost of imports and directly increase domestic prices.

Continued price increases in basic goods and services such as rice, tinned fish, fuel, water, electricity would raise inflation and make the cost-of-living crisis worse.

“Marape has been fixated on borrowing to fund Connect PNG and other dubious investments that enrich a small group of his cronies at the expense of the nation,” Nomane said.

‘Dubious state guarantee’
“Sovereign guarantees that will not create jobs or spur economic growth have become the Marape modus operandi.

“For example, the dubious K2.4 billion (NZ1.4 billion) state guarantee for a solar-power project in Gusap, Madang province, without any due diligence to a K2 Singapore company.

“Marape seems to imply that the government can tell the Central Bank what to do.”

This inferred control was dangerous and an affront to Sir Mekere Morauta’s exemplary reforms for total independence of the Central Bank.

By melding the Treasury and Central Bank, the Prime Minister was preempting the decisions of the Central Bank in terms of interest rates and monetary policy.

“Devaluation will raise inflation and the cost-of-living, lower creditworthiness, and reduce investor confidence.”

Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

But Xinhua didn’t accurately translate Georgieva’s remarks. In Xinhua’s original English copy, the IMF chief was quoted as saying the Chinese economy “performed slightly above expectations” last year.

The claim was shared in a Chinese version of the report by Xinhua on Feb. 1.

“Talking about China’s economy, Georgieva told Xinhua that the country’s economy performed well in 2023,” the report reads in part. 

China continues to attempt to jumpstart its economy following several sluggish years under stringent anti-epidemic measures after the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. 

Local officials assert that the 5.2% GDP growth in 2023 indicates the economy is “recovering and improving,” although this growth still falls short of the usual pre-COVID rates of 6% to 7%.

But the claim is misleading. In Xinhua’s original English copy, the IMF chief was in fact cited as saying the Chinese economy “performed slightly above expectations.”

Georgieva’s remarks are in line with what she said in January during an interview with American broadcaster CNBC.

At that time, she said China’s economy faces “really difficult short-term and long-term challenges,” citing the high level of local government debt and needs for “structural reforms” among others. 

The IMF executive board made similar appraisals about China’s economic outlook on Feb. 2.

Keyword searches found no credible reports or statements to show that Georgieva said the Chinese economy performed well in 2023.

Portraying optimistic outlook

While it’s uncertain whether Xinhua deliberately mistranslated the IMF chief’s remarks, this incident aligns with a recent trend in China where its state-controlled media consistently portray an optimistic view of the nation’s economic prospects.

In December 2023, for instance, a Global Times journalist interviewed international financial consultant Jim Rogers. During the interview, the reporter questioned if U.S. efforts to economically decouple from China would be successful, citing an increase in Sino-U.S. trade throughout 2023 as evidence that these attempts were ineffective. However, this claim about U.S.-China trade in 2023 was incorrect.

Statistics published by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce show that China’s total trade with the United States fell 11.6% to US$664.4 billion last year from US$759.4 billion in 2022. 

Both China’s total imports to and exports from the United States suffered a continuous decline through every month of 2023, with average monthly trade falling more than 10 percent year-on-year. 

Although the report was published more than a week before the end of the year, the Ministry of Commerce updated the publicly available statistics every month throughout 2023. 

Edited by Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shen Ke for Asia Fact Check Lab.

The International Monetary Fund has reestablished a resident mission in Papua New Guinea, ending a more than two-decade absence from a Pacific island country with which it had a stormy relationship.

Prime Minister James Marape said the IMF, which is often a lender of last resort to developing nations, had been invited back and would help ensure an independent and transparent assessment of Papua New Guinea’s economic policies and performance.

“We told the IMF to come and assist, assess, look and advise us,” Marape said in a statement on Sunday. The presence of the IMF alongside institutions such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank “signifies a comprehensive support system for PNG's economic development,” he said.

The fund’s office in Papua New Guinea was closed in the early 2000s after a backlash against policies, such as registration of customary land and the sale of state-owned companies, it attempted to impose on the country in return for providing a financial lifeline.  

According to civil society organizations and media reports, three student protestors were killed and 17 wounded when police opened fire on a protest in June 2001 against the IMF and World Bank in Port Moresby. The incident followed more than a decade of social convulsions and conflict between the IMF and Papua New Guinea’s government over the fund’s so-called structural adjustment policies.

At a ceremony on Thursday, Marape and IMF deputy managing director Bo Li cut a red ribbon and a cake to mark the official opening of the fund’s new office in Port Moresby and the first visit by a top-level IMF official in recent memory.

The IMF’s involvement with Papua New Guinea stepped up significantly last year when the fund approved a U.S.$918 loan to help the country’s recovery from repeated economic shocks in the past decade, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stability for Papua New Guinea, which gained its independence from Australia in 1975, has remained elusive as it grapples with tribal violence and challenges such as corruption and lack of roads and basic healthcare in many regions. 

The country, which is by far the most populous Pacific island nation with an estimated 12 million people, also has been a focus of the intensifying China-U.S. rivalry in the Pacific.

Li said he was saddened by loss of life and damage to businesses in Port Moresby in January when the capital was hit by riots and looting. At least 16 died in the Jan. 10 chaos that erupted after police walked off the job in protest at a pay cut the government later said was caused by a payroll system glitch.

The economic impact of the riots is not yet factored into the IMF’s near-term forecasts for Papua New Guinea “but we still see a positive sign on the overall economy,” said Li.

“As Papua New Guinea continues to build a stronger and more resilient economy, the IMF is here to support you,” Li said. “Papua New Guinea’s new [economic policy] program, supported by the IMF, supports a structural reform agenda on which the authorities are already making remarkable progress,” he said.

According to the IMF’s summary of the loan it approved last year, Papua New Guinea needs to make its government leaner without sacrificing social spending and strengthen anti-corruption efforts so it can attract more investment. 

To reduce foreign exchange shortages – that contribute to nationwide disruptions such as fuel rationing – Papua New Guinea needs to strengthen its central bank and gradually move to a market-decided exchange rate for its currency, the summary said.

At the ceremony, Marape and Treasurer Ian Ling-Stuckey were at pains to emphasize the IMF was not dictating policy to the government.

“I want to inform the country that the reforms were not imposed on us. It was something that we knew we had to do,” Marape said.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Harlyne Joku for BenarNews.

This elite thinks it can do a better job than nature by changing the essence of food and the genetic core of the food supply (via synthetic biology and genetic engineering). The plan also involves removing farmers from the land (AI-driven farmerless farms) and filling much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels. Although the food system has problems that need addressing, this misguided agenda is a recipe for food insecurity that no one voted for.

Farming Crisis KEY POINTS from Sandi Adams interview (youtube.com)

Throughout the world, from the Netherlands to India, farmers are protesting. The protests might appear to have little in common. But they do. Farmers are increasingly finding it difficult to make a living, whether, for instance, because of neoliberal trade policies that lead to the import of produce that undermines domestic production and undercuts prices, the withdrawal of state support or the implementation of net-zero emissions policies that set unrealistic targets.

The common thread is that, by one way or another, farming is deliberately being made impossible or financially non-viable. The aim is to drive most farmers off the land and ram through an agenda that by its very nature seems likely to produce shortages and undermine food security.

A ‘one world agriculture’ global agenda is being promoted by the likes of the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum. It involves a vision of food and farming that sees companies such as Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and Cargill working with Microsoft, Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate AI-driven farmerless farms, laboratory engineered ‘food’ and retail dominated by the likes of Amazon and Walmart. A cartel of data owners, proprietary input suppliers and e-commerce platforms at the commanding heights of the economy.

The agenda is the brainchild of a digital-corporate-financial complex that wants to transform and control all aspects of life and human behaviour. This complex forms part of an authoritarian global elite that has the ability to coordinate its agenda globally via the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other supranational organisations, including influential think tanks and foundations (Gates, Rockefeller etc).

Its agenda for food and farming is euphemistically called a ‘food transition’. Big agribusiness and ‘philanthropic’ foundations position themselves as the saviours of humanity due to their much-promoted plans to ‘feed the world’ with high-tech ‘precision’ farming’, ‘data-driven’ agriculture and ‘green’ (net-zero) production – with ‘sustainability’ being the mantra.

Integral to this ‘food transition’ is the ‘climate emergency’ narrative, a commentary that has been carefully constructed and promoted (see the work of investigative journalist Cory Morningstar), and net-zero ideology tied to carbon farming and carbon trading.

The ‘food transition’ involves locking farmers (at least those farmers who will remain in farming) further into a corporate-controlled agriculture that extracts wealth and serves the market needs of global corporations, carbon trading Ponzi schemes and institutional investors and speculators with no connection to farming who regard agriculture, food commodities and agricultural land as mere financial assets. These farmers will be reduced to corporate profit-extracting agents who bear all of the risks.

This predatory commercialisation of the countryside uses flawed premises and climate alarmism to legitimise the roll-out of technologies to supposedly deliver us all from climate breakdown and Malthusian catastrophe.

In society in general, we also see the questioning of official narratives discouraged, censored and marginalised. We saw this with the policies and the ‘science’ that were used to legitimise COVID-related state actions. A wealthy elite increasingly funds science, determines what should be studied, how it should be studied and how the findings are disseminated and how the technology produced is to be used.

This elite has the power to shut down genuine debate and to smear and censor others who question the dominant narrative. The prevailing thinking is that the problems humanity face are all to be solved through technical innovation determined by plutocrats and centralised power.

This haughty mindset (or outright arrogance) leads to, and is symptomatic of, an authoritarianism that seeks to impose a range of technologies on humanity with no democratic oversight. This includes self-transmitting vaccines, the genetic engineering of plants and humans, synthetic food, geoengineering and transhumanism.

What we see is a misguided eco-modernist paradigm that concentrates power and privileges techno-scientific expertise (a form of technocratic exceptionalism). At the same time, historical power relations (often rooted in agriculture and colonialism) and their legacies within and between societies across the world are conveniently ignored and depoliticised. Technology is not the cure-all for the destructive impacts of poverty, inequality, dispossession, imperialism or class exploitation.

When it comes to the technologies and policies being rolled out in the agriculture sector, these phenomena will be reinforced and further entrenched – and that includes illness and poor health, which have markedly increased as a result of the modern food we eat and the agrochemicals and practices already used by the corporations pushing for the ‘food transition’. However, that then opens up other money-spinning techno-fix opportunities in the life sciences sector for investors like BlackRock that invest in both agriculture and pharmaceuticals.

But in a neoliberal privatised economy that has often facilitated the rise of members of the controlling wealthy elite, it is reasonable to assume that its members possess certain assumptions of how the world works and should continue to work: a world based on deregulation with limited oversight and the hegemony of private capital and a world led by private individuals like Bill Gates who think they know best.

Whether through, for instance, the patenting of life forms, carbon trading, entrenching market (corporate) dependency or land investments, their eco-modern policies serve as cover for generating and amassing further wealth and for cementing their control.

So, it should come as little surprise that powerful people who have contempt for democratic principles (and by implication, ordinary people) believe they have some divine right to undermine food security, close down debate, enrich themselves further courtesy of their technologies and policies and gamble with humanity’s future.

The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. semiconductor firms must strengthen oversight of their foreign partners and work more closely with the government and investigative groups, a group of experts told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, saying the outsourcing of production overseas has made tracking chip sales more difficult, enabling sanctions evasion by Russia and other adversaries.

U.S. semiconductor firms largely produce their chips in China and other Asian countries from where they are further distributed around the world, making it difficult to ascertain who exactly is buying their products, the experts told the committee at a hearing in Washington on February 27.

The United States and the European Union imposed sweeping technology sanctions on Russia to weaken its ability to wage war following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russia’s military industrial complex is heavily reliant on Western technology, including semiconductors, for the production of sophisticated weapons.

“Western companies design chips made by specialized plants in other countries, and they sell them by the millions, with little visibility over the supply chain of their products beyond one or two layers of distribution,” Damien Spleeters, deputy director of operations at Conflict Armament Research, told senators.

He added that, if manufacturers required point-of-sale data from distributors, it would vastly improve their ability to trace the path of semiconductors recovered from Russian weapons and thereby identify sanctions-busting supply networks.

The banned Western chips are said to be flowing to Russia via networks in China, Turkey, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

Spleeters said he discovered a Chinese company diverting millions of dollars of components to sanctioned Russian companies by working with U.S. companies whose chips were found in Russian weapons.

That company was sanctioned earlier this month by the United States.

'It's Going To Be Whack-A-Mole'

The committee is scrutinizing several U.S. chip firms whose products have turned up in Russian weapons, Senator Richard Blumenthal (Democrat-Connecticut) said, adding “these companies know or should know where their components are going.”

Spleeters threw cold water on the idea that Russia is acquiring chips from household appliances such as washing machines or from major online retail websites.

“We have seen no evidence of chips being ripped off and then repurposed for this,” he said.

“It makes little sense that Russia would buy a $500 washing machine for a $1 part that they could obtain more easily,” Spleeters added.

In his opening statement, Senator Ron Johnson (Republican-Wisconsin) said he doubted whether any of the solutions proposed by the experts would work, noting that Russia was ramping up weapons production despite sweeping sanctions.

“You plug one hole, another hole is gonna be opening up, it's gonna be whack-a-mole. So it's a reality we have to face,” said Johnson.

Russia last year imported $1.7 billion worth of foreign-made microchips despite international sanctions, Bloomberg reported last month, citing classified Russian customs service data.

Johnson also expressed concern that sanctions would hurt Western nations and companies.

“My guess is they're just going to get more and more sophisticated evading the sanctions and finding components, or potentially finding other suppliers...like Huawei,” Johnson said.

Huawei is a leading Chinese technology company that produces chips among other products.

James Byrne, the founder and director of the open-source intelligence and analysis group at the Royal United Services Institute, said that officials and companies should not give up trying to track the chips just because it is difficult.

'Shocking' Dependency On Western Technology

He said that the West has leverage because Russia is so dependent on Western technology for its arms industry.

“Modern weapons platforms cannot work without these things. They are the brains of almost all modern weapons platforms,” Byrne said.

“These semiconductors vary in sophistication and importance, but it is fair to say that without them Russia … would not have been able to sustain their war effort,” he said.

Byrne said the depth of the dependency on Western technology -- which goes beyond semiconductors to include carbon fiber, polymers, lenses, and cameras -- was “really quite shocking” considering the Kremlin’s rhetoric about import substitution and independence.

Elina Ribakova, a Russia expert and economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said an analysis of 2,800 components taken from Russian weapons collected in Ukraine showed that 95 percent came from countries allied with Ukraine, with the vast majority coming from the United States. The sample, however, may not be representative of the actual distribution of component origin.

Ribakova warned that Russia has been accelerating imports of semiconductor machine components in case the United States imposes such export controls on China.

China can legally buy advanced Western components for semiconductor manufacturing equipment and use them to manufacture and sell advanced semiconductors to Russia, Senator Margaret Hassan (Democrat-New Hampshire) said.

Ribakova said the manufacturing components would potentially allow Russia to “insulate themselves for somewhat longer.”

Ribakova said technology companies are hesitant to beef up their compliance divisions because it can be costly. She recommended that the United States toughen punishment for noncompliance as the effects would be felt beyond helping Ukraine.

“It is also about the credibility of our whole system of economic statecraft. Malign actors worldwide are watching whether they will be credible or it's just words that were put on paper,” she said.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

"We will, in the months to come, have to accelerate the scale of our support," Macron said in a speech on January 30 during a visit to Sweden. The "costs...of a Russian victory are too high for all of us."

EU leaders will meet in Brussels on February 1 for a meeting of the European Council, where they will discuss aid to Ukraine as the war approaches its second anniversary.

Ukraine continues to hold off large-scale Russian grounds attacks in the east but has struggled to intercept many of the deadly missiles Moscow fires at its cities on a regular basis.

Earlier in the day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia had launched nearly 1,000 missiles and drones at Ukraine since the start of the year as Kyiv maintained a missile-threat alert for several regions on January 30, hours after Russian strikes killed at least three civilians.

"Russia has launched over 330 missiles of various types and approximately 600 combat drones at Ukrainian cities since the beginning of the year," Zelenskiy said on X, formerly Twitter.

"To withstand such terrorist pressure, a sufficiently strong air shield is required. And this is the type of air shield we are building with our partners," he wrote.

"Air defense and electronic warfare are our top priorities. Russian terror must be defeated -- this is achievable."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

A man was killed and his wife was wounded in the Russian shelling early on January 30 in the village of Veletenske in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, the regional prosecutor's office reported.

U.S. lawmakers have been debating for months a supplementary spending bill that includes $61 billion in aid to Ukraine. The aid would allow Ukraine to obtain a variety of U.S. weapons and armaments, including air-defense systems. The $61 billion -- if approved -- would likely cover Ukraine's needs through early 2025, experts have said.

Separately, regional Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said that Russian forces had fired 272 shells at Kherson from across the Dnieper River.

In the eastern region of Donetsk, one civilian was killed and another one was wounded by the Russian bombardment of the settlement of Myrnohrad, Vadym Filashin, the governor of the Ukrainian-controlled part of the region, said on January 30.

Also in Donetsk, in the industrial city of Avdiyivka, Russian shells struck a private house, killing a 47-year-old woman, Filashkin said on Telegram.

Russian forces have been trying to capture Adviyivka for the past several weeks in one of the bloodiest battles of the war triggered by Moscow's unprovoked invasion in February 2022.

Indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas has turned most of Avdiyivka into rubble.

Earlier on January 30, Ukrainian air defenses shot down 15 out of 35 drones launched by Russia, the military said.

The Russian drones targeted the Mykolayiv, Kirovohrad, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, and Kharkiv regions, the Ukrainian Air Force said.

Russian forces also launched 10 S-300 anti-aircraft missiles at civilian infrastructure in the Donetsk and Kherson regions, the military said, adding that there dead and wounded among the civilian population.

The Ukrainian Air Force later said that the Kirovohrad, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhya regions remained under a heightened level of alert due to the danger of more missile strikes.

Meanwhile, Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses had destroyed or intercepted 21 Ukrainian drones over the Moscow-occupied Crimean Peninsula and several Russian regions.

On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces fought 70 close-quarters battles along the entire front line, the General Staff of the Ukrainian military said in its daily report early on January 30. Ukrainian defenders repelled repeated Russian attacks in eight hot spots in the east, the military said.

In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on January 29 warned that Ukraine's gains over two years of fighting invading Russian troops were all in doubt without new U.S. funding, as NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg visited to lobby Congress.

WATCH: In February 2022, Ukrainian Army medic Yuriy Armash was trying to reach his unit as the Russian invasion was advancing fast. He was caught in Kherson, tortured, and held for months. While in captivity, he used his medical training to treat other Ukrainian prisoners. Some say he saved their lives.

Tens of billions of dollars in aid has been sent to Ukraine since the invasion in February 2022, but Republican lawmakers have grown reluctant to keep supporting Kyiv, saying it lacks a clear end game as the fighting against President Vladimir Putin's forces grinds on.

Blinken offered an increasingly dire picture of Ukraine's prospects without U.S. approval of the so-called supplemental funding amid reports that some progress was being made on the matter late on January 29.

In Brussels, European Union leaders will restate their determination to continue to provide "timely, predictable, and sustainable military support" to Ukraine at a summit on February 1, according to draft conclusions of the meeting.

"The European Council also reiterates the urgent need to accelerate the delivery of ammunition and missiles," the draft text, seen by Reuters, also says.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Led by Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) and cosponsored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Delia Ramirez (D-IL), Chuy García (D-AZ), and Greg Casar (D-TX), House Resolution 943 notably calls for ending unilateral coercive economic measures against Cuba and other regional states. Initially introduced on December 19, 2023, Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Hank Johnson (D-GA) added their co-sponsorships on January10. Others may join them.

Rap sheet on Monroeism

While the Monroe Doctrine ingenuously claimed to protect hemispheric independence from foreign interference, HR 943 charges that the policy has, in fact, been used as a “mandate” to give the US license to interfere in the internal affairs of other states to promote its own narrow interests.

The resolution forcefully begins with noting the “massive, forced displacement and genocide of Native peoples” by the North American colonialists.

The resolution goes on to enumerate the further progression of the US imperium on the hemisphere. Back in the 1840s, the US took 55% of Mexico. In 1898, Puerto Rico (still possessed) and Cuba (Guantánamo still controlled) were seized. From 1898-1934, Washington intervened militarily in Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

In 1904, “international police power” to protect US and foreign creditors in the region was claimed under the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In 1947, the CIA was created with authorization for covert action in the region. Then in 1953, Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in the “first” CIA coup.

In 1961, the US facilitated a 21-year military dictatorship in Brazil. The following year, the still continuing embargo (really a blockade) of Cuba was initiated. In 1973, Washington backed a coup in Chile and the succeeding 15-year military dictatorship.

From 1975-1980, the US coordinated Operation Condor with terroristic military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. In 1983, the US invaded and overthrew the government of Grenada. And in the 1980s and early 1990s, the US backed “dirty wars” in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

In 1991, the US covertly financed a military coup in Haiti. Another coup in Haiti was precipitated in 2004. Starting in 2000, billions were provided for Plan Colombia, implicated in massive human rights abuses. Meanwhile, from 1941-2003, US Naval operations in Vieques, Puerto Rico, caused deaths and lethal illnesses. In 2002, the US supported an unsuccessful coup in Venezuela. US-backed coups in Honduras in 2009 and in Bolivia in 2019 were both followed by Washington’s support for the subsequent illegitimate governments.

Although this amounts to an appalling rap sheet, the resolution just highlights some of the more obvious transgressions. Omitted, for instance, is the 1989 US invasion of Panama and overthrow of that government.

US-imposed institutions of regional control

The resolution notes that the Washington-based and largely US-controlled Organization of American States (OAS) ignores “the many egregious abuses perpetrated” by the US and its client states.

Similarly, the largely US-dominated International Monetary Fund is implicated in the regional debt crises, which has resulted in austerity and stagnant development. Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions, which are often imposed by the US in free-trade agreements, are also criticized in the resolution.

The resolution blames the massive regional immigration of displaced persons partly on Washington’s own policies. The Central American “dirty wars” in the 1980s and 1990s and more recently the US-sponsored US drug wars and free trade agreements are cited among the problematic contributing causes.

Regarding foreign intervention in the hemisphere, although not noted in the resolution, has been the US’s actual abetting of foreign interference; that is, when it aligns with its interests. Just this month, the British sent a warship to Guyana. At the same time, a US deputy secretary of defense was meeting with the Guyanese, backing the claims of a US oil company in territory disputed between Guyana and Venezuela.

Further, the US fully backs what amount to European colonies, regardless of whether they are called dependencies, overseas territories, or even departments. France claims French Guiana, Guadeloupe Saint Martin, Saint Barthélemy, and Martinique. Netherlands possesses Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. The UK has Bermuda, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the Malvinas. Washington, too, has its own de facto colonies of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Remedies

 Following this devastating bill of particulars, the resolution calls for remedies. The first of which is for the State Department to “send a strong signal” by annulling the Monroe Doctrine. A “good neighborhood policy” is proposed to replace it.

That sounds nice. But, as the resolution notes, then US Secretary of State John Kerry mouthed similarly soothing words in 2013 and nothing came of that.   Notably, this resolution adds a bite to the bark, specifically calling for terminating all unilateral coercive economic sanctions. These measures are a form of collective punishment and as such are illegal under international law and condemned by the United Nations.

Regarding the recidivist US practice of backing “extraconstitutional transfer of power,” the resolution urges Congress to legislate automatic reviews of assistance to coup governments. Aid would only be reinstated after the both the US and the majority of regional states agree that constitutional order has been re-instituted.

Interestingly, the resolution calls for the “prompt” declassification of all US secret documentation on coups, dictatorships, and human rights abuses. Cover-ups from the past would be exposed.

In terms of regional governance, the resolution insists that the OAS be reformed. Without naming US-sycophantic Luis Almagro, the resolution requests accountability for unethical and criminal activities by the organization’s secretary general plus full transparency on financial and personnel decisions (not explicitly named, but including his girlfriend). An ombudsman’s office is proposed. Human rights rapporteurs and electoral observation would be independent. Similarly, the US is asked to work cooperatively with other regional bodies such as CELAC, CARICOM, and UNASUR.

Unspecified reforms of the International Monetary Fund and other international financial institutions are proposed to ensure equity for loans to developing countries. International Monetary Fund Special Drawing Rights are cited, which would help regional development and climate adaptation. Contributions are also recommended to the Amazon Fund.

Citizen initiatives

Of the sponsors of the resolution, three had been on a delegation to Brazil, Colombia, and Chile in August facilitated by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), where they met with high-level officials. CEPR’s Director of International Policy Alexander Main commented that the delegation sought to “promote a fresh approach to US relations.”

CEPR publishes the monthly Sanctions Watch, which reports on the asphyxiating impact of the unilateral coercive economic measures. Longest sanctioned, Cuba is in dire need of humanitarian relief from Uncle Sam. Particularly debilitating for Cuba was President Trump’s inclusion of the island nation on the State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) list, which cuts it off from otherwise available aid.

The SSOT policy has been continued by President Biden. A call to reverse the policy is absent from the proposed congressional resolution, which is sponsored by Biden’s fellow Democrats. However, the National Network on Cuba (NNOC) and the Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect (ACERE) are among the many organizations working to get Cuba off that list. These include faith-based groups such as the Presbyterian Mission and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Even the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), which is the DC-based think tank that serves to give a liberal gloss to State Department policies, wants Cuba removed from the list.

The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition (NSC) works on reversing US sanctions there and is gearing up against a new congressional initiative to extend the grueling collective punishment. Fire This Time Movement for Social Justice (FTT) and the Venezuela Solidarity Network are among the North America groups working to take the US sanctions burden off of Venezuela.

The SanctionsKill campaign opposes all economic coercive measures, including those imposed by the United Nations. The Latin America and the Caribbean Policy Forum, spearheaded by CodePink, is working for an “Americas without sanctions” with the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ) and others. CodePink and World Beyond War hosted a mock “funeral” for the Monroe Doctrine in December.

Counter initiative

Earlier on December 1, María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) and Chip Roy (R-TX) had introduced a resolution, which was opposite of the intent of the resolution led by Velázquez. This other resolution celebrated the Monroe Doctrine’s bicentennial and was joined by fourteen other Republican representatives as cosponsors. They asserted that the need is greater than ever to protect against “malign overseas influence.” Salazar warned, “China, Russia and Iran are trying to invade the Western Hemisphere.”

Although Velázquez’s and her fellow Democrats’ HR 143 calls for annulling the Monroe Doctrine and ending sanctions, we should have no illusion that their resolution will end US imperialism any time soon. Unfortunately, many on the blue team including their standard bearer have developed a fervor for American exceptionalism similar to the wing-nuts on the other side of the aisle.

But, given the seemingly unlimited bipartisan appetite for foreign intervention, it is at least a step in the right direction and a platform that can be used for organizing, particularly against sanctions. As the Spanish daily El País commented, the resolution to annul is a “charge against two centuries of US expansionist policy.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

Speaking on January 11 in Riga on the last stop of a tour of the Baltic states, he added that the situation on the front line is "very complicated" and again said that Ukrainian forces lack weapons.

Zelenskiy told reporters that after the election in which President Vladimir Putin is expected to win another term in office Russia will undertake military action on a larger scale.

He said later on X, formerly Twitter, that he met with Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina in Riga and discussed "further military aid to Ukraine and tangible actions to advance Ukraine’s path to EU and NATO membership."

Speaking earlier in Estonia, Zelenskiy rejected the possibility of a cease-fire with Russia, saying it would not lead to substantive progress in the war and only favor Moscow by giving it time to boost supplies to its military as the conflict nears its two-year anniversary.

“A pause on the Ukrainian battlefield will not mean a pause in the war,” the Ukrainian leader said in Estonia's capital, Tallinn, on January 11 during a tour of the three Baltic nations.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

"Give Russia two to three years and it will simply run us over. We wouldn't take that risk.... There will be no pauses in favor of Russia," he said. "A pause would play into [Russia’s] hands.... It might crush us afterward.”

Zelenskiy has pleaded with Ukraine's allies to keep supplying it with weapons amid signs of donor fatigue in some countries and as Russia turns to countries such as Iran and North Korea for munitions.

NATO allies meeting in Brussels on January 10 tried to allay Kyiv's concerns over supplies, saying they will continue to provide Ukraine with major military, economic, and humanitarian aid. NATO allies have outlined plans to provide "billions of euros of further capabilities" in 2024 to Ukraine, the alliance said in a statement.

But in Washington, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said U.S. assistance for Ukraine has "ground to a halt," though lawmakers continue negotiating a deal that would tie the release of the aid to U.S. border security.

Meanwhile, Latvia and Estonia announced aid packages during Zelenskiy's visits to their capitals.

Latvia will provide Ukraine with a new package of military aid, President Edgars Rinkevics said after meeting with Zelenskiy in Riga.

"Today I informed the president of Ukraine about the next package of aid, which includes howitzers, ammunition, anti-tank weapons, antiaircraft missiles, mortars, all-terrain vehicles, hand grenades, helicopters, drones, generators, means of communication, equipment," Rinkevics said, speaking at a joint press conference with Zelenskiy.

Estonian President Alar Karis said earlier after his meeting with Zelenskiy that his country will provide 1.2 billion euros ($1.31 billion) in aid to Ukraine until 2027.

"Ukraine needs more and better weapons," Karis said at a joint news conference with Zelenskiy.

"The capabilities of the EU military industry must be increased so that Ukraine gets what it needs, not tomorrow, but today. We should not place any restrictions on the supply of weapons to Ukraine," he added.

Ukraine has been subjected to several massive waves of Russian missile and drone strikes since the start of the year that have caused civilian deaths and material damage.

In the latest such attack, a hotel in downtown Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, was struck by Russian missiles overnight on January 11. The strike injured 13 people, including Turkish journalists staying at the hotel, Kharkiv regional police chief Volodymyr Tymoshko said.

A Russian missile attack struck a hotel in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, late on January 10, wounding 11 people, according to local authorities.

The General Staff of the Ukrainian military said on January 11 that 56 combat clashes took place at the front during the day. The operational situation in the northern directions did not change significantly, and the formation of Russian offensive groups was not detected.

With reporting by AFP and Reuters

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Han Youngsoo (Republic of Korea), Seoul, Korea 1956–1963.

In October 2023, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published its annual Trade and Development Report. Nothing in the report came as a major surprise. The growth of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues to decline with no sign of a rebound. Following a modest post-pandemic recovery of 6.1% in 2021, economic growth in 2023 fell to 2.4%, below pre-pandemic levels, and is projected to remain at 2.5% in 2024. The global economy, UNCTAD says, is ‘flying at “stall speed”’, with all conventional indicators showing that most of the world is experiencing a recession.

The latest notebook from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The World in Depression: A Marxist Analysis of Crisis, questions the use of the term ‘recession’ to describe the current situation, arguing that it acts as ‘a smokescreen meant to hide the true nature of the crisis’. Rather, the notebook explains that ‘the prolonged and profound crisis that we are experiencing today is… a great depression’. Most governments in the world have used conventional tools to try and grow their way out of the great depression, but these approaches have placed an enormous cost on household budgets, which are already hit hard by high inflation, and have curbed the investments needed to improve employment prospects. As UNCTAD notes, central banks ‘prioritise short-term monetary stability over long-term financial sustainability. This trend, together with inadequate regulation in commodity markets and continuous neglect for rising inequality, are fracturing the world economy’. Our team in Brazil explores these matters further in the recently launched Financeirização do capital e a luta de classes (‘Financialisation of Capital and the Class Struggle’), the fourth issue of our Portuguese-language journal Revista Estudos do Sul Global (‘Journal of Global South Studies’).

There are some exceptions to this rule, however. UNCTAD projects that five of the G20 countries will experience better growth rates in 2024: Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, and Russia. There are different reasons why these countries are exceptions: in Brazil, for instance, ‘booming commodity exports and bumper harvests are driving an uptick in growth’, as UNCTAD writes, while Mexico has benefited from ‘less aggressive monetary tightening and an inflow of new investment to establish new manufacturing capacity, triggered by the bottlenecks that emerged in East Asia in 2021 and 2022’. What seems to unite these countries is that they have not tightened monetary policy and have used various forms of state intervention to ensure that necessary investments are made in manufacturing and infrastructure.

Farhan Siki (Indonesia), Market Review on School of Athens, 2018.

The OECD’s Economic Outlook, published in November 2023, is consistent with UNCTAD’s assessment, suggesting that ‘global growth remains highly dependent on fast-growing Asian economies’. Over the next two years, the OECD estimates that this economic growth will be concentrated in India, China, and Indonesia, which collectively account for nearly 40% of the world population. In a recent International Monetary Fund assessment entitled ‘China Stumbles But Is Unlikely to Fall’, Eswar Prasad writes that ‘China’s economic performance has been stellar over the past three decades’. Prasad, the former head of the IMF’s China desk, attributes this performance to the large volume of state investment in the economy and, in recent years, to the growth of household consumption (which is related to the eradication of extreme poverty). Like others in the IMF and OECD, Prasad marvels at how China has been able to grow so fast ‘without many attributes that economists have identified as being crucial for growth – such as a well-functioning financial system, a strong institutional framework, a market-oriented economy, and a democratic and open system of government’. Prasad’s description of these four factors is ideologically driven and misleading. For instance, it is hard to think of the US financial system as ‘well-functioning’ in the wake of the housing crisis that triggered a banking crisis across the Atlantic world, or given that roughly $36 trillion – or a fifth of global liquidity – is sitting in illicit tax havens with no oversight or regulation.

What the data shows us is that a set of Asian countries is growing very quickly, with India and China in the lead and with the latter having the longest sustained period of rapid economic growth over at least the past thirty years. This is uncontested. What is contested is the explanation for why China, in particular, has experienced such high rates of economic growth, how it has been able to eradicate extreme poverty, and, in recent decades, why it has struggled to overcome the perils of social inequality. The IMF and the OECD are unable to formulate a proper assessment of China because they reject – ab initio – that China is pioneering a new kind of socialist path. This fits within the West’s failure to comprehend the reasons for development and underdevelopment in the Global South more broadly.

Over the past year, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has engaged with Chinese scholars who have been trying to understand how their country was able to break free of the ‘development of underdevelopment’ cycle. As part of this process, we collaborate with the Chinese journal Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横) to produce an international quarterly edition that collects the work of Chinese scholars who are experts on the respective topics and brings voices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America into dialogue with China. The first three issues have looked at the shifting geopolitical alignments in the world (‘On the Threshold of a New International Order’, March 2023), China’s decades-long pursuit of socialist modernisation (‘China’s Path from Extreme Poverty to Socialist Modernisation’, June 2023), and the relationship between China and Africa (‘China-Africa Relations in the Belt and Road Era’, October 2023).

The latest issue, ‘Chinese Perspectives on Twenty-First Century Socialism’ (December 2023), traces the evolution of the global socialist movement and tries to identify its future direction. In this issue, Yang Ping, the editor of the Chinese-language version of Wenhua Zongheng, and Pan Shiwei, the honorary president of the Institute of Cultural Marxism, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, contend that a new period in socialist history is currently emerging. For Yang and Pan, this new ‘wave’ or ‘form’ of socialism, following the birth of Marxism in nineteenth-century Europe and the rise of many socialist states and socialist-inspired national liberation movements in the twentieth century, began to emerge with China’s period of reform and opening up in the 1970s. They argue that, through a gradual process of reform and experimentation, China has developed a distinct socialist market economy. The authors both assess how China can strengthen its socialist system to overcome various domestic and international challenges as well as the global implications of China’s rise – that is, whether or not it can promote a new wave of socialist development in the world.

Denilson Baniwa (Brazil), The Call of the Wild//Yawareté Tapuia, 2023.

In the introduction to this issue, Marco Fernandes, a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, writes that China’s growth has been sharply distinct from that of the West since it has not relied upon colonial plunder or the predatory exploitation of natural resources in the Global South. Instead, Fernandes argues that China has formulated its own socialist path, which has included public control over finance, state planning of the economy, heavy investments in key areas that generate not only growth but also social progress, and promoting a culture of science and technology. Public finance, investment, and planning allowed China to industrialise through advancements in science and technology and through improving human capital and human life.

China has shared many of its lessons with the world, such as the need to control finance, harness science and technology, and industrialise. The Belt and Road Initiative, now ten years old, is one avenue for such cooperation between China and the Global South. However, while China’s rise has provided developing countries with more choices and has improved their prospects for development, Fernandes is cautious about the possibility of a new ‘socialist wave’, warning that the obstinate facts facing the Global South, such as hunger and unemployment, cannot be overcome unless there is industrial development. He writes:

this will not be attainable merely through relations with China (or Russia). It is necessary to strengthen national popular projects with broad participation from progressive social sectors, especially the working classes, otherwise the fruits of any development are unlikely to be reaped by those who need them the most. Given that few countries in the Global South are currently experiencing an upsurge in mass movements, the prospects for a global ‘third socialist wave’ remain very challenging; rather, a new wave of development with the potential to take on a progressive character, seems more feasible.

This is precisely what we indicated in our July dossier, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory. A future that centres the well-being of humankind and the planet will not materialise on its own; it will only emerge from organised social struggles.

Philip Fagbeyiro (Nigeria), Streets of Insignificance, 2019.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot about Argentine President-elect Javier Milei for the November 24, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Fox News (11/19/23)

Janine Jackson: Many people are hearing the name Javier Milei for the first time about now. Milei has just been elected president of Argentina—56% to 44% are the numbers we’re hearing right now—over the country’s economic minister, Sergio Massa.

Fox News trumpeted, “Javier Milei crushes Argentine Left, Becomes World’s First Libertarian Head of State.” Donald Trump announced that Milei would “truly make Argentina great again,” and Elon Musk declared, “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina.” That reception gives you some indication of where this is going, and what it could mean.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He’s author of the book Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy, and co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Mark Weisbrot.

Mark Weisbrot: Thanks, Janine. Great to be here.

JJ: Lest there be a lot of mystery: To start with, Javier Milei carried around a chainsaw as a prop on the campaign trail, and that was about “cutting public spending.” And he described the state as a “pedophile in a kindergarten.” And don’t think he’s done, because he went on to say “the state is a pedophile in a kindergarten with the children chained up and bathed in Vaseline.”

It reminds me of Duterte saying he’d be “happy to slaughter” 3 million drug addicts in the Philippines, and of course it reminds folks of Trump and his current pledge to “root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of this country” (and that’s just from this week).

It’s histrionic. We have politicians saying things you hear supervillains in the movies say. And I guess the concern is that they will be underestimated as merely colorful and over the top, and not considered in terms of the actual real-world things that they want to do and are capable of.

So there, that’s my setup. What are the material things that listeners need to know about Javier Milei and his election?

CEPR (11/17/23)

MW: Well, the material craziness of Milei is an important part of the story. And as you mentioned, or hinted at, by the examples you gave, the media have been comparing him to Trump, and he likes it. And so it is part of that phenomenon, which we could talk about for hours, of crazy people getting elected in situations and ways in which they wouldn’t in the past. And, of course, that’s the big anthropological sociological question, is how does this happen?

But I won’t get into that. What I’d rather talk about is what his craziness means. I think that’s more interesting to your audience as well.

And so his craziness is partly a coherent extreme-right libertarian view. He says, “Every time the state intervenes, it’s a violent action that harms the right to private property, and in the end limits our freedom.” And he applies this to fixing the problem of hunger, fixing the problem of poverty or employment. So he’s really as extreme as you get in that right-wing libertarian set of ideas.

Reuters (11/24/23)

So the question is, in terms of policy, what does that mean? First, he wants to abolish the central bank, which of course would be a disaster, and almost no economist would support even thinking like that. And he wants to also dollarize the economy, which would probably also be a disaster; most economists would say that. They don’t even have the reserves for that at this point, but it wouldn’t be a good idea.

So he has big things he would get rid of. He would get rid of some ministries. And certainly the chainsaw, a symbol. A guy walks around in a Batman costume with chainsaws, and he got elected president. He wants to cut public spending at least 15%, has no attachment whatsoever to anything like public education, healthcare and everything. So he would cut anything he can, and the economy would probably go into recession, almost certainly. And who knows where it would stop.

JJ: He seems to have a definition of “socialism,” and this is what I feel like US media are going to pick up on, because, as you and I both know, they will have a lot of quotes from him, and they will have quotes from some people who disagree with him, but I don’t think they’re going to dig deep into the rhetoric. And so he talks about everything that happened from previous administrations in Argentina as “socialism,” and, I mean, how do we unpack that?

MW: Yeah, that’s right. Argentina “has embraced socialist ideas for the last hundred years.” Of course, that’s crazy too.

I don’t know what he’ll actually be able to do. That’s the first thing. He has only 39 seats out of 257 in the Lower House, and 8 out of 72 in the Senate.

Now he does have a party aligned with him, that was the president from 2015 to ’19. And that was Macri. And that’s how he got elected, partly, because Macri and his party supported him; these are right-wing people, but they’re not as crazy as him.

So it’s not clear what he’ll get done. This is going to be what we’ll see.

You have to remember too that the government that he’s succeeding, the Peronists, they have a real movement, and they’ve gotten in the streets before when terrible things have happened; in 2001, four presidents resigned within less than two weeks, at the end of 2001. And that was because of protest.

New York Times (8/19/19)

I think this is maybe where to start the story, because you guys focus on what the media are missing or getting wrong. And I think we really should start, I think, with what you don’t see in the media.

You don’t see, for example, that in these last 20 years, the Peronists actually did very well. They first came to power with Néstor Kirchner in 2003. And you had, in the 12 years that followed, before Macri, you had a 71% decline in poverty, 81% decline in extreme poverty, and GDP, or income per person, grew by 42%, which, I compared it to Mexico, it’s three times as fast.

So this was a very successful set of policies, but I haven’t seen that in any of the coverage. I wrote it in a New York Times op-ed a couple of years ago, but you don’t really see that part of the story.

And that’s unfortunate, because people need to know that. And of course it’s partly because people don’t know that—the Argentine media is no better than here, the major media—that somebody like this could get elected.

And, of course, what happened in this story, the other part of the story, I think, that’s really—well, first let’s start with the depression from 1998 to 2002. That was caused, overwhelmingly, by the IMF. And you can go back to the New York Times and read that, actually; at the time, they actually reported the IMF role.

So that was a huge part of the story. Because as you know, as most of your listeners know, the IMF is primarily dominated by decision-making by the US Treasury Department.

And then, of course, you had the Kirchners and the Peronists, and you had this long period where they did very well. And Macri himself—that was the president from 2015 to ’19—he wouldn’t have gotten to power, actually, if it weren’t for more things that came from the United States. And I can tell you that as well, depending on how much time you have.

JJ: Please do; I think folks want to know where the US role is here.

New York Times (4/1/16)

MW: Yeah, I think it’s really important, actually, for people here to know, because this was such a big thing. I mean, Argentina is obviously one of the largest economies in South America. And during this period, in the first decade of the 21st century, it wasn’t just Argentina that had this great rebound. Latin America as a whole reduced poverty from 44% to 28%, after having two decades of increasing poverty before that; that was 2003 to ’13, is the decade I’m looking at. That was a decade in which the majority of the hemisphere was governed by left governments for the first time ever.

And then the United States, of course, played this role, which we’ll focus right now on Argentina, in trying to get rid of all of them, and making their lives difficult so that they would be ousted, a number of them by coup d’etat.

So what happened in Argentina? They had to default to the IMF, in 2003, and the IMF backed down, and they defaulted on their private debt, right before they actually defaulted to the IMF, but the IMF rolled over the debt. So they had a big fight with the IMF and the private creditors, just to stabilize the economy. But they did that successfully, and they grew.

And then in 2014, a New York judge decided that Argentina should not be able to pay its creditors, over 70% of its creditors, the ones who had accepted the restructured debt. And this was Thomas Griesa, a New York judge, and he did this on behalf of the vulture funds. These were funds that bought up the debt when it was very cheap in the early 2000s, and wanted to collect the full value of it.

Mark Weisbrot: “The whole mess that got this guy elected was really created by the Macri government and that IMF agreement.”

So he was trying to force the Argentine government to pay these US vulture funds. And he was doing it by cutting off the Argentines’ ability to pay all other creditors, until they would pay the vultures. And so that is part of what hurt the Argentina economy in 2014.

And just to show you how political this was, in 2016, the same judge, Griesa, actually wrote an opinion where he lifted the injunction on paying this debt, that is, he reversed the decision, and he said he did it because, and this is an exact quote from him, “Put simply. President Macri’s election changed everything.” OK?

So that’s partly how we got Macri, was him harming the Argentine economy right before that, and then, of course, reversing that tremendous harm as soon as Macri was elected. So there you go. There’s a big change. And it leads to another big change in Macri’s term because, OK, so Macri gets elected because of action that came from the US, and there are other actions as well, which I’ll describe.

But then Macri goes and gets—and this is because of Trump’s influence on the IMF that it happened—the largest loan that the IMF ever gave to anybody, any country in the world, $57 billion in 2018. And the conditions on that loan were terrible. And they forced the economy into recession. And then, of course, when things started to go sour—which they did right away, because the big loan that they got just financed capital flight out of the country, and, of course, that led to all kinds of problems—the IMF doubled down and had more austerity, both fiscal policy and monetary policy. And so things got worse.

And that actually leads you, really, to the situation you have today. That’s what created it: The economy, the 140% inflation that you have now, the whole mess that got this guy elected, was really created by the Macri government and that IMF agreement, and also other measures that the US took to deprive Argentina of dollars before Macri came to power as well.

Washington Post (11/19/19)

JJ: When you hear about having to make vulture funds whole, and the impact that has, I’m thinking Puerto Rico; I know that there’s lots of other places in the world that are coming to people’s mind. But then when you set that situation, so now I’m reading the Washington Post, which is trying to explain why did Milei get elected, and it’s saying:

Voters in this nation of 46 million demanded a drastic change from a government that has sent the peso tumbling, inflation skyrocketing and more than 40% of the population into poverty.

So they’re saying, well, Milei’s against this, the poverty and the problems that they’re having; he’s coming before the people and saying, “I’m going to shake that up.” And I don’t think, at least in this explanation, I’m not getting anything of the longer term history that you’re giving me. I’m getting, things were bad, Milei’s there to fix them, right?

MW: Yeah. Although, I mean, I don’t think the media here like Milei. It’s just like Trump. It’s this irony that you have in a lot of these situations, where the media don’t like these people because they’re too extreme. The US didn’t even want Bolsonaro, for example, in Brazil, who, by the way, was one of the first calls, a video call, that Milei made when he won this election. The mainstream consensus here is that these guys are too crazy, but they still do help them win.

JJ: Exactly….

MW: This is a paradox that probably you all can figure out better than me.

Vox (11/20/23)

JJ: I can’t. But you know what, you see the interviews, and we’re seeing them now, and folks who are listening will be seeing them, folks on the street in Argentina saying: “Well, there’s just too much inflation. There’s too much corruption.” Very sort of Trump-voter things of, “Well, I don’t like his social ideas, but his economic plans make sense.”

People want change. And I think that we can acknowledge that people want change. And then folks come along and say, you know what I am? I’m different. I represent change.

But where media don’t, to my mind, exercise their role is, well, why do people want change? And what does that have to do with the failure of existing systems, including economic systems? Instead, media just say, “I guess people just deep down want a kind of fascistic guy.” Even if they’re opposed, they still don’t dig deep enough, to my mind, into why folks were willing to do this Hail Mary play.

MW: Yeah, and I think part of the media story is that most people in Argentina, as well as your audience, don’t know this historical record. I mean, imagine if all the voters knew that in the past 20 years, you had the majority of that time when the Peronists were in power, the numbers that I just told you; people did quite well in terms of reducing poverty enormously. And the real wage growth was 34% under the Kirchners, for example, over that period. And all these things happened, and increased spending on cash transfer programs, everything. And they did extremely well.

Some people remember it, and that’s why they still got 44% of the vote, but not everybody is old enough, or even would necessarily understand the whole situation, not having seen it in print, or heard it on radio or television.

Al Jazeera (11/18/23)

And so, yeah, it’s easy for this guy to come in here, he’s almost literally a clown, and even though probably a lot of people, even, who voted for him think his ideas are crazy, or that he’s crazy, you see quotes like that in the press: “Yeah, he’s crazy, but I’m voting for him anyway.” But they don’t have a way of seeing that there actually have been successful alternatives.

And if we can go into the economics a little bit, I think part of the problem here is that the IMF loan is huge, and they have to pay that back. And of course they got some debt relief on the private debt, but the IMF doesn’t give any; they postponed the payment some, but it’s still going to come due. And, of course, you have capital flight because of that situation.

And you have a situation where you have what’s called an inflation depreciation spiral. So if confidence in the currency is undermined by a variety of things, including the inflation itself, and including the debt problems that the IMF left them with, and then pretty soon it’s going to be the anticipated and real policies of the IMF that are going to cause capital to flee the country, as they did in 2018.

So all of these things: What happens is capital flees the country, and that causes the currency to depreciate. And when the currency depreciates, then the price of all imports goes up, and then that causes more inflation, and then the increased inflation causes the currency to depreciate more.

And that’s why it was so hard for this latest government before Milei to resolve this problem, because it’s a self-perpetuating spiral, something you don’t want to get into. And, of course, there are ways, it is possible, but again, that’s a very hard problem. And that was a result of the policies that came in overwhelmingly with the Macri government, and the IMF agreement that he followed.

And you know, he even said it at one point, I don’t have the exact quote, but it was something like, “I did everything that I agreed to in this agreement, and the economy went down the toilet.” So even he realized that.

But again, you’re not seeing that in the public discussion. All you saw up to the election is, the party in power must be responsible for what’s happening and they have to go. And then you see this guy Milei come in with really crazed ideas, and nobody even cares so much how crazy they are, it’s just different. That’s kind of how Trump won as well.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mark Weisbrot; he’s co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. You can find their research and analysis online at CEPR.net. Mark Weisbrot, thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MW: Thank you.

The post Milei Is ‘Really as Extreme as You Get in Right-Wing Libertarian Ideas’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

From 9 to 15 October, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank held their annual joint meeting in Marrakech (Morocco). The last time that these two Bretton Woods institutions met on African soil was in 1973, when the IMF-World Bank meeting was held in Nairobi (Kenya). Kenya’s then President Jomo Kenyatta (1897–1978) urged those gathered to find ‘an early cure to the monetary sickness of inflation and instability that has afflicted the world’. Kenyatta, who became Kenya’s first president in 1964, noted that, ‘[o]ver the last fifteen years, many developing countries have been losing, every year, a significant proportion of their annual income through deterioration of their terms of trade’. Developing countries could not overcome the negative terms of trade in a situation where they sold raw materials or barely processed goods on the world market while being reliant on the import of expensive finished commodities and energy, even if they raised their volumes of export. ‘Recently’, Kenyatta added, ‘inflation in the industrial countries has led to further and important losses to the developing countries’.

‘The whole world is watching’, Kenyatta said. ‘This is not because many people understand the details of what you are discussing, but because the world looks to you to find urgent solutions to problems affecting their daily lives’. Kenyatta’s warnings went unheeded. Six decades after the meeting in Nairobi, the loss of national income to debt and inflation remains a serious problem for developing countries. But, in our time, the whole world is not watching. Most people do not even know that the IMF and World Bank met in Morocco, and few expect them to solve the world’s problems. That is because, across the globe, people know that these institutions are, in fact, the authors of pain and are simply not capable of solving the problems that they have created and exacerbated.

Ahead of the meeting in Morocco, Oxfam issued a statement that strongly criticised the IMF and World Bank for ‘returning to Africa for the first time in decades with the same old failed message: cut your spending, sack public service workers, and pay your debts despite the huge human costs’. Oxfam highlighted the economic crisis facing the Global South, pointing out that ‘more than half (57 percent) of the world’s poorest countries, home to 2.4 billion people, are having to cut public spending by a combined $229 billion over the next five years’. On top of this, they showed that ‘low- and low-middle income countries will be forced to pay nearly half a billion dollars every day in interest and debt repayments between now and 2029’. Though the IMF has said that it plans to create ‘social spending floors’ to prevent cuts in government spending on public services, Oxfam’s analysis of 27 IMF loan programmes found that ‘these floors are a smokescreen for more austerity: for every $1 the IMF encouraged governments to spend on public services, it has told them to cut six times more than that through austerity measures’. The fallacy of ‘social spending floors’ has also been demonstrated by Human Rights Watch in its recent report, Bandage on a Bullet Wound: IMF Social Spending Floors and the COVID-19 Pandemic.

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we continue to monitor the IMF’s impact on developing economies, including in our new dossier, How the International Monetary Fund Is Squeezing Pakistan (October 2023). Written and researched by Taimur Rahman and his colleagues at the Research and Publications Centre (Lahore, Pakistan), the dossier lays out the structural problems facing Pakistan’s economy, such as low productivity in its export-oriented industry and the high costs of imported luxury goods. Because of the lack of investment in industry, Pakistan’s labour productivity is low, and so its exports are priced out by other countries (as is the case with the textile industry in Bangladesh, China, and Vietnam). Meanwhile, the import of luxury goods would be far more devastating for the economy if not for the dollars earned by remittances from hard-working but ignored Pakistani workers, mainly in the Gulf states. Pakistan’s ballooning deficit, the dossier explains, is ‘driven by the fact that Pakistan is no longer competitive in the international market and has continued to import goods and services at a rate that it simply cannot afford’. Furthermore, ‘IMF-imposed conditions have further dried up the investment that Pakistan sorely needs to upgrade its infrastructure and accelerate industrialisation’. Not only does the IMF prevent investment for industrialisation, but it enforces cuts on public services (importantly, for health and education).

In July, the IMF approved a $3 billion stand-by agreement with Pakistan that it claimed would create ‘the space for social and development spending to help the people of Pakistan’. However, the IMF is simply feeding Pakistan the same tired neoliberal package, calling for ‘greater fiscal discipline, a market-determined exchange rate to absorb external pressures, and further progress on reforms related to the energy sector, climate resilience, and the business climate’ – all measures that will exacerbate the crisis. To ensure the permanency of these policies, the IMF spoke not only with the government of Caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar, but also with former Prime Minister Imran Khan (who was removed from office in 2022 in a move that was encouraged by the United States due to his neutrality on the war in Ukraine). As if this were not enough, through its role facilitating the agreement, the US government pressured the Pakistani government to supply weapons to Ukraine in secret through the disreputable arms dealer Global Ordnance. This makes an already bad deal even worse.

Similar deals have been made with countries such as Argentina, Sri Lanka, and Zambia. In the case of Sri Lanka, for instance, the institution’s senior mission chief for the country, Peter Breuer, described the IMF agreement as a ‘brutal experiment’. The social consequences of this experiment will, of course, be borne by the Sri Lankan people, whose frustrations have been stifled by the police and military forces.

This dynamic was also on display in February in Suriname, where large numbers of people who took to the streets to protest against the IMF-imposed austerity regime were met with tear gas and rubber bullets. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Suriname has defaulted three times on its foreign debt, which is largely owed to wealthy bondholders in the West, and in December 2021 the government of President Chan Santokhi told the IMF that it would cut subsidies for energy. We zijn Moe (‘We Are Tired’), a movement against austerity, protested for years but could not move an agenda against the IMF-imposed starvation politics. ‘A hungry mob is an angry mob’, Maggie Schmeitz wrote of the protests.

These protests – from Suriname to Sri Lanka – are the latest cycle in a long history of IMF riots, such as those that began in Lima (Peru) in 1976 and sprung up in Jamaica, Bolivia, Indonesia, and Venezuela in the years that followed. When the IMF riots unfolded Indonesia in 1985, long-time CEO of the Bank of America Tom Clausen was presiding over the World Bank (1981–1986). In remarks that he made five years prior, Clausen encapsulated the attitude of the Bretton Woods institutions towards such popular uprisings, stating that ‘When people are desperate, you have revolutions. It’s in our own evident self-interest to see that they are not forced into that. You must keep the patient alive, because otherwise you can’t effect the cure’.

Clausen’s ‘cure’ – privatisation, commodification, and liberalisation – is no longer credible. Popular protests, such as those in Suriname, reflect the broad awareness of the failures of the neoliberal agenda. New agendas are needed that will build upon the following ideas, such as:

1. Cancelling odious debts, namely those taken by undemocratic governments and used against the well-being of the people.
2. Restructuring debt and forcing wealthy bondholders to share the burden of debts that cannot be fully repaid (without wreaking devastating and fatal social consequences) but from which they benefited for decades.
3. Investigating the failure of multinational corporations to pay their fair share of taxes to poorer nations and establishing laws that prevent forms of theft such as transfer mispricing.
4. Investigating the role of illicit tax havens in allowing elites in the poorer nations to ferret away the social wealth of their countries in these places and procedures to return that money for public usage.
5. Encouraging the poorer nations to take advantage of new lenders that are not committed to austerity-debt forms of lending, such as the Peoples Bank of China and the New Development Bank.
6. Developing industrial policies that are geared toward creating jobs, lessening the destruction of nature, and progressively adopting renewable energy sources.
7. Implementing progressive taxation (especially on profit) and a living wage in order to ensure fair income for workers as well as wealth distribution.

This list is not comprehensive. If you have other ideas for a credible ‘cure’, do write to me.

The photographs featured in this newsletter and the dossier are by Ali Abbas (‘Nad E Ali’), a visual artist based in Lahore, Pakistan, whose work explores themes of alienation, belonging, and the in-between spaces that exist in all cultures. The photographs are from his series ‘Hauntology of Lahore’ (2017–present), borrowing the term from philosopher Jacques Derrida. In Abbas’s words, ‘within the very landscape of Lahore, amidst its bustling streets, ancient structures, and vibrant communities lies a reservoir of untapped futures and unrealised potential’.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

But that won’t be enough to counter the continuing high inflation rates – more than 25% – that have put many Laotians on the edge of poverty, several Laotians told Radio Free Asia.

“People in rural areas are still looking for food from forested areas,” a Saravane province resident said. “They don’t have the money to buy food in the market. They only buy the necessities.”

If the government can’t get inflation under control, no one will benefit from economic growth, a Xieng Khouang province resident said.

“People are getting poorer by the day,” he said. “They live paycheck to paycheck. Most products and merchandise sold in the markets are imported.”

The Asian Development Bank also predicted this month that the Lao economy would expand by 4% next year. It said last month that the country would grow by 3.7 percent in 2023.

But an ADB official told RFA that the rate of inflation would remain at 28% year over year – the same as it was in 2023.

Price controls, wage increases

Inflation has soared to as much as 40% in recent years following a depreciation in the Lao currency and declines in foreign investment.

Earlier this year, Lao authorities imposed price controls on basic necessities such as pork, rice and natural gas. The government has also raised the minimum wage several times since 2022 to address the cost of living crisis.

Last week, Lao Prime Minister Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone acknowledged at a conference in Vientiane that the economy has been sluggish due to high debt levels, inflation, high gasoline prices and several other factors. 

But economic growth in Laos will strengthen as tourism, exports and service industries recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, and as investment from neighboring Thailand, China and Vietnam resumes, according to the ADB official.

The IMF forecast was released on Oct. 18, but an updated prediction should be available next month, once officials look at more export and tourism data.

“One issue is that the currency is still fluctuating,” an IMF representative told RFA on Friday. “That needs to be fixed quickly if they want the macroeconomy to stabilize.”

The government must also entice more foreign investment, motivate locals to increase their export-oriented production and lower the amount of import if it wants more consistent growth, he said.

Translated by Sidney Khotpanya. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Lao.

Pakistan has made international headlines repeatedly over the last year for almost all the wrong reasons. While the country has been associated with extremism and terrorism for over two decades, more recently Pakistan has become known for natural disasters and political upheavals. Among the issues that deserve serious scrutiny – but gets little to no attention – is the alarmingly unprecedented contraction of the country’s economy, projected to grow a mere 0.5% in 2023 and experience inflation rates upwards of 27%. Given that Pakistan’s population is increasing at a rate of 1.8%, outpacing national economic expansion, the Gross Domestic Product per capita will shrink. Put plainly, the Pakistani people are going to be significantly poorer in the coming years.

Dossier no. 69, How the International Monetary Fund Is Squeezing Pakistan, unpacks the country’s worrisome economic indicators, debunks the common – but mistaken – explanations, illuminates why this mineral-rich, agriculturally fertile southeast Asian country remains import-dependent, and delves into the political and military ramifications of the economic crisis and its devastating implications for the class struggle in Pakistan.

Furthermore, it explains the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in completely undermining Pakistan’s control over its own economy and in restricting the country’s development aspirations. Pakistan is by no means an extraordinary case; it merely illustrates the IMF’s general template for all economies, whether large or small, with little interest if its actions turn a cyclical recession into a depression. As the dossier notes, the historic task placed before the people of Pakistan and the entire Third World today, therefore, is to organise, mobilise, and struggle for economic independence.

• Check out Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s dossier no. 69, How the International Monetary Fund Is Squeezing Pakistan.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

IMF HQ. Photo: IMF.

This year’s annual IMF/World Bank meetings in Morocco are the most explicitly confrontational yet by US/NATO diplomacy toward China and its fellow BRICS+ allies. It is not really rivalry, because US neoliberal financial policy is so different from the aims that the BRICS+ countries have been developing at their own recent international meetings. At issue is not only what countries will be the major beneficiaries of future IMF and World Bank loan operations, but whether the world will back US unipolar dominance or start to move explicitly toward a multipolar philosophy of mutual support to increase living standards and prosperity instead of imposing anti-labor austerity in an attempt to maintain a trade and investment system that is now widely seen to be dysfunctional and financially predatory US demands to use these two organizations as arms of its New Cold War policy.

At issue is an increase in the US drive to increase quotas of IMF and World Bank member countries. Quotas reflect voting power, with 85% of the votes required to enact a policy. A 15% veto is able to block any policy change. And ever since the inception of these two organizations in 1944-45, the United States has insisted in having veto power in any organization it joins, so that no foreign countries will ever be in a position to dictate its policy – while enabling it to block any policy that it deems benefiting other nations more than itself. Its 17.4% quota (and 16.5% of the vote) gives it veto power in the IMF.

It was inevitable that the original distribution of quotas has not kept pace with the shifts in international financial power since 1945. Rising economies have asked for a larger quota and hence voice in settling IMF and World Bank policy. But each round of quota increases has seen US strategists insist that any increase in overall quotas must not reduce its own quota to less than the 15% enabling it to maintain its unique veto power.

No other country remotely approaches U.S. power. US strategists were glad to let Japan obtain the second largest quota, now 6.47 percent. That reflects not only its great industrial takeoff in the 1970s and ‘80s, but US confidence that Japan will be like a “second US vote.” (That is why it tried to add Japan to the UN Security Council. The Soviet delegate vetoed this, citing Japan’s role as a US political satellite.)

China is in third place, with 6.40%, closely followed by the weakening economies of Germany and Britain, thoroughly reliant on US gentleness as it imposes tightening US-centered dependency on their economies.

What makes this issue so pressing this year is the emergence of BRICS+ countries and the collective alternative that they are in the process of juxtaposing as they move to de-dollarize their economies so as to protect themselves from the threat that US diplomats will impose sanctions, confiscate their official monetary reserves (as they have done with those of Iran, Venezuela and Russia) in punishment for their seeking national self-sufficiency instead of reliance on US suppliers and creditors.

For countries seeking a multipolar world order instead of US-centered unipolar economy, the widely used term “dedollarization” has evolved rapidly to mean much more than simply using other currencies to settle their trade and investment transactions. A fundamentally different philosophy of international finance, creditor/debtor relationships and national self-sufficiency to protect themselves from trade sanctions and other US-sponsored economic warfare. For many decades, countries sought to avoid running into debt to the IMF in fear of being subjected to its anti-labor austerity policies imposed in the junk-economics belief that any volume of foreign debt service could be squeezed out by reducing labor’s wages by a sufficient degree.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and her US neoliberal gang at Marrakesh have thrown down the gauntlet when it comes to giving China a stronger voice – that is, quota – in the IMF. The Financial Times published the most explicit statement of their position on October 12 in an article by former US Treasury official Edwin Truman. “Like it or not,” he points out, “any deal must satisfy the US Treasury.” Its primary concern is that while ideally each member’s quota would increase by at least one-third, “the com­bined size of these selec­ted increases must not threaten the US vot­ing share, or Wash­ing­ton will block the com­prom­ise.”[1]

Furthermore, Mr. Truman explains, the planned increase should not apply to “the emerging market and developing countries.” They are debtors and hence would support policies that help debtor countries recover instead of fall into deepening dependency on international bondholders and new US dollar loans from US/NATO creditors and the IMF.

The problem is that “Under the current for­mula, the quotas of [the strongest] 25 IMF mem­bers should be at least 50 percent lar­ger than their current ones, led by China.” But in addition to threatening to “reduce the US vot­ing share to close to 15 percent,” it would give China increasing influence. “The US has made clear that it will not support an increase in any mem­ber’s quota share unless that coun­try respects the rules and norms of the IMF, which in the US view China does not. To remove this obstacle, China should agree not to accept the select­ive increase in its quota to which it would oth­er­wise be entitled, and the US should sup­port the com­prom­ise.”

If it does not submit quietly, he threatens, is for the IMF meeting to end in “another stalemate.” By that word, he means a refusal by China and other countries to acquiesce in U.S. Cold War strategists hijacking even more Asian and Global South resources to support their international diplomacy.

In one sense, I wonder what all this kerfuffle actually is about. Who really cares what the IMF’s articles of agreement stipulate and what its staff recommends? We are no longer in a rule of law, but in a “rules-based order,” with US officials setting the rules on an ad hoc basis. This already had made a travesty of IMF rules and procedures.

The IMF’s recent loans to Ukraine have raised its borrowing to seven times its quota. The IMF no longer feels obligated to follow its articles of agreement, and quite openly acts as an agent of the US State Department and military to finance the US/NATO war against Russia and China (and really, of course, against Germany and Western Europe).

In addition to IMF loans to Ukraine violating its stated limits to member-country borrowing, it is lending to a country at war, also forbidden. And third, it violates the “No more Argentinas” rule that it is not supposed to make a loan to a country without some calculation that the country will be able to repay the loan. Does anyone believe that Ukraine can repay – except perhaps by selling its agricultural land to Monsanto, Cargill and other US agribusiness companies?

Since US strategists at the IMF and World Bank are bound to continue to weaponize their loans to promote US-centered neoliberalism, I have a modest proposal for China. I know that it does not want to use the present state of international tension to emphasize its willingness to break. So perhaps it should indeed give the US precisely what it wants – and even more!

It can indeed go on record as suggesting that it be given a quota reflecting its economic equality with the United States. That certainly would seem to be warranted by being designated America’s Number One long-term adversary. But if the US refuses, then I would like to see China simply withdraw its IMF and World Bank subscriptions altogether. Walk away.

Why should China help subsidize international organizations whose policies are adverse to those of China and its fellow BRICS+ allies? The World Bank is always headed by a US diplomat, usually from the military, and hopes to finance the US/NATO-backed alternative to China’s Belt and Road initiative. And the IMF’s neoliberal “stabilization” policies are anti-labor and hence most amenable to US client oligarchies, not the reforms that BRICS+ countries are seeking to put in place.

If Chinese and fellow BRICS+ de-dollarization is indeed a broad system-wide effort to replace the US unipolar predatory asymmetry with a more positive-sum philosophy of mutual gain, why not take this opportunity to accept the US challenge that has just thrown down the gauntlet to China? That would avoid a “stalemate.” It would make clear the philosophical distinctions that have led the world economy to today’s crossroads.

In diplomatic terms, let’s call it an agreement to disagree.

Note.

[1] Edwin Tru­man, “Another impasse on IMF quotas is not accept­able,” Financial Times, October 12, 2023.

The post IMF Showdown with China in Morocco appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Hudson.

The post The IMF and World Bank Talk Good Governance, But Walk With State-Capturers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Bond.

Wu Fang (China), 行走 (‘Journey’), 2017.

In his 1963 book, Africa Must Unite, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, wrote, ‘We have here, in Africa, everything necessary to become a powerful, modern, industrialised continent. United Nations investigators have recently shown that Africa, far from having inadequate resources, is probably better equipped for industrialisation than almost any other region in the world’. Here, Nkrumah was referring to the Special Study on Economic Conditions and Development, Non-Self-Governing Territories (United Nations, 1958), which detailed the continent’s immense natural resources. ‘The true explanation for the slowness of industrial development in Africa’, Nkrumah wrote, ‘lies in the policies of the colonial period. Practically all our natural resources, not to mention trade, shipping, banking, building, and so on, fell into, and have remained in, the hands of foreigners seeking to enrich alien investors, and to hold back local economic initiative’. Nkrumah further expanded upon this view in his remarkable book, Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965).

As the leader of Ghana’s government, Nkrumah devised a policy to reverse this trend by promoting public education (with an emphasis on science and technology), building a robust public sector to provide his country with infrastructure (including electricity, roads, and railways), and developing an industrial sector that would add value to the raw materials that had previously been exported at meagre prices. However, such a project would fail if it were only tried in one country. That is why Nkrumah was a great champion of African unity, articulated at length in his book Africa Must Unite (1963). It was because of his determination that African countries formed the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) the same year as his book was published. In 1999, the OAU became the African Union.

As Ghana and Africa made small strides to establish national and continental sovereignty, some people had other ideas. Nkrumah was removed from office in a Western-backed coup in 1966, five years after Patrice Lumumba was ejected as prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and then assassinated. Anyone who wanted to build a project for the sovereignty of the continent and the dignity of the African people would find themselves either deposed, dead, or both.

Guo Hongwu (China), 革命友谊深如海 (‘Revolutionary Friendship Is as Deep as the Ocean’), 1975.

The Western-backed governments that followed these coups often reversed the policies to exercise national sovereignty and build continental unity. For instance, in 1966, the military leaders of Ghana’s National Liberation Council began to gut the policy of establishing quality public education and an efficient public sector with industrialisation and continental trade at its centre. Import-substitution policies that had been important to the new Third World states were rejected in favour of exporting cheapened raw materials and importing expensive finished products. The spiral of debt and dependency wracked the continent. This situation was worsened by the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programmes, set in motion during the worst of the 1980s debt crisis. A 2009 research paper from the South Centre noted that ‘the continent is the least industrialised region of the world, while the share of sub-Saharan Africa in global manufacturing value added actually declined in most sectors between 1990 and 2000’. Indeed, the South Centre paper referred to the situation in Africa as one of ‘de-industrialisation’.

In April 1980, African leaders gathered in Lagos, Nigeria, under the aegis of the OAU to deliberate about the harsh climate created by the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programmes, which targeted their fiscal policies but did nothing to change the adverse international credit markets. Out of this meeting came the Lagos Plan of Action (1980–2000), whose main argument was for African states to establish their sovereignty from international capital and to build industrial policies for their countries and for the continent. This was, in essence, a renewal of the Nkrumah policy of the 1960s. Alongside the Lagos Plan of Action, the United Nations established the Industrial Development Decade for Africa (1980–1990). Towards the end of that decade, in 1989 the OAU – cognisant of the policy’s failure due to the deepening of neoliberal approaches that slashed budgets and intensified the export-oriented theft of African resources – worked with the United Nations to establish 20 November as Africa Industrialisation Day. The failure of the Industrial Development Decade for Africa was followed by a second decade (1993–2002) and then a third (2016–2025). In January 2015, the African Union adopted Agenda 2063 to combine the imperative of industrialisation with Africa’s commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals. These ‘decades’ and Agenda 2063 have become merely symbolic. There is no agenda to undo external debt and debt servicing burdens nor any policy to create a climate to advance industrial development or finance the provision of basic needs.

Pan Jianglong (China), 撒哈拉以东 (‘To the East of the Sahara’), 2017.

At the China-Africa Leaders’ Dialogue, held on the side-lines of the fifteenth BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) summit in Johannesburg, China launched the Initiative on Supporting Africa’s Industrialisation ‘to support Africa in growing its manufacturing sector and realising industrialisation and economic diversification’. The Chinese government pledged to increase its funding to build infrastructure, design and create industrial parks, and assist African governments and firms in developing their industrial policies and industries. This new initiative will build off of China’s commitments at the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation to strengthen infrastructure on the continent, share its own experiences with industrialisation, and support a development project that emerges out of the African experience rather than one forced upon African states by the IMF or other agencies.

This week, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Dongsheng launched the third issue of the international edition of the journal Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横), entitled ‘China-Africa Relations in the Belt and Road Era’. This issue features three articles, written by Grieve Chelwa, Zhou Jinyan, and Tang Xiaoyang. Professor Zhou, concurring with the South Centre report, notes that ‘African countries were essentially de-industrialised’ since the 1980s and that whatever growth African countries experienced was a consequence of high commodity prices for exported raw materials. She points out that Western countries – offering debt, aid, and structural adjustment – are ‘not motivated to promote African industrialisation’. Drawing heavily from the UN Economic Commission for Africa and analysing the industrial policies of most African countries, Professor Zhou highlights four important points: first, the state must play an active role in any industrial development; second, industrialisation must take place on a regional and continental level – not within African states alone, given that 86 percent of Africa’s total trade is ‘still conducted with other regions of the world, not within the continent; third, urbanisation and industrialisation must be coordinated so that cities on the continent do not continue to grow into large slums filled with jobless youth; and fourth, manufacturing will be the engine of African economic development rather than the fantasy of service sector-led growth.

These points guide Professor Zhou’s assessment of how China can support the process of African industrialisation. In sharing its experiences with African countries, she notes that ‘China’s failures’ are as important as its successes.

Zhao Jianqi (China), 回望故乡 (‘Longing for Home’), n.d.

In his essay, Professor Tang tracks the record of the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on the continent. Established in 2013, the BRI is only a decade old, which barely allows enough time to fully assess this massive, global infrastructural and industrial development project. At the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation (April 2019), UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, ‘With the scale of its planned investments, [the BRI] offers a meaningful opportunity to contribute to the creation of a more equitable, prosperous world for all, and to reversing the negative impact of climate change’. In 2022, the UN released a report on the role of the BRI called Partnering for a Brighter Shared Future, which noted that the BRI – unlike most other development projects – provided significant funding for infrastructure projects that may form the basis for industrialisation in regions that had previously been exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured products.

Building on such assessments of the BRI, Professor Tang offers three practical ways in which the BRI has promoted industrialisation on the African continent: first, by constructing industrial parks with integrated power sources and creating industrial clusters of interconnected firms; second, by building industries to supply infrastructural materials; and third, by prioritising production for local markets rather than for export. Unlike the IMF policies that are forced on African countries, Professor Tang argues that ‘China encourages each country to follow its own path of development and to not blindly follow any model’.

Neither Tang nor Zhou nor Chelwa indicate that China is somehow the saviour of Africa. Those days are gone. No country or continent seeks its salvation elsewhere. Africa’s path will be built by Africans. Nonetheless, given its own experiences of building manufacturing against a structure that reproduces dependency, China has a lot to share. Since it has enormous financial reserves and does not impose Western-styled conditionality, China can, of course, be a source of financing for alternative development projects.

In December 2022, African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina said that ‘Africa’s prosperity must no longer depend on exports of raw materials but on value-added finished products’. ‘Across Africa’, he continued, ‘we need to turn cocoa beans into chocolate, cotton into textiles and garments, coffee beans into brewed coffee’. To keep in step with the times, we might add that Africa must also turn cobalt and nickel into lithium-ion batteries and electric cars and turn copper and silver into smartphones. Inside Adesina’s statement is Nkrumah’s dream: as he wrote in 1963, we have here, in Africa, everything necessary to become a powerful, modern, industrialised continent.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

The Biden administration helped Pakistan get a controversial new bailout from the International Monetary Fund after Pakistan agreed to secretly sell arms to the United States for the war in Ukraine, according to a new blockbuster report by The Intercept. The deal allows Pakistan to sell some $900 million in munitions while keeping IMF loans flowing to the government in Islamabad amid a spiraling economic crisis, which is driven at least partly by the austerity measures imposed by the IMF loan. Pakistan’s position on the war in Ukraine has shifted significantly since Russia’s invasion and the ouster of Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was removed from office in 2022 under pressure from U.S. diplomats who objected to his “aggressively neutral” stance on the war. Khan is now imprisoned in Pakistan on corruption charges. Meanwhile, the caretaker government backed by Pakistan’s powerful military has delayed planned elections, widely seen as an attempt to block Khan’s supporters from power. “When the United States has a primary foreign policy objective, in particular when it’s a war, everything else falls away. That’s what you’re seeing in Pakistan now,” says The Intercept’s Ryan Grim.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Secret Pakistani arms sales to the U.S. helped to facilitate a controversial bailout from the International Monetary Fund earlier this year, according to two sources with knowledge of the arrangement, with confirmation from internal Pakistani and American government documents. The arms sales were made for the purpose of supplying the Ukrainian military — marking Pakistani involvement in a conflict it had faced U.S. pressure to take sides on.

The revelation is a window into the kind of behind-the-scenes maneuvering between financial and political elites that rarely is exposed to the public, even as the public pays the price. Harsh structural policy reforms demanded by the IMF as terms for its recent bailout kicked off an ongoing round of protests in the country. Major strikes have taken place throughout Pakistan in recent weeks in response to the measures.

The protests are the latest chapter in a year-and-a-half-long political crisis roiling the country. In April 2022, the Pakistani military, with the encouragement of the U.S., helped organize a no-confidence vote to remove Prime Minister Imran Khan. Ahead of the ouster, State Department diplomats privately expressed anger to their Pakistani counterparts over what they called Pakistan’s “aggressively neutral” stance on the Ukraine war under Khan. They warned of dire consequences if Khan remained in power and promised “all would be forgiven” if he were removed.

“Pakistani democracy may ultimately be a casualty of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.”

Since Khan’s ouster, Pakistan has emerged as a useful supporter of the U.S. and its allies in the war, assistance that has now been repaid with an IMF loan. The emergency loan allowed the new Pakistani government to put off a looming economic catastrophe and indefinitely postpone elections — time it used to launch a nationwide crackdown on civil society and jail Khan.

“Pakistani democracy may ultimately be a casualty of Ukraine’s counteroffensive,” Arif Rafiq, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute and specialist on Pakistan, told The Intercept.

Pakistan is known as a production hub for the types of basic munitions needed for grinding warfare. As Ukraine grappled with chronic shortages of munitions and hardware, the presence of Pakistani-produced shells and other ordinances by the Ukrainian military has surfaced in open-source news reports about the conflict, though neither the U.S. nor the Pakistanis have acknowledged the arrangement.

Records detailing the arms transactions were leaked to The Intercept earlier this year by a source within the Pakistani military. The documents describe munitions sales agreed to between the U.S. and Pakistan from the summer of 2022 to the spring of 2023. Some of the documents were authenticated by matching the signature of an American brigadier general with his signature on publicly available mortgage records in the United States; by matching the Pakistani documents with corresponding American documents; and by reviewing publicly available but previously unreported Pakistani disclosures of arms sales to the U.S. posted by the State Bank of Pakistan.

The weapons deals were brokered, according to the documents, by Global Military Products, a subsidiary of Global Ordnance, a controversial arms dealer whose entanglements with less-than-reputable figures in Ukraine were the subject of a recent New York Times article.

Documents outlining the money trail and talks with U.S. officials include American and Pakistani contracts, licensing, and requisition documents related to U.S.-brokered deals to buy Pakistani military weapons for Ukraine.

The economic capital and political goodwill from the arms sales played a key role in helping secure the bailout from the IMF, with the State Department agreeing to take the IMF into confidence regarding the undisclosed weapons deal, according to sources with knowledge of the arrangement, and confirmed by a related document.

To win the loan, Pakistan had been told by the IMF it had to meet certain financing and refinancing targets related to its debt and foreign investment — targets that the country was struggling to meet. The weapons sales came to the rescue, with the funds garnered from the sale of munitions for Ukraine going a long way to cover the gap.

Securing the loan eased economic pressure, enabling the military government to delay elections — a potential reckoning in the long aftermath of Khan’s removal — and deepen the crackdown against Khan’s supporters and other dissenters. The U.S. remained largely silent about the extraordinary scale of the human rights violations that pushed the future of Pakistan’s embattled democracy into doubt.

“The premise is that we have to save Ukraine, we have to save this frontier of democracy on the eastern perimeter of Europe,” said Rafiq. “And then this brown Asian country has to pay the price. So they can be a dictatorship, their people can be denied the freedoms that every other celebrity in this country is saying we need to support Ukraine for — the ability to choose our leaders, ability to have civic freedoms, the rule of law, all these sorts of things that may differentiate many European countries and consolidated democracies from Russia.”

Masood Khan attends the 9th International Maritime Conference in Karachi, Pakistan on Feb. 13, 2021.

Bombs for Bailouts

On May 23, 2023, according to The Intercept’s investigation, Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S. Masood Khan sat down with Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu at the State Department in Washington, D.C., for a meeting about how Pakistani arms sales to Ukraine could shore up its financial position in the eyes of the IMF. The goal of the sit-down, held on a Tuesday, was to hash out details of the arrangement ahead of an upcoming meeting in Islamabad the following Friday between U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Donald Blome and then-Finance Minister Ishaq Dar.

Lu told Khan at the May 23 meeting that the U.S. had cleared payment for the Pakistani munitions production and would tell the IMF confidentially about the program. Lu acknowledged the Pakistanis believed the arms contributions to be worth $900 million, which would help to cover a remaining gap in the financing required by the IMF, pegged at roughly $2 billion. What precise figure the U.S. would relay to the IMF remained to be negotiated, he told Khan.

At the meeting on Friday, Dar brought up the IMF question with Blome, according to a report in Pakistan Today, which said that “the meeting highlighted the significance of addressing the stalled IMF deal and finding effective solutions to Pakistan’s economic challenges.”

A spokesperson at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington declined to comment, referring questions to the State Department. A spokesperson for the State Department denied the U.S. played any role in helping procure the loan. “Negotiations over the IMF review were a matter for discussion between Pakistan and IMF officials,” the spokesperson said. “The United States was not party to those discussions, though we continue to encourage Pakistan to engage constructively with the IMF on its reform program.”

An IMF spokesperson denied the institution was pressured but did not comment on whether it was taken into confidence about the weapons program. “We categorically deny the allegation that there was any external pressure on the IMF in one way or another while discussing support to Pakistan,” said IMF spokesperson Randa Elnagar. (Global Ordnance, the firm involved in the arms deal, did not respond to a request for comment.)

“My understanding, based on conversations with folks in the administration, has been that we supported the IMF loan package given the desperate economic situation in Pakistan.”

The State Department’s denial was contradicted by Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a leading voice in Washington on foreign affairs. Earlier this month, Van Hollen told a group of Pakistani journalists, “The United States has been very instrumental in making sure that the IMF came forward with its emergency economic relief.” Van Hollen, whose parents were both stationed in Pakistan as State Department officials, was born in Karachi and is known to be the closest observer of Pakistan in Congress.

In an interview with The Intercept at the Capitol on Tuesday, Van Hollen said that his knowledge of the U.S. role in facilitating the IMF loan came directly from the Biden administration. “My understanding, based on conversations with folks in the administration, has been that we supported the IMF loan package given the desperate economic situation in Pakistan,” he said. 

Eleventh-Hour IMF Deal

The diplomatic discussion about the loan came a month before a June 30 deadline for the IMF’s review of a planned billion-dollar payment, part of a $6 billion agreement made in 2019. A failed review would mean no cash infusion, but, in the months and weeks ahead of the deadline, Pakistani officials publicly denied that they faced serious challenges in financing the new loan.

In early 2023, Dar, the finance minister, said that external financing assurance — in other words, financial commitments from places like China, the Gulf states, or the U.S. — were not a condition the IMF was insisting Pakistan meet. In March 2023, however, the IMF representative in charge of dealing with Pakistan publicly contradicted Dar’s rosy assessment. IMF’s Esther Perez Ruiz said in an email to Reuters that all borrowers need to be able to demonstrate that they can finance repayments. “Pakistan is no exception,” Perez said.

The IMF statement sent Pakistani officials scrambling for a solution. The required financing, according to public reporting and confirmed by sources with knowledge of the arrangement, was set at $6 billion. To reach that goal, the Pakistani government claimed it had secured roughly $4 billion in commitments from Gulf countries. The secret arms deal for Ukraine would allow Pakistan to add nearly another billion dollars to its balance sheet — if the U.S. would let the IMF in on the secret.

“It was at an impasse because of the remaining $2 billion,” said Rafiq, the Middle East Institute scholar. “So if that figure is accurate, the $900 million, that’s almost half of that. That’s pretty substantial in terms of that gap that had to be bridged.”

On June 29, a day before the original program was set to expire, the IMF made a surprise announcement that instead of extending the previous series of loans and releasing the next $1.1 billion installment, the bank would instead be entering an agreement — “called a Stand-By Arrangement” — with fewer strings attached, more favorable terms, and valued at $3 billion.

“Had that not happened, there would have been a full-blown economic meltdown in the country. So it was a make-or-break moment.”

The agreement included the conditions that the currency would be allowed to float freely and energy subsidies would be withdrawn. The deal was finalized in July after Parliament approved the conditions, including a nearly 50 percent increase in the cost of energy.

Uzair Younus, director of the Pakistan Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, said that the IMF deal was critical to Pakistan’s short-term economic survival. “Had that not happened, there would have been a full-blown economic meltdown in the country,” Younus said. “So it was a make-or-break moment.”

The question of how Pakistan overcame its financing obstacles, has remained a mystery even to those following the situation professionally. The IMF issues public accounting of its reviews, Rafiq noted, but doing so if the financing relates to secret military projects presents an unusual challenge. “Pakistan is very strange, in many ways,” he said, “but I don’t know how a secret, covert, clandestine military program would figure into their calculations, because everything’s supposed to be open and by the books and all that.”

Police fire tear gas to disperse supporters of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan protesting against the arrest of their leader in Peshawar, Pakistan, on May 9, 2023.

Imran Khan, Ukraine, and Pakistan’s Future

At the start of the Ukraine war, Pakistan was in a markedly different geopolitical and economic position. When the conflict began, Khan, at the time the prime minister, was in the air on the way to Moscow for a long-planned bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The visit outraged American officials.

As The Intercept previously reported, Lu, the senior State Department official, said in a meeting with then-Pakistani Ambassador Asad Majeed Khan two weeks after the invasion that it was the belief of the U.S. that Pakistan had taken a neutral position solely at Khan’s direction, adding that “all would be forgiven” if Khan was removed in the no-confidence vote. Since his ouster, Pakistan has firmly taken the side of the U.S. and Ukraine in the war.

The U.S., meanwhile, continues to deny that it put its thumbs on the scale of Pakistani democracy — for Ukraine or any other reason. At an off-the-record, virtual town hall with members of the Pakistani diaspora at the end of August, Lu’s deputy, Elizabeth Horst, responded to questions about The Intercept’s reporting on Lu’s meeting with the Pakistani ambassador.

“I want to take a moment to address disinformation about the United States’s role in Pakistani politics,” Horst said at the top of the call, audio of which was provided to The Intercept by an attendee. “We do not let propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation get in the way of any bilateral relationship, including our valued relationship with Pakistan. The United States does not have a position on one political candidate or one party versus another. Any claims to the contrary, including reports on the alleged cypher are false, and senior Pakistani officials themselves have acknowledged this isn’t true.”

Senior Pakistani officials, including former Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, have confirmed the authenticity of the cable, known internally as a cypher, published by The Intercept.

Van Hollen, in his press briefing with Pakistani journalists, took the same line as the State Department, saying that he had been assured by the administration that the U.S. did not interfere in Pakistani politics. In his interview with The Intercept, he clarified that he meant the U.S. did not engineer Khan’s ouster. “I’m not disputing the accuracy of the cable,” Van Hollen said. “Look, I have no idea where the administration is on what their view is on the final result, but I do not read that [cable] to mean that the United States engineered his removal.”

After orchestrating Khan’s removal, the military embarked on a campaign to eradicate his political party through a wave of killings and mass detentions. Khan himself is currently imprisoned on charges of mishandling a classified document and facing some 150 additional charges — allegations widely viewed as a pretext to stop him from contesting future elections.

Horst, at the town hall, was also pressed as to why the U.S. has been so muted in response to the crackdown. She argued the U.S. had, in fact, spoken up on behalf of democracy. “Look, I know many of you feel strongly and are very concerned about the situation in Pakistan. I’ve heard from you. Trust me when I say I see you, I hear from you. And I want to be responsive,” she said. “We do continue to speak up publicly and privately for Pakistan’s democracy.”

While Pakistan reels from the impact of IMF-directed austerity policies and the political dysfunction that followed Khan’s removal, its new military leaders have made lofty promises that foreign economic support will rescue the country. According to reports in the Pakistani publication Dawn, Army Chief Gen. Asim Munir recently told a gathering of Pakistani businessmen that the country could expect as much as $100 billion in new investment from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, hinting that there would be no more appeals to the IMF.

There is little evidence, however, that the Gulf nations are willing to come to Pakistan’s rescue. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, recently announced major investments and economic partnerships with India during a visit there for the G20 summit. Despite reports in the Pakistani press expressing hope that MBS would pay Pakistan a visit, none materialized, let alone any major new investment announcements.

The absence of other foreign support left Pakistan’s embattled military regime further dependent on the IMF, the U.S., and the production of munitions for the war in Ukraine to sustain itself through a crisis that shows no sign of resolution.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

The current members of BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—along with the countries accepted for membership: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran.

BRICS is an informal grouping of emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. It provides a platform for its members to challenge the global financial system dominated by the United States and its allies in forums like the G7, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Sarang Shidore (The Nation, 8/17/23), director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute and adjunct faculty at George Washington University, notes that many countries of the Global South are frustrated with the US dollar being the de facto world currency, because it leaves their

economies at the mercy of US interest rates and sovereign measures such as quantitative easing, and enables harsh US-led sanctions regimes. For the Global South, alternative pathways of both development financing and currency settlements are attractive ways to achieve autonomy, enhance economic growth and at least partly protect themselves against the extraterritoriality of sanctions.

Relatedly, the BRICS states appear to be seeking diplomatic autonomy, taking a variety of positions on the war in Ukraine that are at odds with Washington’s preferred view (The Nation, 6/27/23) and not always in perfect sync with that of the “R” in BRICS.

In August, BRICS invited six new members to join: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. More than 40 countries expressed interest in joining BRICS, while 23 formally applied to become part of the club (Al Jazeera, 8/24/23).

China too big?

Dozens of countries are trying to join BRICS, but clearly they don’t read Bloomberg (8/18/23).

The prospect of a group of nations almost entirely from the Global South working together to advance independent development sent the Bloomberg news service into attack mode. The outlet ran an op-ed by Howard Chua-Eoan (8/18/23) headlined “BRICS Is Broken and Should Be Scrapped.” His argument:

The big trouble with the BRICS is that China (with its still enormous economic clout) dominates the group—and Beijing wants to turn it into another global forum to echo its denunciations of the US and EU.

The assertion that China “dominates” BRICS is misleading. Three scholars (Conversation, 8/18/23) from Tufts University’s Rising Power Alliances project, which studies the evolution of BRICS and its relationship with the US, found that

the common portrayal of BRICS as a China-dominated group primarily pursuing anti-US agendas is misplaced. Rather, the BRICS countries connect around common development interests and a quest for a multipolar world order in which no single power dominates.

For instance, the authors note:

China has been unable to advance some key policy proposals. For example, since the 2011 BRICS summit, China has sought to establish a BRICS free trade agreement, but could not get support from other states.

Similarly, Shidore (The Nation, 8/17/23) points out:

In 2015, the five [BRICS] states founded the New Development Bank, with infrastructure financing and sustainable development as its focus. Although China’s GDP is more than twice that of the rest of the BRICS states combined, it agreed to an equal partnership on governing the bank and an equal share of subscribed capital of $10 billion each.

‘US economic leadership’

Bloomberg (8/29/23) blames the rise of BRICS on “the US turn away from economic leadership.”

In another article, Bloomberg’s editorial board (8/29/23) worried that BRICS’ expansion “could weaken existing channels of cooperation at a time when collective action on global threats has never been more urgent.” For the authors, the BRICS countries are “sidelining the existing institutions” of “global governance,” thereby making “genuinely multilateral cooperation harder.”

The editorial’s concern is not with developing international “cooperation” or “collective action on global threats” per se; its concern is with maintaining the current global system. The root of the threat to the status quo, the editorial maintained, was lack of US leadership:

It’s no coincidence that the BRICS-11 arrives following the US turn away from economic leadership—accelerated by Donald Trump’s administration and affirmed by Joe Biden’s. The IMF and World Bank are increasingly rudderless. The WTO is all but defunct, as good as shut down by US obstruction. The organizing principle of US policy is no longer global prosperity but “Made in America.” Emerging economies can be forgiven for seeking alternatives to a global order that seems to put them last.

The timing of this shift couldn’t be worse. Higher interest rates are adding to the financial stresses confronting many low- and middle-income countries. If a new global debt crisis lies ahead, the damage won’t be narrowly confined. The costs of climate change are mounting, and the efforts of the once-and-future BRICS in containing them will be pivotal. These challenges are unavoidably global and demand a cooperative global response.

All this makes the fracturing of the multilateral order truly dangerous. Prodded by the BRICS enlargement, the US and its partners should work urgently to repair it.

The editors are wildly misreading BRICS’ appeal. As Martin Wolf put it in the Financial Times (5/23/23), “What brings its members together is the desire not to be dependent on the whims of the US and its close allies, who have dominated the world for the past two centuries.” Likewise, Shidore (The Nation, 8/17/23) wrote:

The multiple failures of the US-led world order to substantially support two core requirements of Global South states—economic development and safeguarding sovereignty—are creating a demand for alternative structures for ordering the world.

Astrid Prange made a similar point in Deutsche Welle (4/10/23):

In 2014, with $50 billion (around €46 billion) in seed money, the BRICS nations launched the New Development Bank as an alternative to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In addition, they created a liquidity mechanism called the Contingent Reserve Arrangement to support members struggling with payments.

These offers were not only attractive to the BRICS nations themselves, but also to many other developing and emerging economies that had had painful experiences with the IMF’s structural adjustment programs and austerity measures. This is why many countries said they might be interested in joining the BRICS group.

Contrary to the Bloomberg editorial’s claims, it’s not the US’s so-called “turn away from economic leadership,” or the stalling of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, that makes BRICS attractive. It’s precisely that the “multilateral order” Bloomberg refers to is US-led, and that the US has used its stranglehold on these institutions to exploit and control poorer nations.

The democracy problem(s)

Bloomberg (8/28/23) criticizes BRICS for lack of democracy; meanwhile, at the IMF, countries with 14% of the world’s population get 59% of the votes.

Bloomberg (8/28/23) also ran a piece by Giovanni Salzano, headlined “BRICS Enlargement Is Going to Worsen Its Democracy Problem.” The piece comments that, of the six states invited to join BRICS,

only Argentina can be considered a democracy—albeit a flawed one. That means the enlargement would leave the group dominated by non-democratic countries, with seven of them headed by hybrid or authoritarian regimes.

Leaving aside the “democracy problem” of states at the core of the US-led world system—such as Canada and the US itself—Salzano offers an overly narrow conception of democracy. He exclusively focuses on the internal political systems of the BRICS nations, ignoring whether BRICS might help address the dearth of democratic procedures in existing international organizations.

For example, as Al Jazeera (8/22/23) pointed out:

The five BRICS nations now have a combined gross domestic product (GDP) larger than that of the G7 in purchasing power parity terms. In nominal terms, the BRICS countries are responsible for 26% of the global GDP. Despite this, they get only 15% of the voting power at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

BRICS countries account for roughly 40% of the world’s population (Reuters, 8/24/23) while the G7 is home to just 10% (FT, 5/23/23). Jason Hickel (Al Jazeera, 11/26/20) of the London School of Economics observed:

The leaders of the World Bank and the IMF are not elected, but are nominated by the US and Europe…. The US has de facto veto power over all significant decisions, and together with the rest of the G7 and the European Union controls well over half of the vote in both agencies. If we look at the voting allocations in per capita terms, the inequalities are revealed to be truly extreme. For every vote that the average person in the global North has, the average person in the global South has only one-eighth of a vote (and the average South Asian has only one-20th of a vote).

It’s too early to say whether BRICS will help countries in the Global South to develop on their own terms. But Bloomberg’s opposition to the group is probably a good sign.

The post Bloomberg Hits BRICS as US Power Challenged appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Gregory Shupak.

The subsidies are financial support from governments that make fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal cheaper to produce or buy.

Subsidies for coal, oil and natural gas in 2022 represented more than world governments spent on education and two-thirds of what was spent on healthcare.

According to the IMF report released Thursday, governments provided support to consumers and businesses during the surge in global energy prices, a consequence of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine and the economic rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The IMF’s report comes as the world witnesses its highest average monthly temperatures on record. 

When burned, fossil fuels emit harmful pollutants that contribute to global warming and intensify extreme weather events. They also contaminate the air with toxins, harming our respiratory systems and other vital organs and killing millions yearly.

By fuel product, undercharging for oil products accounted for nearly half the subsidies, coal another 30%, and natural gas almost 20% (underpricing for electricity accounts for the remainder), the report said.

By region, East Asia and the Pacific accounted for nearly half the global subsidy, according to the IMF. 

Meanwhile, by country, in absolute terms, China contributed by far the most to total subsidies ($2.2 trillion) in 2022, followed by the United States ($760 billion), Russia ($420 billion), India ($350 billion), and the European Union ($310 billion). 

The bulk of global subsidies accounted for in the study fall into what the IMF termed implicit subsidies, which arise when governments do not adequately charge for the environmental damage caused by the combustion of fossil fuels. 

Such damage encompasses air pollution and climate change, with the impact forecast to grow due to the rising consumption of fossil fuels by developing countries. 

The IMF said explicit subsidies, in which consumers pay less than the supply costs of fossil fuels, have tripled since 2020, from $0.5 trillion to $1.5 trillion in 2022.

The figure is similar to the estimates from the Canada-based think tank, International Institute for Sustainable Development, released Wednesday, that said the world’s biggest economies, the G20, provided a record $1.4 trillion in public money for fossil fuels in 2022 despite the promise to reduce spending. 

That includes investments by state-owned enterprises and loans from public finance institutions. 

The G20 nations, which cause 80% of global carbon emissions, pledged to phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies in 2009.

Comprehensively reforming fossil fuel prices by removing explicit fuel subsidies and imposing corrective taxes such as a carbon tax would reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by 43% below “business as usual” levels in 2030 (34% below 2019 levels) the IMF said. 

It added that this would be in line with keeping global warming to ‘well below’ 2 degrees Celsius and towards 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“Underpricing fossil fuels implies that governments forgo a valuable source of much-needed revenue and undermines distributional and poverty reduction objectives since most of the benefits from undercharging accrue to wealthier households,” the IMF report said.

“The gap between efficient and current fuel prices is often substantial given, not least, the damages from climate change and the large number of people dying prematurely from fossil fuel air pollution exposure (4.5 million a year).”

The IMF said fuel price reform would avert about 1.6 million premature deaths yearly from local air pollution by 2030.

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Subel Rai Bhandari for RFA.

In late July, I visited two settlements of the Landless Rural Workers (MST) on the outskirts of São Paulo (Brazil). Both settlements are named for brave women, the Brazilian lawmaker Marielle Franco – who was assassinated in 2018 – and Irmã Alberta – an Italian Catholic nun who died in 2018. The lands where the MST has built the Marielle Vive camp and the Irmã Alberta Land Commune were slated for a gated community with a golf course, and a garbage dump, respectively. Based on the social obligations for land use in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, the MST mobilised landless workers to occupy these areas, build their own homes, schoolhouses and community kitchens, and grow organic food.

Each of these MST encampments are beacons of hope for ordinary people who are otherwise taught to feel redundant within the neo-colonial structures of contemporary capitalism. The MST has been under concerted attack in Brazil’s legislature, driven by the agenda of agro-business elites who want to prevent 500,000 families from building a tangible alternative for the working class and the peasantry. ‘When the elite see the land, they see money’, Wilson Lopes of the MST told me at Marielle Vive. ‘When we see the land,’ he said, ‘we see the people’s future’.

It is often impossible for people in large parts of the planet to imagine the future. Hunger rates rise, and those who can access food are often only able to eat unhealthily; family farmers, such as those at the MST settlements, provide over a third of the world’s food (more than 80% in value terms) and yet, they find it nearly impossible to access agricultural inputs, mostly water, and reasonable credit. The MST is the largest producer of organic rice in Latin America. Pressure from Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank) as well as from commercial banks and development agencies force countries to embrace ‘modernisation policies’ that are contrary to the facts. These ‘modernisation policies’, as we showed in dossier no. 66, were designed in the 1950s without an accurate assessment of global neo-colonial structures: they assumed that if countries borrowed money, strengthened their export sector for commodities, and imported finished goods from the West, then they would be able to ‘modernise’.

As we walked around the MST settlement, residents Cintia Zaparoli, Dieny Silva, and Raimunda de Jesus Santos told us about how the community struggled to access electricity and water, social goods which are not easily produced without large-scale interventions. For context, two billion people around the world have no easy access to safe drinking water. None of these social goods can be conjured out of thin air; they require complex institutions, and in our modern world, the most important of these institutions is the state. But most states are constrained from acting on their citizenry’s behalf due to external pressures that thwart economic policies which would benefit society over private capital and wealthy bondholders, who stand first in line to extract the immense social wealth produced in poorer nations.

None of these problems are new. For Latin America, the contemporary suffocation of state projects that aim to elevate people’s social conditions can be dated back to the Chapultepec Conference of 1945 held in Mexico City. Mexico’s Foreign Minister Ezequiel Padilla told the conference that it was ‘vital for the Americans to do more than produce raw materials and live in a state of semi-colonialism’. The view was that those living in the hemisphere must be allowed to use all tools necessary – including tariffs and subsidies – to build industries in the region. US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, was horrified by this attitude, telling the Venezuelan delegation that it had been ‘short-sighted … increasing tariffs and restricting trade by import and other controls after the first World War and in the early thirties’. The US put forward a resolution to get all Latin American states ‘to work for the elimination of economic nationalism in all its forms’, including the exercise of economic sovereignty against the advantages secured by multinational corporations. This agenda asserted that the first beneficiaries of a country’s resources should be US investors.

An important line of thinking, now known as ‘dependency theory’, developed in the aftermath of the Chapultepec Conference. It describes a neo-colonial setting where capitalist development in ‘periphery’ countries cannot take place since their economic output is structured to benefit ‘core’ countries, creating a situation that Andre Gunder Frank called ‘the development of underdevelopment’. Our dossier no. 67 – Dependency and Super-Exploitation: The Relationship Between Foreign Capital and Social Struggles in Latin America (August 2023) – uses the centenary of one of Brazil’s most important Marxist intellectuals, Ruy Mauro Marini (1932–1997), to outline a proper Marxist view from the Third World of this ‘dependency theory’ tradition for our current times. The text was developed by the Brazil office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, in collaboration with Professor Renata Couto Moreira from the Research Group on Marxist Studies of Dependency Theory in Latin America – Anatália de Melo Collective of the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES).

Our key assessment is to be found in these sentences:

The root of underdevelopment was not to be found in the industrial backwardness of each economy, but rather in the historical process and in the way that the countries of Latin America had been incorporated into the world market through colonisation by Europe, and then by the international relations to which those countries were subjected, which were perpetuated after their political independence by means of economic dependence on the dictates of the division of labour in global capitalism.

Countries in Latin America, but also in Africa and Asia, emerged in the post-World War II era as appendages of a world system that they were not able to define or control. As in the era of high colonialism, unprocessed raw materials were exported from these countries to earn valuable foreign exchange that was used to buy expensive finished products and energy. The uneven exchange that took place allowed for the almost permanent deterioration of the ‘terms of trade’, as Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer had shown in the 1940s and that has been reaffirmed in the 2000s. The structure of unevenness was premised not only on the terms of trade, as Prebisch and the more liberal scholars of dependency understood it, but importantly, in the global social relations of production.

In the zones of the South, wages are held down through a wide variety of mechanisms, as shown by an International Labour Organisation report from 2012. Reasons given for unequal wages across international borders are often racist, the argument being made that a worker in India, for example, does not have the same expectations of life as a worker in Germany. If workers in the South are paid less, this does not mean that they do not work hard (even if their productivity rates are lower due to less mechanisation and less scientific management of the workplace). The Marxist theory of dependency focused on this ‘super-exploitation’, pointing to the sub-contracted mechanisms of labour discipline that allow richer countries to maintain high moral standards while they rely on brutal work conditions that render social relations toxic in poorer nations. Our observation in the dossier is clear:

The super-exploitation of labour refers to the intensified exploitation of the workforce, resulting in an extraction of surplus value that exceeds the limits historically established in core countries. This becomes a fundamental feature of the capitalist system in underdeveloped economies, since foreign capital and local ruling classes benefit from workers’ low wages and precarious working conditions as well as the absence of labour rights, thus maximising their profits and capital accumulation. This contributes to the reproduction of these countries’ dependence and subordination as part of the international order.

The cycle of dependency, we argue, has to be broken by two simultaneous and necessary operations: the building of an industrial sector through active state intervention, and the building of strong working-class movements to challenge the social relations of production that rely upon the super-exploitation of labour in poorer regions.

In 1965, the year after the US-backed coup in Brazil and during the US-initiated coup in Indonesia, Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) published his monumental book, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. In this book, Nkrumah argued that the new nations that had come out of colonialism remained trapped in the neo-colonial structure of the world economy. Governments in places like Ghana that had been impoverished by colonialism had to beg their former colonizers and ‘a consortium of financial interests’ for credit to conduct the basic functions of government, let alone to advance the social needs of their population. The lenders, he argued, ‘have a habit of forcing would-be borrowers to submit to various offensive conditions, such as supplying information about their economies, submitting their policy and plans to review by the World Bank, and accepting agency supervision of their loans’. This intervention, deepened by the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programme, simply did not allow room for manoeuvre.

Neocolonialism was widely reviewed, including in a secret memorandum of 8 November 1965 by Richard Helms, Deputy Director of the US’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Helms took offence at the direct assault on imperialism in the book. In February 1966, Nkrumah was removed from office by a coup d’état encouraged by the US. That is the price to be paid for revealing the neo-colonial structure of the world and fighting for structural transformation. It is a price that the West wants to inflict on the people of Niger, who have decided that it is no longer beneficial to allow their wealth to be leeched away by the French, and for the US to have a major military footprint in their country. Can the people of Niger and the Sahel, in general, break the cycle of dependency that has created grief for over a hundred years?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

In the December 2016 paper Future urban land expansion and implications for global croplands, it was projected that by 2030, globally, urban areas will have tripled in size, expanding into cropland and undermining the productivity of agricultural systems.

Around 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities. The paper states that this land is, on average, twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe. 

Africa and Asia will together bear 80% of the projected cropland loss due to rising urbanisation. The disappearance of this productive land will impact staple crops such as maize, rice, soya beans and wheat, which are cornerstones of global food security.   

In South Asia, farmland can’t simply spread elsewhere because fertile land is already running out.  

One of the paper’s authors, Felix Creutzig (currently, Professor of Sustainability Economics at the Technical University of Berlin), said at the time that, as cities expand, millions of small-scale farmers will be displaced. These farmers produce the majority of food in developing countries and are key to global food security.  

However, what Creutzig says is not inevitable. Far from it. Urbanisation is being encouraged and facilitated by design. 

According to the World Bank’s lending report, based on data compiled up to 2015, India was easily the largest recipient of its loans in the history of the institution. On the back of India’s foreign exchange crisis in the early 1990s, the IMF and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture: India was to embark on a massive rural depopulation/urbanisation project.  

In addition, in return for up to more than $120 billion (accounting for inflation, this would be $269 billion in 2023) in loans, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions, facilitate the entry of global players and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange. 

The details of this plan appear in a January 2021 article by the Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE). In effect, it constitutes a massive urbanisation project and the opening of India’s agriculture sector to foreign agribusiness corporations.  

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Felix Creutzig predicted the following:  

As peri-urban land is converted, smallholders will lose their land. The emerging mega-cities will rely increasingly on industrial-scale agricultural and supermarket chains, crowding out local food chains.

The RUPE says that the opening of India’s agriculture and food economy to foreign investors and global agribusinesses has been a longstanding project of the imperialist countries. 

Industrial-scale agriculture is key to the plan. And integral to this model of farming is genetically engineered food crops – whether first generation genetically modified (GM) crops based on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or newer techniques involving the likes of gene editing.   

Glyphosate/GM crop approval  

According to a recent report in the Chennai-based New Indian Express (NIE), the Indian government is likely to allow the cultivation of herbicide-tolerant (HT) GM crops. These crops have not been legalised but have been growing in India for some years. 

The government is creating a pool of more than 4,000 ‘progressive farmers’ and ‘rural educated youths’ who can help farmers spray glyphosate on GM crops that have been genetically engineered to withstand the herbicide. These pest control officers are to spray glyphosate on behalf of farmers. 

Glyphosate is carcinogenic and, in India, its use is officially restricted to tea crops and non-cropping areas like barren land and roadsides. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015.   

The NIE quotes a source who implies that the drive to spray glyphosate on agricultural land seems like a precursor of legalising HT GM cotton (I would add – and HT GM food crops eventually).  

At this time, only one GM crop – Bt (insecticidal) cotton – is legalised in India.  

The legalisation of HT GM cotton would be a key step towards opening a multi-billion-dollar market for global agritech-agrochemicals firms which have a range of HT GM food crops waiting in the pipeline.   

Much has been written on the devastating effects that glyphosate has on health and the environment. Glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH)s formulas affect the gut microbiome and are associated with a global metabolic health crisis. They also cause epigenetic changes in humans and animals – diseases skip a generation then appear. 

These toxic chemicals have entered the food chain and human bodies at harmful levels and are even in a range of popular children’s cereals. 

An April 2023 study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute measured glyphosate levels in the urine of farmers and other study participants and determined that high levels of the pesticide were associated with signs of a reaction in the body called oxidative stress, a condition that causes damage to DNA and a cancer biomarker.  

The study findings appeared after the US Centers for Disease Control reported in 2022 that more than 80% of urine samples drawn from children and adults contained glyphosate. Similar figures are found in the EU. GBHs are the world’s most widely used agricultural weedkiller. 

There are dozens of academic studies that indicate the deleterious and disturbing effects of GBHs on human health. Rather than presenting them here, for the sake of brevity, many are listed in the online article Bathed In Pesticides: The Narrative Of Deception (2022). 

Attorney Robert F Kennedy Jr and current presidential candidate has been involved with some of the ongoing court cases in the US that have been brought against Bayer regarding the human health damage of Monsanto’s Roundup GBH (Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018).  

Kennedy concludes that there is cascading scientific evidence linking glyphosate to a constellation of injuries that have become prevalent since its introduction, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney and inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts. 

He adds that strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10. 

Researchers peg glyphosate as a potent endocrine disruptor, which interferes with sexual development in children. It is also a chelator that removes important minerals from the body and disrupts the microbiome, destroying beneficial bacteria in the human gut and triggering brain inflammation and other ill effects. 

So, why do GBHs remain on the market? It’s because of the power of the agritech/agrochemical sector and the don’t look, don’t see approach of compromised regulatory bodies: see Glyphosate: EU assessment report excludes most of the scientific literature from its analysis (2021) by GMWatch and Glyphosate in the EU: product promoters masquerading as regulators in a ‘cesspool of corruption’? (2016) in The Ecologist. 

Consider what veteran journalist Carey Gillam says: 

US Roundup litigation began in 2015 after the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. Internal Monsanto documents dating back decades show that the company was aware of scientific research linking its weed killer to cancer but instead of warning consumers, the company worked to suppress the information and manipulate scientific literature.

Over the years, Monsanto mounted a deceitful defence of its health- and environment-damaging Roundup and its GM crops and orchestrated toxic smear campaigns against anyone – scientist or campaigner – who threatened its interests. 

In 2016, campaigner Rosemary Mason wrote an open letter to European Chemicals Agency Executive Director Geert Dancet. It can be accessed on the academia.edu site.

In it, she sets out how current EU legislation was originally set up to protect the pesticides industry and how Monsanto and other agrochemical corporations helped the EU design the regulatory systems for their own products.

There is much at stake for the industry. According to Phillips McDougall’s Annual Agriservice Reports, herbicides made up 43% of the global pesticide market in 2019 by value. Much of the increase in glyphosate use is due to the introduction of glyphosate-tolerant soybean, maize and cotton seeds in the US, Brazil and Argentina.

GBHs are a multi-billion-dollar money-spinning venture for the manufacturers. But this latest development in India is as much about the legalisation of a wide range of proprietary HT GM seeds and crops as it is about glyphosate because both are joined at the hip.

Regulatory delinquency

In India, five high-level reports have advised against the adoption of GM crops: the Jairam Ramesh Report (2010); the Sopory Committee Report (2012); the Parliamentary Standing Committee Report (2012); the Technical Expert Committee Final Report (2013); and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science & Technology, Environment and Forests (2017).

Given the health and environmental issues surrounding GM crops, as well as the now well-documented failure of Bt cotton in the country, it comes as little surprise that these reports advise against their adoption.

This high-level advice also derives, in part, from GM ‘regulation’ in India being dogged by blatant violations of biosafety norms, hasty approvals, a lack of monitoring abilities, general apathy towards the hazards of contamination and a lack of institutional oversight. 

The ‘Technical Expert Committee Final Report’ was scathing about India’s prevailing regulatory system and highlighted its inadequacies and serious inherent conflicts of interest. As we have seen with the push to get GM mustard commercialised, the problems described by the TEC persist.  

The drive to get GM crops commercialised has been relentless, not least GM mustard. The Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), the country’s apex regulatory body for GMOs, has pushed ahead by giving this crop the nod. However, the case of GM mustard remains stuck in the Supreme Court due to a public interest litigation lodged by environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues. 

Rodrigues argues that GM mustard is being undemocratically forced through with flawed tests (or no testing) and a lack of public scrutiny: in other words, unremitting scientific fraud and outright regulatory delinquency. 

This crop is also HT, which is wholly inappropriate for a country like India with its small biodiverse farms that could be affected by its application on nearby fields. 

However, despite the ban on GM crops, in 2005, biologist Pushpa Bhargava noted that unapproved varieties of several GM crops were being sold to farmers. In 2008, Arun Shrivasatava wrote that illegal GM okra had been planted in India and poor farmers had been offered lucrative deals to plant “special seed” of all sorts of vegetables. 

In 2013, a group of scientists and NGOs protested in India against the introduction of transgenic brinjal in Bangladesh – a centre for origin and diversity of the vegetable – as it would give rise to contamination of the crop in India. In 2014, the West Bengal government said it had received information regarding “infiltration” of commercial seeds of GM Bt brinjal from Bangladesh. 

In 2017, the illegal cultivation of an HT GM soybean was reported in Gujarat. Bhartiya Kisan Sangh (BKS), a national farmers organisation, claimed that Gujarat farmers had been cultivating the HT crop. 

As mentioned above, HT cotton is illegally growing in India.  

In the 2017 paper – The ox fall down: path-breaking and technology treadmills in Indian cotton agriculture – Glenn Stone and Andrew Flachs note the tactic of encouraging farmers to abandon traditional on-farm practices, which coincides with the appearance of an increasing supply of HT GM cotton seeds.

This is a cynical attempt to place farmers on corporate seed and chemical (glyphosate) treadmills. 

The authors write: 

Although India’s cotton sector has been penetrated by various input- and capital-intensive methods, penetration by herbicide has been largely stymied. In Telangana State, the main obstacle has been the practice of ‘double-lining’, in which cotton plants are spaced widely to allow weeding by ox-plow… double-lining is an example of an advantageous path for cash-poor farmers. However, it is being actively undermined by parties intent on expanding herbicide markets and opening a niche for next-generation genetically modified cotton.

Stone and Flachs note the potential market for herbicide growth alone in India is huge. Writing in 2017, the authors note that sales could soon reach USD 800 million with scope for even greater expansion. Indeed, enormous expansion if HT GM crops become legal. 

Friends in high places 

Global agritech firms are salivating at the prospect of India being prised open for the introduction of GM crops. The industry has always had high-level supporters in India and abroad. And this leads back to what was stated earlier in the article – the plan to industrialise Indian agriculture at the behest of the World Bank and foreign agribusiness and the manoeuvring into position of compliant officials. 

PM Modi proclaimed in 2014 that GM represents a good business-investment opportunity. Renowned environmentalist Vandana Shiva has highlighted the arm twisting that has gone on in an attempt to force through GMOs into India, with various politicians having been pushed aside until the dotted line for GMO open field-testing approval was signed on.  

Back in late 2015, I co-authored a piece with then editor of The Ecologist Oliver Tickell – Rice, wheat, mustard… India drives forward first GMO crops under veil of secrecy.  

Seventeen or more secret applications had been made to India’s GMO regulators for trials and release of GM crops, including rice, wheat, chickpeas, brinjal and mustard. In a violation of the law, regulators had released no information about the applications, raising fears that India’s first GMOs will be released with no health, safety or environmental testing. 

It is not surprising then that calls have been made for probes into the workings of the GEAC and other official bodies, who seem to have been asleep at the wheel or deliberately looking the other way as illegal GM crop cultivation has taken place.  

India’s first GM crop cultivation – Bt cotton – was discovered in 2001 growing on thousands of hectares in Gujarat, spread surreptitiously and illegally. Campaigner Kavitha Kuruganti said the GEAC was caught off-guard when news about large-scale illegal cultivation of Bt cotton emerged, even as field trials that were to decide whether India would opt for this GM crop were still underway. 

In March 2002, the GEAC ended up approving Bt cotton for commercial cultivation in India. To this day, no liability has been fixed for the illegal spread. We could well be witnessing a rerun of this scenario for HT cotton and HT food crops.  

The tactic of contaminate first then legalise has benefited industry players before. Aside from Bt cotton in India, in 2016, the US Department of Agriculture granted marketing approval of GM Liberty Link 601 (Bayer CropScience) rice variety following its illegal contamination of the food supply and rice exports. The USDA effectively sanctioned an ‘approval-by-contamination’ policy. 

The writing could be on the wall for India. 

Does India need GM?  

A common claim is that GMOs are essential to agriculture if we are to feed an ever-growing global population. Supporters of GM crops argue that by increasing productivity and yields, this technology will also help boost farmers’ incomes and lift many out of poverty.  

In a 2018 paper in the journal Current Science, eminent scientists P C Kesavan and M S Swaminathan (regarded as the ‘father of the Green Revolution’ in India) questioned the efficacy of and the need for GMOs in agriculture.

The performance of GM crops has been a hotly contested issue and, as highlighted in Kesavan and Swaminathan’s piece and by many others, there is sufficient evidence to question their efficacy, especially that of HT crops and their shocking, devastating impact in places like Argentina.

Kesavan and Swaminathan argue that GM is supplementary and must be need based. In more than 99% of cases, they say that time-honoured conventional breeding is sufficient. Too often, however, conventional options and innovations that outperform GM are sidelined in a rush by powerful interests to facilitate the introduction of GM crops. 

Although India fares poorly in world hunger assessments, the country has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains and has ensured there is enough food available to feed its entire population. It is the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses and millets and the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables and fruit. 

People are not hungry in India because its farmers do not produce enough food. Hunger and malnutrition result from various factors, including inadequate food distribution, (gender) inequality and poverty; in fact, the country continues to export food while millions remain hungry. It’s a case of ‘scarcity’ amid abundance. 

Where farmers’ livelihoods are concerned, the pro-GMO lobby says that GM will boost productivity and help secure cultivators a better income. Again, this is misleading: it ignores crucial political and economic contexts. Even with bumper harvests, Indian farmers still find themselves in financial distress. 

India’s farmers are not experiencing financial hardship due to low productivity. They are reeling from the effects of neoliberal policies, years of neglect and a deliberate strategy to displace most of them at the behest of the World Bank and predatory global agri-food corporations. 

But pro-GMO supporters, both outside of India and within, along with the neoliberal think tanks many of them are associated with, have wasted no time in wrenching the issues of hunger and poverty from their political contexts to use notions of ‘helping farmers’ and ‘feeding the world’ as lynchpins of their promotional strategy.  

The knowledge and many of the traditional practices of India’s small farmers are now recognised as sophisticated and appropriate for high-productive, sustainable agriculture. It is no surprise therefore that a 2019 FAO high-level report has called for agroecology and smallholder farmers to be prioritised and invested in to achieve global sustainable food security. It argues that scaling up agroecology offers potential solutions to many of the world’s most pressing problems, whether, for instance, climate resilience, carbon storage, soil degradation, water shortages, unemployment or food security. 

Available evidence suggests that (non-GMO) smallholder farming using low-input methods is more productive in total output than large-scale industrial farms and can be more profitable.  

It is for good reason that the FAO high-level report referred to earlier along with the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Professor Hilal Elver and numerous other papers and reports advocate agroecology call for investment in this type of agriculture. Despite the pressures, including the fact that globally industrial agriculture grabs 80% of subsidies and 90% of research funds, smallholder agriculture plays a major role in feeding the world. 

In the introduction to a recent article, I wrote that the prevailing globalised agrifood model is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness, the undermining and destruction of local communities and the eradication of biodiversity.   

Do Indian citizens want a GM/glyphosate-drenched, industrial food system that brings with it all of the above?   

I also wrote that the model relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets, long supply chains, external proprietary inputs, highly processed food and market (corporate) dependency.   

The solution lies in a paradigm shift that abandons the notion that urbanisation equates with ‘progress’. A shift that prioritises rural communities, small independent retail enterprises (instead of global giants like Walmart-Flipkart and Amazon) and smallholder farms, local markets, short supply chains, on-farm resources, diverse agroecological cropping, nutrient-dense diets and food sovereignty. 

A shift that rejects the ecomodernist techno-dystopia of hyper-urbanisation, genetically engineered crops, biosynthetic food and farmerless farms and a ‘food transition’ all under the control of a big data-agritech cartel that wraps all of the above in a veneer of fake green.   

There are alternative visions, potential outcomes and resistance that can challenge the ecomodernist agenda.   

Instead of their eradication, creating land markets to amalgamate their land for industrial-scale mono-cropping or using vital cropland to build on, smallholder farmers and rural communities should be placed at the centre of development policies. Moreover, inspiration can be taken from the worldviews of indigenous peoples and, as anthropology professor Arturo Escobar says, the concept of Buen Viver: promoting ways of living that stress the collective well being of humans and nature and recognising the inseparability and interdependence of both. 

For instance, India’s indigenous peoples’ low-energy, low-consumption tribal cultures are the antithesis of capitalism and industrialisation, and their knowledge and value systems promote genuine sustainability through restraint in what is taken from nature.  

This entails a fundamental transformation in values, priorities and outlooks and a shift away from predation, imperialism, domination, anthropocentrism and plunder.  

That’s what a genuine ‘food transition’ and Buen Viver would really mean.

• Many of the issues mentioned in the article above are discussed in the author’s free-to-read e-book. 

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

• Argentina will pay the IMF in yuans
• Yuan overtakes the dollar in China’s bilateral trade
• Floods in the north of the country
• Cunchao, the rural soccer phenomenon

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

Small farmers produce up to 80% of the food in the non-industrialised countries. However, they are currently squeezed onto less than a quarter of the world’s farmland. The period 1974-2014 saw 140 million hectares – more than all the farmland in China – being taken over for soybean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane plantations.  

GRAIN noted that the concentration of fertile agricultural land in fewer and fewer hands is directly related to the increasing number of people going hungry every day. While industrial farms have enormous power, influence and resources, GRAIN’s data showed that small farms almost everywhere outperform big farms in terms of productivity. 

In the same year, policy think tank the Oakland Institute released a report stating that the first years of the 21 century will be remembered for a global land rush of nearly unprecedented scale. An estimated 500 million acres, an area eight times the size of Britain, were reported bought or leased across the developing world between 2000 and 2011, often at the expense of local food security and land rights. 

Institutional investors, including hedge funds, private equity, pension funds and university endowments, were eager to capitalise on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class.  

This trend was not confined to buying up agricultural land in low-income countries. Oakland Institute’s Anuradha Mittal argued that there was a new rush for US farmland. One industry leader estimated that $10 billion in institutional capital was looking for access to this land in the US.   

Although investors believed that there is roughly $1.8 trillion worth of farmland across the US, of this between $300 billion and $500 billion (2014 figures) is considered to be of “institutional quality” – a combination of factors relating to size, water access, soil quality and location that determine the investment appeal of a property.  

In 2014, Mittal said that if action is not taken, then a perfect storm of global and national trends could converge to permanently shift farm ownership from family businesses to institutional investors and other consolidated corporate operations. 

Why this matters 

Peasant/smallholder agriculture prioritises food production for local and national markets as well as for farmers’ own families, whereas corporations take over fertile land and prioritise commodities or export crops for profit and markets far away that tend to cater for the needs of more affluent sections of the global population.  

In 2013, a UN report stated that farming in rich and poor nations alike should shift from monocultures towards greater varieties of crops, reduced use of fertilisers and other inputs, increased support for small-scale farmers and more locally focused production and consumption of food. The report stated that monoculture and industrial farming methods were not providing sufficient affordable food where it is needed.  

In September 2020, however, GRAIN showed an acceleration of the trend that it had warned of six years earlier: institutional investments via private equity funds being used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into industrial-scale concerns. One of the firms spearheading this is the investment asset management firm BlackRock, which exists to put its funds to work to make money for its clients.  

BlackRock holds shares in a number of the world’s largest food companies, including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Walmart, Danone and Kraft Heinz and also has significant shares in most of the top publicly traded food and agriculture firms: those which focus on providing inputs (seeds, chemicals, fertilisers) and farm equipment as well as agricultural trading companies, such as Deere, Bunge, ADM and Tyson (based on BlackRock’s own data from 2018). 

Together, the world’s top five asset managers – BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group – own around 10–30% of the shares of the top firms in the agrifood sector.  

The article “Who is Driving the Destructive Industrial Agriculture Model?” (2022) by Frederic Mousseau of the Oakland Institute showed that BlackRock and Vanguard are by far the biggest shareholders in eight of the largest pesticides and fertiliser companies: Yara, CF Industries Holdings K+S Aktiengesellschaft, Nutrien, The Mosaic Company, Corteva and Bayer.  

These companies’ profits were projected to double, from US$19 billion in 2021 to $38 billion in 2022, and will continue to grow as long as the industrial agriculture production model on which they rely keeps expanding. Other major shareholders include investment firms, banks and pension funds from Europe and North America. 

Through their capital injections, BlackRock et al. fuel and make huge profits from a globalised food system that has been responsible for eradicating indigenous systems of production, expropriating seeds, land and knowledge, impoverishing, displacing or proletarianizing farmers and destroying rural communities and cultures. This has resulted in poor-quality food and illness, human rights abuses and ecological destruction.  

Systemic compulsion 

Post-1945, the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan bank with the World Bank helped roll out what has become the prevailing modern-day agrifood system under the guise of a supposedly ‘miraculous’ corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive Green Revolution (its much-heralded but seldom challenged ‘miracles’ of increased food production are nothing of the sort; for instance, see the “What the Green Revolution Did for India” and “New Histories of the Green Revolution“).  

Ever since, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO have helped consolidate an export-oriented industrial agriculture based on Green Revolution thinking and practices. A model that uses loan conditionalities to compel nations to ‘structurally adjust’ their economies and sacrifice food self-sufficiency.  

Countries are placed on commodity crop production treadmills to earn foreign currency (US dollars) to buy oil and food on the global market (benefitting global commodity traders like Cargill, which helped write the WTO trade regime – the Agreement on Agriculture), entrenching the need to increase cash crop cultivation for exports.  

Today, investment financing is helping to drive and further embed this system of corporate dependency worldwide. BlackRock is ideally positioned to create the political and legislative framework to maintain this system and increase the returns from its investments in the agrifood sector.  

The firm has around $10 trillion in assets under its management and has, according to William Engdahl, positioned itself to effectively control the US Federal Reserve, many Wall Street mega-banks and the Biden administration: a number of former top people at BlackRock are in key government positions, shaping economic policy. 

So, it is no surprise that we are seeing an intensification of the lop-sided battle being waged against local markets, local communities and indigenous systems of production for the benefit of global private equity and big agribusiness.  

For example, while ordinary Ukrainians are currently defending their land, financial institutions are supporting the consolidation of farmland by rich individuals and Western financial interests. It is similar in India (see the article “The Kisans Are Right: Their Land Is at Stake“) where a land market is being prepared and global investors are no doubt poised to swoop.  

In both countries, debt and loan conditionalities on the back of economic crises are helping to push such policies through. For instance, there has been a 30+ year plan to restructure India’s economy and agriculture. This stems from the country’s 1991 foreign exchange crisis, which was used to impose IMF-World Bank debt-related ‘structural adjustment’ conditionalities. The Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy locates agricultural ‘reforms’ within a broader process of Western imperialism’s increasing capture of the Indian economy. 

Yet ‘imperialism’ is a dirty word never to be used in ‘polite’ circles. Such a notion is to be brushed aside as ideological by the corporations that benefit from it. Instead, what we constantly hear from these conglomerates is that countries are choosing to embrace their entry and proprietary inputs into the domestic market as well as ‘neoliberal reforms’ because these are essential if we are to feed a growing global population. The reality is that these firms and their investors are attempting to deliver a knockout blow to smallholder farmers and local enterprises in places like India. 

But the claim that these corporations, their inputs and their model of agriculture is vital for ensuring global food security is a proven falsehood. However, in an age of censorship and doublespeak, truth has become the lie and the lie is truth. Dispossession is growth, dependency is market integration, population displacement is land mobility, serving the needs of agrifood corporations is modern agriculture and the availability of adulterated, toxic food as part of a monoculture diet is feeding the world. 

And when a ‘pandemic’ was announced and those who appeared to be dying in greater numbers were the elderly and people with obesity, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease, few were willing to point the finger at the food system and its powerful corporations,  practices and products that are responsible for the increasing prevalence of these conditions (see campaigner Rosemary Mason’s numerous papers documenting this on Academia.edu). Because this is the real public health crisis that has been building for decades.   

But who cares? BlackRock, Vanguard and other institutional investors? Highly debatable because if we turn to the pharmaceuticals industry, we see similar patterns of ownership involving the same players.   

A December 2020 paper on ownership of the major pharmaceuticals companies, by researchers Albert Banal-Estanol, Melissa Newham and Jo Seldeslachts, found the following (reported on the website of TRT World, a Turkish news media outlet): 

Public companies are increasingly owned by a handful of large institutional investors, so we expected to see many ownership links between companies — what was more surprising was the magnitude of common ownership… We frequently find that more than 50 per cent of a company is owned by ‘common’ shareholders who also own stakes in rival pharma companies.

The three largest shareholders of Pfizer, J&J and Merck are Vanguard, SSGA and BlackRock.  

In 2019, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations reported that pay outs to shareholders had increased by almost 400 per cent — from $30 billion in 2000 to $146 billion in 2018. Shareholders made $1.54 trillion in profits over that 18-year period.

So, for institutional investors, the link between poor food and bad health is good for profit. While investing in the food system rakes in enormous returns, you can perhaps double your gains if you invest in pharma too.

These findings predate the 2021 documentary Monopoly: An Overview of the Great Reset, which also shows that the stock of the world’s largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors. ‘Competing’ brands, like Coke and Pepsi, are not really competitors, since their stock is owned by the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies and banks. 

Smaller investors are owned by larger investors. Those are owned by even bigger investors. The visible top of this pyramid shows only Vanguard and Black Rock.  

A 2017 Bloomberg report states that both these companies in the year 2028 together will have investments amounting to $20 trillion.    

While individual corporations – like Pfizer and Monsanto/Bayer, for instance – should be (and at times have been) held to account for some of their many wrongdoings, their actions are symptomatic of a system that increasingly leads back to the boardrooms of the likes of BlackRock and Vanguard.  

Prof Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University says: 

Today, capitalist power can be summed up with the names of the three biggest investment funds in the world: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street Global Advisor. These giants, sitting at the centre of a huge galaxy of financial entities, manage a mass of value close to half the global GDP, and are major shareholders in around 90% of listed companies.

These firms help shape and fuel the dynamics of the economic system and the globalised food regime, ably assisted by the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and other supranational institutions. A system that leverages debt, uses coercion and employs militarism to secure continued expansion.  

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. Oxfam and Development Finance International also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next few years. 

As a result, almost three-quarters of Africa’s governments have reduced their agricultural budgets since 2019, and more than 20 million people have been pushed into severe hunger. In addition, the world’s poorest countries were due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports. 

Last year, Oxfam International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher stated that there was a terrifying prospect that in excess of a quarter of a billion more people would fall into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone. That year, food inflation rose by double digits in most African countries.  

By September 2022, some 345 million people across the world were experiencing acute hunger, a number that has more than doubled since 2019. Moreover, one person is dying of hunger every four seconds. From 2019 to 2022, the number of undernourished people grew by 150 million. 

Billions of dollars’ worth of arms continue to pour into Ukraine from the NATO countries as US neocons pursue their goal of regime change in Russia and balkanisation of that country. 

Yet people in those NATO countries are experiencing increasing levels of hardship. The US has sent almost 80 billion dollars to Ukraine, while 30 million low-income people across the US are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US. In England, 100,000 children have been frozen out of free school meals.  

Due to the disruptive supply chain effects of the conflict in Ukraine, speculative trading that drives up food prices, the impact of closing down the global economy under the guise of COVID and the inflationary impacts of pumping trillions of dollars into the financial system between September 2019 and March 2020, people are being driven into poverty and denied access to sufficient food. 

Matters are not helped by issues that have long plagued the global food system: cutbacks in public subsidies to agriculture, WTO rules that facilitate cheap, subsidised imports which undermine or wipe out indigenous agriculture in poorer countries and loan conditionalities, resulting in countries ‘structurally adjusting’ their agri sectors thereby eradicating food security and self-sufficiency – consider that Africa has been transformed from a net food exporter in the 1960s to a net food importer today.  

Great game food geopolitics continue and result in elite interests playing with the lives of hundreds of millions who are regarded as collateral damage. Policies, underpinned by neoliberal dogma masquerading as economic science and necessity, which are designed to create dependency and benefit a handful of multi-billionaires and global agribusiness corporations who, ably assisted by the World Bank, IMF and WTO, now preside over an increasingly centralised food regime. 

Many of these corporations have engaged in rampant profiteering at a time when people across the world are experiencing rising food inflation. For instance, 20 corporations in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors delivered $53.5 billion to shareholders in the fiscal years 2020 and 2021. At the same time, the UN estimates that $51.5 billion would be enough to provide food, shelter and lifesaving support for the world’s 230 million most vulnerable people. 

As a paper in the journal Frontiers noted in 2021, these corporations form part of a powerful alliance of multinational corporations, philanthropies and export-oriented countries who are subverting multilateral institutions of food governance. Many who are involved in this alliance are co-opting the narrative of ‘food systems transformation’ as they anticipate new investment opportunities and seek total control of the global food system. 

This type of ‘transformation’ is more of the same wrapped in a climate emergency narrative in an attempt to move food and farming further towards an ecomodernist techno-dystopia controlled by big agribusiness and big tech, as described in the article “The Netherlands: Template for Ecomodernism’s Brave New World.” 

A ‘brave new world’ where a concoction of genetically engineered items, synthetic food and ultra-processed products will do more harm than good – but will certainly boost the bottom line of the pharmaceutical corporations.  

While securing further dominance over the global food system and undermining food security in the process, global agribusiness frames this as ‘feeding the world’. 

The model these corporations promote not only creates food insecurity but also produces death and illness.   

Former Professor of Medicine Dr Paul Marik recently stated: 

If you believe the narrative, Type 2 diabetes is a progressive metabolic disease that’ll result in cardiac complications. You’re going to lose your legs. You’re going to have kidney disease, and the only treatment is expensive pharma drugs. That is completely false. It’s a lie.

It is projected that by the end of this decade half of the world’s population are going to be obese and over 20% to 25% will have Type 2 diabetes.   

According to Marik, the bottom line is Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disease due to bad lifestyle and really bad eating habits: 

“We eat all the time. We snack all the time. This is part of the food industry’s goal. Processed food, starch, becomes an addiction. Most of us are glucose addicted and it’s, in fact, more addictive than cocaine. It creates this vicious cycle of insulin resistance.” 

He adds that if you’re insulin resistant, this prevents leptin and the other hormones acting on your brain, so you’re continually hungry: 

“If you are continually hungry, you eat more, which causes more insulin resistance. It causes this vicious cycle of overeating carbohydrates…” 

This is the nature of the modern food system. Cheap processed ingredients, low-nutrient value, highly addictive and maximum profits. A system that is being imposed or has already been imposed on countries whose populations once had healthy, unadulterated diets (see Obesity, malnutrition and the globalisation of bad food – theecologist.org). 

Over the past 60 years in Western nations, there have been fundamental changes in the quality of food. In 2007, nutritional therapist David Thomas in “A Review of the 6th Edition of McCance and Widdowson’s the Mineral Depletion of Foods Available to Us as a Nation” noted a precipitous change towards convenience and pre-prepared foods containing saturated fats, highly processed meats and refined carbohydrates, often devoid of vital micronutrients yet packed with a cocktail of chemical additives including colourings, flavourings and preservatives. 

Aside from the negative impacts of Green Revolution cropping systems and practices, Thomas proposed that these changes are significant contributors to rising levels of diet-induced ill health. He added that ongoing research clearly demonstrates a significant relationship between deficiencies in micronutrients and physical and mental ill health. 

Increasing prevalence of diabetes, childhood leukaemia, childhood obesity, cardiovascular disorders, infertility, osteoporosis and rheumatoid arthritis, mental illnesses and so on have all been shown to have some direct relationship to diet, specifically micronutrient deficiency, and pesticide use. 

It is clear that we have a deeply unjust and unsustainable food system that causes environmental devastation, illness and malnutrition, among other things. People often ask: So, what’s the solution? The solutions have been made clear time and again and involve a genuine food transition towards agroecology.  

Unlike the co-opted version of ‘food transition’ being promoted, agroecology offers concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture. Agroecology challenges the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of a neoliberalism that drives a failing system. Well-known academics like Raj Patel and Eric Holtz-Gimenez have written extensively on the potential of agroecology. And its benefits are clear. 

In finishing, let us consider the skin-deep morality pedalled throughout the COVID period. During COVID, the official narrative was underpinned by emotive slogans like ‘protect lives’ and ‘keep safe’. Those who refused the COVID jab were labelled ‘granny killers’ and ‘irresponsible’. All presided over by government politicians who too often failed to obey their own COVID rules.  

Meanwhile, while having terrorised the public with a health crisis narrative, they continue to collude with powerful agrifood corporations that destroy health courtesy of their practices. They continue to facilitate a system that serves the needs of global agricapital and ruthless investors like BlackRock’s Larry Fink who secure massive profits from a monopolistic food system (Fink also invests in the pharma sector – one of the biggest beneficiaries of a sickening global food regime) that by its very nature creates illness, malnutrition and hunger.    

The COVID narrative was imbued with the notion of moral responsibility. The people who sold it to the masses have no morality. Like the UK’s former health minister and COVID rule breaker Matt Hancock (see Matt Hancock’s Car Crash Interview), they are willing to sell their soul (or influence) to the highest bidder – in Hancock’s case, a £10,000 wage demand for a day’s ‘consultancy’ as a sitting politician or a few hundred thousand to bolster his ego, bank balance and image on a celebrity TV programme.  

In a corrupted and corrupting society, the rewards could be even higher for the likes of Hancock when he leaves office (a health minister who helped traumatise the population while doing nothing to hold the health-damaging agribusiness corporations to account). But with a long line of well-rewarded fraudsters to choose from, we already know that.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

Photograph Source: Sintegrity – CC BY-SA 4.0

Who would have expected that the BRICS nations could rise as the potential rival of the G7 countries, the World Bank and the IMF combined? But that once seemingly distant possibility now has real prospects which could change the political equilibrium of world politics.

BRICS is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It was supposedly coined by the Chief Economist of Goldman Sachs in 2001, as a reference to the world’s emerging economies. It was then known as BRIC, with the ‘S’ added later, when South Africa formally joined the group in 2010.

BRIC’s first official summit took place in 2009. Then, the discussion seemed largely abstract. However, not until 2014 did BRICS begin taking serious steps towards greater integration, when the nascent alliance, now including South Africa, launched the New Development Bank with seed money of $50 billion. This decision meant that the group was now ready to take its first practical steps in challenging the dominance of the West over international monetary institutions, namely the World Bank and the IMF.

The geopolitical global conflict, thus shifts, resulting from the Russia-Ukraine war, however, proved to be the driving force behind the massive expansion underway at BRICS, especially as financially powerful countries began showing interest in the initiative. They include Argentina, UAE, Mexico, Algeria and, particularly, Saudi Arabia.

Recent financial reports suggest that BRICS is already the world’s largest gross domestic product (GDP) bloc in the world, as it currently contributes 31.5% to the global GDP, ahead of the G7, which contributes 30.7%.

One of the greatest opportunities, and challenges, facing BRICS now is its ability to expand its membership base while maintaining its current growth. The issue of helping new members maintain economic and political independence is particularly vital.

The IMF and World Bank are notorious for stipulating their monetary support of countries, especially in the Global South, on political conditions. This position is often justified under the guise of human rights and democracy, though is entirely related to privatization and opening markets for foreign investors – read western corporations.

As BRICS strengthens, it will have the potential to help poorer countries without pushing a self-serving political agenda, or indirectly manipulating and controlling local economies.

As inflation is hitting many western countries, resulting in slower economic growth and causing social unrest, nations in the Global South are using this as an opportunity to develop their own economic alternative. This means that groups like BRICS will cease being exclusively economic institutions. The struggle is now very political.

For decades, the US’s greatest weapon has been its dollar which, with time, ceased being a normal currency per se, to become an actual commodity. Wars have been fought to ensure countries, like Iraq and Libya, remain committed to the dollar. Following the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Baghdad returned to selling its oil in US dollars. This struggle over the dominance of the dollar was also painfully felt in Venezuela which has the world’s largest oil reserve, yet was reduced to abject poverty for attempting to challenge the supremacy of Washington its currency.

Though it will take time, the process of lessening the reliance on US dollars is now in full swing.

On March 30, Brazil and China announced a trade agreement that would allow them to use the two countries’ national currencies, the yuan and the reais, respectively. This step shall prove consequential, for it will encourage other South American countries to follow suit. But that move was neither the first, nor will it be the last of its kind.

One of the main decisions by finance ministers and central bank governors of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) following their March 30-31 meeting in Indonesia is to reduce their reliance on the US dollar. They agree to “reinforce financial resilience … through the use of local currency to support cross-border trade and investment in the ASEAN region.” This too is a game-changer.

The BRICS countries, in particular, are leading the charge and are set to serve as the facilitator of rearranging the world’s economic and financial map.

While the West is busy trying to keep its own economies afloat, it remains wary of the changes underway in the Global South. Washington and other western capitals are worried. They ought to be.

Following a meeting between US President Joe Biden and 40 African leaders at the White House last December, it was clear that African countries were not interested in taking sides in the ongoing war in Ukraine. Consequently, US Vice President Kamala Harris flew to Africa on March 26 to meet African leaders, with the sole purpose of pushing them away from China and Russia. That effort is likely to fail.

A perfect illustration of Africa’s refusal to abandon its neutrality is the press conference between Harris and President of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, on March 28. “There may be an obsession in America about Chinese activity on the continent, but there is no such obsession here,” Akufo-Addo told reporters.

To argue that BRICS is a purely economic group is to ignore a large part of the story. The timing of BRICS’ expansion, the stern political discourse of its members, potential members and allies, the repeated visits by top Russian and Chinese diplomats to Africa and other regions in the Global South, etc., indicate that BRICS has become the South’s new platform for geopolitics, economy and diplomacy.

The more successful BRICS will become, the weaker western hegemony over the South will grow. Though some western politicians and media insist on downplaying BRICS’ role in shaping the new world order, the change seems to be real and irreversible.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

• Lula da Silva in China
• ByteDance posts record earnings
• New Tesla mega factory in Shanghai
• Afrobeat gains popularity in China

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

• Lula da Silva in China
• ByteDance posts record earnings
• New Tesla mega factory in Shanghai
• Afrobeat gains popularity in China

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

The International Monetary Fund insists that so-called "social spending floors" enacted as part of its loan programs for poor and middle-income countries help protect critical social services from the kinds of austerity that the powerful institution has historically imposed on borrowers.

But an Oxfam International analysis released Thursday in the midst of the IMF and World Bank's spring meetings found that the fund's spending floors—part of a strategy implemented in 2019—"are proving largely powerless against its own austerity policies that instead force countries to cut public funding."

The humanitarian group estimated that "for every $1 the IMF encouraged a set of poor countries to spend on public goods, it has told them to cut four times more through austerity measures."

"The IMF's 'social spending floors' encouraged raising inflation-adjusted social spending by about $1 billion over the second year of its loan programs compared to the first year, across the 13 countries that participated where data is available," Oxfam estimated. "By comparison, the IMF's austerity drive has required most of those same governments to rip away over $5 billion worth of state spending over the same period."

\u201c@IMFNews has lending conditions for governments designed to promote minimum levels of social spending, to help people cope with economic crisis. But it\u2019s being eaten up by #austerity measures \u2013 that are being pushed by the IMF! \n\nFind out more: https://t.co/rkvjwcOpat\u201d

— Oxfam International (@Oxfam International) 1681384739

Oxfam's report comes as poor countries are facing what the United Nations described Tuesday as a "lost decade" due in large part to soaring debt levels and interest rate hikes implemented by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks.

The U.K.-based advocacy group Debt Justice released figures earlier this week showing that in 2023, lower-income country debt payments will reach their highest level in 25 years, endangering spending on healthcare, education, climate action, and more.

For its new report—titled IMF Social Spending Floors: A Fig Leaf for Austerity?—Oxfam analyzed data from 17 low- and middle-income countries that agreed to long-term loan programs with the IMF in 2020 and 2021, years in which the coronavirus wreaked havoc across the globe.

The group found that the IMF's social spending floors were ineffective at achieving their stated goal of preserving minimum levels of social investment.

"Based on the available data, not one of the 17 countries currently has a social spending floor large enough to cover the cost of meeting the World Health Organization's target to reach the Sustainable Development Goal for Health, let alone targets in other areas like education," Oxfam found. "The floors agreed by the IMF with Chad, Cameroon, Jordan, and Madagascar meant that their social spending targets set in the IMF program had actually decreased by 3-5% over the course of their loans."

Amitabh Behar, Oxfam International's incoming interim executive director, said that "to make matters worse, these social floors have become more like ceilings."

"While only half of the 17 countries we analyzed had actually met their minimum social spending floors—which is disappointing enough—just two had spent 10% more than what they agreed with the IMF," Behar added.

The new report was published months after a separate Oxfam analysis found that 13 out of the 15 IMF loan programs negotiated during year two of the Covid-19 pandemic required "new austerity measures such as taxes on food and fuel or spending cuts that could put vital public services at risk," including healthcare.

Half of low- and lower-middle-income countries cut health spending as a share of their budgets during the first two years of the coronavirus crisis, Oxfam and Development Finance International estimated last year.

In its Thursday report, Oxfam suggested a number of improvements the IMF could make to its loan programs to shield poor nations' key public services from cuts.

"The IMF should set social spending levels to at least meet the spending goals and social outcomes set in countries' development strategies," the group recommended. "These should be social spending goals supported by macroeconomic frameworks that enable rapid progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals."

Oxfam also argued that "social spending floors should be increased through progressive revenue-raising measures, especially different forms of wealth taxation, rather than reallocating resources or budget cuts."

"While the 'social spending floors' initiative retains its original urgency and promise," Behar said in a statement Thursday, "it is being undermined by the worst effects of austerity that the IMF is pursuing much more enthusiastically."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Roughly 100 activists marked the opening day of the World Bank Group spring meetings by riding bicycles through the streets of Washington, D.C. on Monday night, calling on incoming bank president Ajay Banga to halt fossil fuel financing and ramp up clean energy and climate justice investments.

While demanding a turnaround on green funding in developing countries, the "Wrong Way on Climate" bike protest blocked rush-hour traffic outside World Bank headquarters as finance ministers traveled to dinner parties and backroom meetings.

"Bikes are very literally people-powered," Hope Neyer, a public health student and organizer with Shutdown D.C., said in a statement. "They're the ultimate zero-emission vehicles. We chose to gather on bikes tonight to remind the World Bank of the potential we have as individuals and communities to show up for what we believe in—the need to protect our planet, the international right to make healthy choices for our families, and a future that is just and livable for us all."

The action took place on the first day of the bank's 2023 spring meetings, which are being run this week by outgoing World Bank President David Malpass. Climate advocates cheered in February when Malpass, tapped to lead the bank by then-U.S. President Donald Trump in 2019, said that he plans to step down by the end of June, nearly a year ahead of schedule. The early resignation announcement followed a sustained pressure campaign against Malpass, who was condemned as a "climate denier" after refusing to acknowledge that burning fossil fuels causes the planet-heating pollution underlying increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather disasters around the globe.

Activists—whose bike ride started under a banner that reads, "World Bank: Time for a Fresh Start on Climate"—are now looking to Malpass' replacement, Banga, to reverse course and scale up decarbonization efforts. Progressives in February denounced U.S. President Joe Biden for nominating the private equity executive and former Mastercard CEO to the role, arguing that he's likely to advance the powerful international financial institution's historically pro-corporate and pro-fossil fuel agenda. Campaigners are wasting no time in pressuring Banga to make the World Bank an instrument for genuinely sustainable development.

"Nominee Banga has the opportunity of a lifetime, if he can rise to the climate challenge."

"After years of David Malpass in the president's office, we cannot afford another second of climate denial leading the bank," Andrew Nazdin, director of the Glasgow Actions Team, said Monday. "Nominee Banga has the opportunity of a lifetime, if he can rise to the climate challenge—ending financing oil or gas, ramping up investment in renewables, and becoming the transformative leader the world is begging for."

In an attempt to defend his record amid criticism last September, Malpass said the World Bank allocated $31.7 billion to climate finance in 2021, with half of it aimed at bolstering adaptation efforts. Not only is that a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars in green investment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says is needed each year to maintain a habitable planet, but according to reporting by the Financial Times, Malpass was directly involved in weakening multilateral development banks' (MDBs) joint announcement on climate lending at COP26.

After the World Bank described itself last year as "the largest multilateral funder of climate investments in developing countries," Bronwen Tucker of Oil Change International pointed out that "the World Bank Group still funds more fossil fuels than any other MDB, and they continue to lock Global South countries into expensive and volatile fossil fuel contracts through their heavy-handed policy lending programs."

The Big Shift Global coalition showed in a recent report that the World Bank has directly financed at least $14.8 billion in fossil fuel production since the signing of the Paris agreement in 2015—negating its 2017 pledge to stop supporting oil and gas projects within two years.

The IPCC and the International Energy Agency have made clear that fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, beyond which the climate emergency's consequences will grow even deadlier, especially for humanity's poorest members who have done the least to cause the crisis.

"As the World Bank and IMF meet behind closed doors to advance the agenda of concentrated corporate and political power, a coalition of D.C.-area activists in solidarity with movements worldwide, especially in the Global South, manifested a very different vision outside," Basav Sen, member of the For People For Planet coalition, said Monday. "We encircled the meetings on bicycle and on foot, to assert the power of organized people."

Concerned citizens from around the globe are demonstrating throughout the week to demand that the World Bank stop financing fossil fuels. They also plan to call for an overhaul of both Bretton Woods institutions—the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—to "prioritize justice, helping developing countries to green to follow a 1.5°C roadmap with poverty alleviation at its heart," according to the Glasgow Actions Team. "They will also call to end the 'gentlemen's agreement' that has thus far allowed only the U.S. to nominate the World Bank president."

On Tuesday morning, activists held a "First 100 Days" protest outside World Bank headquarters. They unveiled a first 100 days checklist that outlines what they want incoming bank president Banga to achieve at the start of his five-year term.

Campaigners also plan to gather outside the World Bank on Wednesday for a "Stop Fossil Gas" demonstration, where they will draw attention to the bank's continued funding of a worldwide expansion of gas pipelines.

Activists plan to cap off the week of action with a large march and rally on Friday that features a "Trojan Horse" of debt impacts on low-income nations the World Bank works with.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

With global finance leaders set to gather in Washington, D.C. this week for the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Oxfam is warning rich countries against using accounting gimmicks to artificially inflate their global climate funding commitments.

The international humanitarian group estimated in an analysis released Monday that low- and middle-income nations will need an additional $27.4 trillion at minimum by 2030 to "fill financing gaps in health, education, social protection, and tackling climate change"—as well as addressing the damage already inflicted by intensifying extreme weather and other consequences of fossil fuel use.

Interest rate hikes by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other powerful central banks have compounded the financial struggles of poor nations as debt servicing costs rise, putting critical public investments at risk.

"But despite the dire economic situation facing the poorest countries today, and much political discussion of the trillions needed to tackle poverty, inequality, and climate change, there is no indication that rich countries are willing to pay the true price of a fair and sustainable future," Oxfam said Monday. "In fact, there is a risk that rich-country finance ministers meeting in Washington this week will celebrate progress on reforms that deliver just 0.1% of the climate and social spending gap in low- and middle-income countries (LICs and MICs) between now and 2030. And that they will do so through financial wizardry that doesn't cost them a cent."

The group pointed specifically to the recent replenishment process for the International Development Association, a member of the World Bank Group ostensibly dedicated to aiding poor nations with grants and loans.

"Although IDA20 saw a record replenishment in 2021, this was not a result of increased donor contributions. In fact, donor contributions declined and the increased allocation was only achieved through the financial wizardry of 'balance sheet optimization,'" Oxfam noted. "Now, with IDA20 commitments again being frontloaded due to mounting crises, there are fears that IDA is facing a 'financial cliff' in the near future."

Oxfam also criticized "green bonds" and other such "financial innovations" that—while positive-sounding and potentially beneficial on the margins—ultimately provide minimal benefit relative to what's necessary to help avert climate catastrophe in nations that did the least to cause the crisis.

"If rich countries were serious about investing in people and planet, they would go beyond financial wizardry," said Amitabh Behar, Oxfam International's incoming interim executive director. "It's time for governments to find their moral fiber and tax the richest, so we can stave off climate catastrophe and lift everyone out of poverty."

Oxfam's analysis suggests several policy steps for wealthy countries, including actually meeting their existing aid commitments to poor nations and ending "the accounting trickery of siphoning off large amounts of aid to spend in donor countries on things like in-country refugee costs and vaccine donations"; committing to a "debt swap" whereby rich nations would borrow $11.5 trillion to help fund climate costs in low- and middle-income countries; and pledging new Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).

The group also called on rich nations to pursue "steep and progressive tax increases on the incomes of the super-rich, on property, land, and inheritance, and on the profits of the wealthiest companies, especially windfall profits, as well as on fossil fuels and on financial transactions."

"If rich-country governments were willing to implement bold and progressive tax reforms there would be more than enough money to go round," Oxfam said. "We cannot allow the richest countries to argue they 'cannot afford' to raise the trillions needed for social and climate spending in the poorest countries. It is clear that mobilizing this money would simply take political will."

The new analysis comes as the World Bank is preparing to confirm Ajay Banga, a private equity executive and former Mastercard CEO chosen by the U.S., as its new president, replacing an outgoing leader who has come under fire for climate denial.

In recent weeks, as E&E Newsreported Monday, the World Bank has outlined changes that would "free up roughly $5 billion annually over the next 10 years, mainly through a slight relaxation of the bank's rules for how much risk it can assume."

"Specifically, it would lower the bank's so-called equity-to-loan ratio from 20% to 19%, which would allow it to increase its lending with the same amount of shareholder money," the outlet noted. "Critics have called the plan underwhelming, saying it's still too vague and risk-averse. Some argue that the equity-to-loan ratio could be lowered further without jeopardizing confidence in the bank’s lending ability, making additional lending capacity available."

Oxfam said Monday that it is "essential that the World Bank and IMF also step up their ambition" during this week's talks.

"The World Bank's own analysis shows that extreme economic inequality is a barrier to poverty reduction—yet the current goal on 'shared prosperity' is weak and ineffective," said Behar. "We need to see far more ambition from a global body tasked with fighting poverty."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Tens of thousands of people marched throughout Greece on Wednesday—amid a nationwide walkout organized by labor unions and student associations—to demand accountability and reforms in the wake of the country's deadliest train disaster, which has been attributed to austerity imposed from abroad.

The February 28 crash that killed 57 people and injured another 72 has sparked public outrage over the deteriorating quality of the rail network. As Reutersreported, "Striking workers say years of neglect, underinvestment, and understaffing—a legacy of Greece's decade-long debt crisis—are to blame."

"Greece sold its state-owned railway operator, now called Hellenic Train, to Italy's state-owned Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane in 2017 during its debt crisis," the news outlet noted. "The sale was a term in the country's bailout agreements with the European Union and the Washington-based International Monetary Fund."

More than 40,000 workers and students hit the streets of Athens, where they chanted "murderers!" and "we are all in the same carriage." Demonstrators in Greece's capital and largest city also waved signs reading, It's not an accident, it's a crime" and, "It could have been any of us on that train."

Another 20,000-plus people rallied in Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city. Meanwhile, near the scene of the train collision in Larrisa, protesters declared, "No to profits over our lives!"

The demonstrations coincided with a daylong strike called by trade unionists. Greece's largest public sector union participated in the work stoppage, disrupting a wide range of transit services, while a teachers' union made clear that "it's not the time to fall silent."

Rail workers, for their part, "have staged rolling, 24-hour strikes since Thursday, bringing the network to a halt," Reuters reported. "The workers say their demands for improvement in safety protocols have gone unheard for years."

Police have responded to protests held across Greece since the disaster occurred with violent repression.

Many of the roughly 350 passengers aboard an intercity train that collided with a freight train while traveling on the same track—including 12 victims—were university students returning to Thessaloniki from Athens.

The stationmaster was arrested hours after the crash and is facing felony charges for disrupting transport and endangering lives.

"You feel angry because the government did nothing for all of those kids," 19-year-old Nikomathi Vathi told Reuters. "The public transport is a mess."

The main rail workers' union has vowed to "impose safe railways so that no one will ever experience the tragic accident at Tempi ever again," adding that "we have an obligation toward our fellow humans and our colleagues who were lost in the tragic accident."

Leftist former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis this week accused the Greek government of trying to "cover-up the real causes of our railway tragedy... by bypassing parliamentary scrutiny and appointing arbitrarily its own three-member investigative committee—on which, remarkably, they included a gentleman who oversaw the botched privatization of our railways—not to mention the prime minister's pronouncement that the cause was human error."

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the leader of Greece's conservative government who is up for re-election this year, orginally blamed the crash on human error before apologizing Sunday and "acknowledging that decades of neglect could have contributed to the disaster," Al Jazeera reported.

Hours after the collision, former Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis resigned. Mitsotakis appointed one of his closest allies, George Gerapetritis, to replace him.

At a Wednesday morning press conference, Gerapetritis said that he understands why people are angry, apologized for the crash and promised to identify its causes, and announced that rail services are being suspended until at least the end of March while the government conducts a safety review.

"No train will set off again if we have not secured safety at the maximum possible level," said Gerapetritis. Greece's new transport minister said the government plans to invest in upgrading infrastructure and hiring more staff.

According to Al Jazeera correspondent John Psaropoulos, the press conference raised "more questions than answers" and is likely to make "the families of the victims even angrier."

As the news outlet reported:

“First of all, we've learned that some of the automated systems that should have been in place throughout the Greek network, were in fact operational on the night of the accident in Larissa station," said Psaropoulos.

He explained that an automated optimal route selection for the train would have been possible, but was not used.

"Secondly, it also doesn't answer why two additional station masters who should have been on duty until 11:00 pm took off at 10:00 pm without permission. Thirdly, it does not answer why the train was about 15 minutes late in leaving," he added, explaining how all these things contributed to the collision.

"It suggests enormous problems in the operation and training of personnel," said Psaropoulos.

E.U. Railway Agency executive director Josef Doppelbauer toldEuronews on Wednesday that his organization repeatedly warned Greek authorities of the need to shore up rail safety prior to the deadly crash.

Despite years of warnings from regulators and the provision of funding to modernize the country's railways, Doppelbauer said, Greek officials failed to fully implement an automated rail traffic management system and other recommended changes. If they had, he added, the disaster likely would have been averted.

European Commission (EC) President Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to provide technical support. Gerapetritis was set to meet with Doppelbauer and other transportation experts from the bloc later on Wednesday.

Varoufakis, who served as Greece's finance minister in 2015 when the "troika"—the EC, the European Central Bank, and the IMF—rammed through a devastating "structural adjustment" program, balked at Leyen's offer, arguing that she helped bring about the crisis in the first place.

The EC was part of the unelected troika that "railroaded the Greek government into the botched privatization that caused the tragedy," he noted. "Keep your assistance dear Ursula. We have had enough."

Last week, the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), which was co-founded by Varoufakis, argued that "the E.U. has blood on its hands."

The deadly collision "has further brought the negligence and corruption of the Greek government under scrutiny, and rightly so," the group said. "However, the role of the European Union in the tragedy cannot go unmentioned either, as it was the E.U. and its institutions who forced Greece to sell off public utilities for a pittance to private—and in the case of the railways, bankrupt and incompetent—companies."

Erik Edman, spokesperson of the European Realistic Disobedience Front (MeRA25), a left-wing Greek political party founded by Varoufakis, denounced the E.U.'s posturing after it lowered its flags to half-mast on Friday in a symbolic tribute to the victims of the crash.

"The architects of the permanent impoverishment of the Greek state and the disastrous privatization of its public property are lowering their flags today," said Edman. "The EC were the brains behind the haphazard privatization that forced the Greek state to sell the entirety of its national railways to the bankrupt (!) Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane for—I kid you not—a measly 45 million euros."

"They view demonstrations, such as those by Greek rail workers, as backward unionists opposing the efficiency of privatization," Edman continued. "People who had been warning of an inevitable accident as a result of underinvestment. Their colleagues had been injured in past years, and now."

"They constantly praise the corrupt government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis as a 'success story,'" he added. "So, they should either stand by the policies they've been supporting and keep the flags up, or take them down and put them away in shame. Anything else is hypocrisy of the worst kind."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Galant – Francisco R. Rodríguez.