UN official raps IMF, WTO deliberately created hunger

By Alejandro Lichauco

ANALYSIS

07/03/2008

Nationalists have never been taken in by the IMF-WB-WTO Group, which has always posed as saviors of the global economy. Nationalists, in fact, as exemplified by Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahatir, has looked upon that Group as “agents of the new colonialism.”

This deep-seated nationalist hostility to the Group is based on historical reasons. The Group as we know, is the institutional agents of free trade. Its mission, for which it was created by the western powers, is to move the global economy, particularly the Third World, toward free trade. And we know what free trade is about. It has always served as the means by which colonial powers exploited their colonies. That exploitation consisted among others, in forcing their colonies, that didn’t have the power resist because they were colonies, into absorbing the exports of the colonial power. It was the means, in brief, by which colonies were forced to serve as dumping ground for the products — particularly manufactured products — of the colonial powers. That arrangement incapacitated the colonies from developing their own local industries.

That was what Britain did to its American colonies. And a major reason the American colonies finally decided to break off from Britain was precisely due to the fact the American colonies, then overwhelmingly agricultural, wanted to industrialize but which they knew they would never be able to do as long as they remained colonies of Britain which insisted on a free trading relation.

There is a slim volume on how free trade, imposed by the colonial power on their colonies, created poverty and hunger in the Third World. The book, titled “The Creation of World Poverty,” was written by British political economist Teresa Hayter.

The book recounts how, prior to its colonization by Britain, India had a far more advanced economy than its colonizer. Its textile industry was far more sophisticated than the British textile industry then. But decades of colonization and the forcible imposition of free trade reduced that ancient civilization into outright backwardness and destitution.

As the book narrated it: “One of the more notorious facts of British colonial history is that the British subsequently proceeded to destroy the industrial economy of India itself.” The book proceeded to discuss the fate of Dacca, a town of India. Dacca, prior to colonization, was, as described by the book, the “Manchester of India.” Meaning, the seat of India’s industrial revolution. Decades of colonization, however, destroyed the industries of Dacca and reduced it to desolation, “Dacca, which used to be the Manchester of India, has fallen off from a flourishing town to a very poor and small one,” the book recounts.

And so we shouldn’t be surprised why it is that a ranking official of the United Nations should on the occasion of a farewell address, accuse the IMF and the WTO of deliberately creating hunger and starvation in the Third World.

Jean Zeigler, the UN’s special rapporteur, according to a news item transmitted to this writer by Mike Billington of the LaRouche Group in Washington, “used his April 28 press conference in Geneva to denounce the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the aberrant policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for starving poor people around the world.”

The UN official charged, according to the news items, “that the IMF’s ‘aberrant’ policies were tantamount to colonialism.”

In defending protectionism extended to Third World farmers, but which run contrary to IMF and WTO rules, the UN official contended that “it is protectionist payments that allow peasants and small farmers to produce food, not — (repeat, not) — trade liberalization.”

So there you have it. The cat is finally out of the bag. No less than a UN official finally accusing the IMF and WTO of creating starvation and hunger worldwide through their trade liberalization doctrine — the very doctrine used by the colonial powers to exploit their colonies and prevent them from developing and diversifying their economies.

This piece will dare say that the Zeigler statement — which one presumes had been cleared with high UN authorities before it was issued — constitutes a landmark event which could well signal the mass walkout of the Third World from the IMF and the WTO — international agencies described by Malaysia’s Mahathir as “agents of the new colonialism.”

What does the opposition say? Wait for GMA to beat them to a draw by walking out of those agencies?

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