> >>With more than 1.2 billion of the world's people still living on less
> >>than $1 a day, there is no more important challenge than improving
> >>living standards and eliminating poverty. The World Bank and other
> >>multilateral development banks have a crucial role to play in meeting
> >>this challenge. To do so, they need to change their ways of doing
> >>business.
> >
> >Looks like typical reformist, "Green Revolution", stuff. (
From: B. DeLong:
> There's something wrong with helping farmers grow more food?
from J. Golowka:
Increasing the amount of food grown will only help baby boomers get fatter.
If we want to fight world hunger then we have to change the distribution
system.
>From another list:
> > > Back in May, (someone) posted a news article...
In the article a World Bank economist was quoted...The context is this:
There is a world-wide glut of coffee, has been for years...:
"In the late 1980s, opposition from the Reagan administration forced
the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement, a decades-old,
cartel-like pact between coffee producing and consuming nations that
guaranteed relatively high prices. After the pact ended in 1989 and
the market was deregulated, prices plummeted.
At the same time, the World Bank and its cousin, the Asian Development Bank, gave generous loans to Vietnam to plant huge amounts of low-quality robusta coffee - in line with international lending institutions' mandate to stimulate low-cost production and end market inefficiencies.
The strategy succeeded with a vengeance, as Vietnam went from being one of the world's smallest coffee producers to being second-largest, after Brazil."
So here we have the World Bank making loans to produce more of a crop of which there was already a glut. "Vietnam has become a successful producer," said Don Mitchell, principal economist at the World Bank. "In general, we consider it to be a huge success."
Although Mitchell acknowledges the damage to nations that cannot compete with Vietnam's $1-per-day labor costs or Brazil's mechanized plantations - such as Guatemala, with its $3-per-day minimum wage - he said the losers must switch to farming other crops.">>>