REASON NO. 3 TO JOIN THE FALL PROTESTS AGAINST THE IMF AND WORLD BANK
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Standard IMF policies and programs have a devastating impact on women's lives the world over. Here's how:
** Export-led growth. The IMF encourages exports through targeted subsidies to export industries, lifting of trade regulations such as tariffs and quantitative restrictions, and other means. This supports large enterprises, but hurts women farmers and workers.
In Africa, for example, where women farmers are responsible for the majority of food production, policies designed to shift resources into export-crop production contributed to decreases in per capita food production in the 1980s of close to 2 percent a year. Food imports during that time increased dramatically. In Kenya, women report planting tobacco right up to their door, yet not having enough money from its sale to buy food, and in Uganda, government incentives to produce beans for export left women farmers with no food crops for their families. A woman farmer in Zaire, referring to a scheme to switch land used for food into export-crop production spoke to the wider reality of rural women across the continent when she observed, "If you have to buy food, you will never have enough."
** Monetary Policy: As the high priest of monetary policy, which posits that inflation is caused by "too much money chasing after too few goods", the IMF uses a two-pronged strategy to reduce inflation.
The IMF demands interest rates increases, which are intended to help diminish the problem of "too much money" by making credit too expensive for people to borrow money, thus cutting back on the amount of money circulating in an economy.
By making credit prohibitively expensive, high interest rates diminish women's already scarce access to credit needed for production and household emergencies.
The economic contraction and layoffs fostered by interest rate hikes disproportionately hit women workers, both because they predominate in small and medium sized enterprises hardest hit by economic slowdowns, and because of the widespread practice of laying off women before men in both public and private sector operations.
** Cuts in Government Spending. The second prong of the IMF's anti-inflation mania is to cut overall spending. This is done directly by cutting government programs, including subsidies, and indirectly through wage restraint policies. In other words, to cut spending, the IMF induces recession.
Government cut-backs in food subsidies and health budgets have been a major cause of worsening health in countries like India and Zimbabwe, as well as of social unrest. The most recent example is Indonesia, where the IMF-driven removal of foods subsidies has sparked riots in major cities.
IMF-mandated low wages affect women directly, and have a ripple effect throughout the economy, placing further downward pressure on women's income. In Africa, falling incomes have destroyed local demand for many goods produced by women, such as textiles, and created large numbers of unemployed workers. Displaced women have been forced into the informal sector in large numbers to compensate for their own income loss and that of their household partners. This has greatly increased competition and further decreased women's wages in that sector.
** Labor Market Flexibility: IMF's insistence on "labor market flexibility," a euphemism for removing worker protections, has directly and indirectly undermined the status of women workers. Women workers find their historic gains in increasing wages and status within the workplace rapidly wiped out in the face of economic crises. In addition, the deregulation of labor markets has led to a significant increase in part-time and unstable employment and in contracting-out arrangements, where women undertake piecework in their homes.
Adapted and excerpted from a paper by Lisa A. McGowan, "Bailouts for Bankers, Burdens for Women," http://www.50years.org/factsheets/bailouts.html.
For much more detail, see Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance, Beverly Bell, Cornell University Press
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