155059
"Poverty reduction" A Trojan Horse of Globalization
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Biruck Tulu, RN, BSN, OCN
,
Nursing Environmental Track in Masters program, University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Nursing, Olney, MD
Learning Objectives:
“Poverty Reduction: Trojan Horse of Globalization 1
Is poverty developing resistance to the different interventions made by the big financial organizations? or are we having a different “strain” of poverty that is mutated through the last 50 years?
After sixty-two years of “developmental” intervention poverty is at large with its full strength than any other time ever and still is risking the lives of millions of children, women, and elderly. In 1944, the World Bank was born in Breton Wood, New Hampshire with the primary objective of reconstructing war torn Europe and to maintain and to stabilize the world’s monetary system, and to contain the expansion of communism. In the last half-century the World Bank and other major financial organizations have launched several developmental interventions to eradicate poverty resulting no major benefit to the poor.
The top-down and coercive developmental approach rather has become an easy income-generating source for the giant financial organizations and in corrupting very few collaborating elites from the individual country. Present day globalization has taken consecutive waves of unsuccessful top-down developmental interventions starting from Structural Adjustment Programe, poverty reduction, free trade, privatization of major public assets, and to the existing millennium development goal.
For example, structural adjustment programe has given a loophole for the richest countries to be actively involved in the corruption of poor countries natural resource and wealth. Structural adjustment program has required poor countries to reduce their spending on basic services like health, education and services while making debt repayment a top priority. Therefore, SAP has increased the greatest transfer of wealth in the name of development from the poor countries to the treasures of the big financial organizations.
It has been recorded that in the late 1970’s the SAP intervention in Zambia ended up in the tragically laying off all employees. Remenbering this incidence, Mark Lynes, an editor to the Zambia Nation Post, Feb 14, 2000 has vented his anger, as
“it is not for a bank to run the whole world They do not represent anybody other than the countries that control them. Look at any African country today, and you will find that the figures are swinging down, standard are going down, health standard going down, and infrastructure is literally breaking up.”
In 1973 the World Bank claimed changing of its objective to a new idea of poverty reduction and imposed developing countries to borrow money with the view of increasing international trade.
The World Bank chief economist, Joseph Stiltz in 2002 criticized this hypocrisy of World Bank and IMF’s changing objectives as follows
“ as far as these ‘client countries’ were concerned, it was a deceptive act in which the politicians to do something to redress the problem (of poverty) while financial interests worked to preserve as much of the status quo as they could.”
Presenting author's disclosure statement:Any relevant financial relationships? No
Any institutionally-contracted trials related to this submission?
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines,
and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed
in my presentation.
|
