Siege of summits

THE DECISION OF the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to substantially reduce the duration of their 2001 annual meetings in Washington is yet another sign that global economic summits and conferences are now under siege from the streets. After the protests at the G-8 summit in Genoa, the Government of Italy has been trying to persuade the Food and Agriculture Organisation to shift the World Food Summit, scheduled for November, out of Rome. Now, the organisers of the high profile IMF-World Bank meetings must suffer the embarrassment of their being reduced from a full week to just two days over a weekend in end-September. The reasons have not been explicitly stated, other than to cause ``the least possible disruption to people who live and work in Washington''. But with up to 50,000 protestors expected in Washington and the city asking the federal Government for $40 million to organise security for a week-long conference, it is clear that the fear of disturbances and the cost of security persuaded the two multilateral organisations to scale down their 2001 annual meetings. The Genoa summit showed that the only way the world's leaders could now meet was behind barbed wire, steel fences and heavily armed police, all of which make for a poor advertisement of global efforts to build a better world.

The violence on the streets of Genoa - as much by the security forces as by the protestors - shifted the focus from what the protestors are saying to concerns about public safety. These are no doubt important concerns and it only requires a handful of violent protestors to drown out the voices of peaceful demonstrators. But the core issue here is not law and order but concerns that are beginning to affect everyday life in the rich and the poor countries. The Washington organisers have not cancelled their protests after the IMF and World Bank scaled down their annual meetings - the groups on the streets would be espousing a mixture of concerns on globalisation, inequality, Third World debt, the environment, job losses and also some extreme causes. But the frequency and the scale of protests suggest that there is a strong global under-current of unhappiness about globalisation which cannot be dismissed as the doing of cranks and marginal groups. In Washington, for the first time in almost two years, organised labour will be present in vast numbers as the U.S. unions gather to march against trade which, even before the present global slowdown, pushed thousands of skilled workers out of jobs. An unwillingness to listen to these voices carries the risk of strengthening the forces of protectionism that would be pleased with the introduction of ``labour standards'' in trade, which in turn would only hurt workers in the Third World.

Labour is only one of the protesting voices and it is also wrong to dismiss the marches as the work of ``do-gooders'' in the developed countries. While some of them may indeed have vague and fuzzy ideas about how economic growth should be organised, the unease about the present global economy is growing. The difficult economic situation that Argentina, for instance, now finds itself in shows how easily even a ``star globaliser'' can quickly descend to an economic morass. The IMF and World Bank would do more for the global economy if they used their curtailed annual meetings for some introspection about the policies they recommend, which have remained the same notwithstanding the cosmetic changes in recent years.

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Section  : Opinion
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