[stop-imf] Rebuttal to WB's Response to 4 Demands of IMF and World Bank

[Robert Weissman]

This document was issued at a news conference in Ottawa in advance of
the rump IMF/World Bank meetings held earlier this month.


November 2001

CIVIL SOCIETY DEMANDS & WORLD BANK DISTORTIONS

A CIVIL SOCIETY REBUTTAL TO THE WORLD BANK’S 
“RESPONSE TO FOUR DEMANDS FROM THE MOBILIZATION FOR GLOBAL JUSTICE”


In late September, with little fanfare, the World Bank released a
response [www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/pb/pbfourdemands.htm] to the four
demands circulated by the Mobilization for Global Justice (MGJ), the
Washington-based coalition organizing protests and alternative
educational events at the joint annual meetings of the World Bank and
its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), scheduled
for  September 2001 in Washington, DC.  Those four demands, endorsed by
hundreds of organizations around the world, are:

1. Open all World Bank and IMF meetings to the media and the public.

2. End all World Bank and IMF policies that hinder people’s access to
food, clean 
   water, shelter, health care, education, and right to organize. (Such
“structural 
   adjustment” policies include user fees, privatization, and economic
austerity 
   programs.)

3. Stop all World Bank support for socially and environmentally
destructive projects
    such as oil, gas, and mining activities, and all support for
projects such as dams 
    that include forced relocation of people.

4. Cancel all impoverished country debt to the World Bank and IMF, using
the 
    institutions’ own resources.

With the recent announcement that the IMF and World Bank have
rescheduled two of their postponed committee meetings for November 18 in
Ottawa, organizations in Canada and the U.S. which participated in
formulating or supported the MGJ’s demands offer the following
rejoinder, pointing to flaws, distortions, and misleading statements in
the Bank’s response. This document, together with the more detailed
resources it refers readers to, bolsters the MGJ’s original demands with
added evidence, raises questions about the logic employed by the Bank’s
policy-makers, and reasserts the urgency — moral, economic, and
environmental — of marshalling the international political will to
implement the fundamental steps toward economic justice called for by
the MGJ at once. (The organizations that participated in drafting this
document are listed at the end.)

The four demands that form the basis for this exchange have been
promoted by a wide range of organizations and social movements in the
Global South.  These four demands are also partially drawn from a longer
list of eight demands generated by the 50 Years Is Enough Network
(http://www.50years.org/s28/demands.html), in consultation with its
South Council, which includes members in Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama,
Brazil, Cameroon, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Zimbabwe,
Mauritius, the Philippines, Thailand, and India.

This rejoinder addresses the World Bank’s points in the order they were
presented in its response, i.e. the four MGJ demands in order
(transparency, structural adjustment, environment, debt), followed by
the Bank’s “demands” of its opponents.  It is important to note that the
IMF has not responded.  To a great extent, the policies and practices of
the IMF and the World Bank overlap, and thus, although the IMF did not
respond, most of what is discussed in this document applies to the IMF
as well

.
INTRODUCTION

For decades, individuals and broad-based movements in the Global South
(Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean) have protested
against World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies and
programs.  They have denounced the expensive energy-generation projects,
designed and built by the Bank together with multinational corporations,
which have forced the re-location of thousands, devastated the
environment, and mired countries in debt.  They have taken to the
streets to demonstrate against the “structural adjustment programs”
which indebted governments must agree to in order to get loans from the
IMF and World Bank, and which preach a blind reliance on market forces
and a progressively diminished role for government in regulating the
economy and advancing social goals.  People in the Global South have
also rallied against the debt treadmill, administered in significant
part by the World Bank and IMF, which requires their countries to devote
more and more resources to international debt repayments, even at the
expense of provision of education, healthcare, and other basic services.
Finally, many Southern citizens have identified the mission of the World
Bank and the IMF as a neo-colonial one, in which the institutions act as
agents of the G-7 countries (and in particular the United States),
coercing support for the G-7’s political and economic aims and
establishing rules that favor corporate interests in G-7 countries.

The protests in the South have in recent years been matched by protests
in Northern countries, including in the institutions’ host, the U.S., in
the Czech Republic, and now in Canada.  The sheer numbers of protesters
and the reception the protests have received have apparently caused the
World Bank concern that its reputation, and perhaps even its funding,
are endangered.  

The Mobilization for Global Justice cancelled its call for street
protests in Washington in late September, in part out of respect for the
victims of the September 11 tragedy and their families. But as the IMF
and World Bank once again take up their business, the movement for
global justice must too.  The economic, social, and environmental
realities of the Global South have not changed, after all; and the
challenges that people in the North confront have only become more
complex.   The international movement for global justice will continue
to work in every way to oppose the policies of the IMF and World Bank
until their power to do harm has been eliminated.  Whenever and wherever
these institutions hold their closed-door meetings, our movement will
continue to be there to expose them and demand justice.


MGJ Demand #1: Open all World Bank and IMF meetings to the media and the
public.

The senior decision-making bodies of the IMF and the World Bank, their
respective Boards of Executive Directors, continue to operate in almost
total secrecy.  The Boards of these two institutions make final
decisions on all IMF and World Bank loans and institution-wide policies.
Yet the meetings of the Executive Boards of the IMF and the World Bank
are closed to citizens around the world who will be affected by these
loans and policies, closed to their parliamentary representatives, and
closed to the media.  The written proceedings from these meetings are
also secret.  The World Bank publishes a highly edited and summarized
report called the “Chairman’s Concluding Remarks” which does not cover
any loan discussions.  The IMF publishes “Chairman’s Statements” which
are very brief and edited notes regarding debt policy, and loan
decisions.  Neither of these documents is adequate to provide civil
society or the media with comprehensive information about decisions that
will have tremendous impact on the lives and livelihoods of citizens in
developing countries.

While continuing to use the rhetoric of empowerment, country ownership
and participatory development, the World Bank has rejected citizen
demands in three key areas:
 
1. The Bank has rejected calls for release of draft documents. Many
important loan-related documents are only disclosed after Executive
Board and government approval, after they have already become binding
contracts. People in borrower countries need information before
important decisions have been made, not afterwards.

2. The Bank has rejected calls for public release of structural
adjustment conditions. In a small move toward greater disclosure, some
adjustment documents may be disclosed after Executive Board and
government approval. However, borrowing governments will identify
“sensitive or confidential” information that will remain secret.

3. The Bank has rejected calls to open its Executive Board to public
scrutiny. This means the public will continue to be denied access to the
substance of Board deliberations pertaining to specific lending
operations and institution-wide policies.
 

For further information:

• Further analysis of the World Bank’s policy on information disclosure
can be found at:  <www.bicusa.org/mdbs/wbg/info.htm>


MGJ Demand #2: End all World Bank and IMF policies that hinder people’s
access to food, clean water, shelter, health care, education, and right
to organize. (Such “structural adjustment” policies include user fees,
privatization, and economic austerity programs.)

Policies formulated and supported by the World Bank and IMF have
consistently reduced access to health care, education, clean water, and
food, and have undermined workers’ right to organize (a human right
highlighted in demands from around the world, but ignored by the World
Bank).  The economic and administrative systems established under these
policies have devastated the productive capacity of national economies
and proven hostile to the provision of basic services and protection of
labor rights.  The specific actions mandated by the World Bank, such as
user fees, have directly caused undeniable suffering.  

The World Bank aggressively pushed countries to charge user fees for
primary health and education services for much of the last 15 years,
often including them as conditions of loans.  The user fees were meant
to compensate for budget shortfalls that were in part related to strict
IMF budget austerity demands.  After years of independent research
showed the harmful effects the fees had on preventing the poorest
citizens from accessing these key services, the World Bank began to
backtrack on its long-standing support for user fees.  In September
2001, the Bank released a new policy statement opposing user fees for
primary education and, in a highly qualified manner, for primary
healthcare.  However, despite new claims by the Bank that it now
discourages user fees, several recent policy documents endorsed or
approved by the Bank, including ones for Ghana, Mauritania and Burkina
Faso, contain user fees.  It must also be recognized that the recourse
to user fees is not always a Bank condition, but often one which grows
indirectly but logically from the destructive rules established by Bank
programs.  And while the Bank claims that it mitigates the harmful
effect of user fees with targeted subsidies, research by UNICEF, the
Bank’s own Operations Evaluation Department (OED), and its annual World
Development Report (WDR) show that such exemption schemes have largely
failed.

The Bank’s claim that its structural adjustment lending does not promote
user fees, austerity or privatization is thus simply inaccurate. As far
as privatization is concerned, for example, the Bank’s own Adjustment
Lending Retrospective (February 20, 2001, page 47) states that
privatization became an important feature in Bank adjustment lending in
the mid-1980s and remains one today.  Also contrary to Bank assertions,
its adjustment programs have not been designed for the primary purpose
of protecting key social sectors, much less to reduce poverty.  These
programs are no more development-oriented now than they were 20 years
ago, as their core measures -- economic deregulation and liberalization,
privatization and austerity — have remained unchanged.  (According to
the World Bank, between 1995 and 1999, 65 percent of all adjustment
operations included trade-policy and exchange-rate reforms and more than
32 percent of adjustment lending supported privatization reforms. Almost
100 percent of IMF loans have budget deficit conditions.)

The World Bank frequently cites the large sums it loans countries and
its programs which include funds for social programs as proof of its
generosity and value. The value of those programs is mitigated by the
conditions governments must agree to. And although the loans given are
often at very low interest rates, they are loans, not grants, and add to
the country’s debt burden.  Indeed, a large portion of the debt that
impoverished countries must deal with (see Demand #4) comes from
low-interest Bank loans.

Adjustment programs vary little from country to country because
governments “adopt” adjustment programs designed by the Bank and the
IMF.  They take this step because these institutions have the power to
cut off all international financing to a country, and do so whenever a
country hesitates to implement the economic policies it considers
“sound.”  Leading economists and insiders like the Bank’s former Chief
Economist, Joseph Stiglitz, and a former adviser to the Bangladeshi
president, Rehman Sobham, have recently publicly belittled the Bank’s
claims that governments feel “ownership” of adjustment policies.  Rather
than a sense of having led or had equitable participation in formulating
the policies, government officials frequently feel trapped into accepted
policies they have little confidence in.

Structural adjustment has failed on its own terms, with countries
displaying lower growth rates while undergoing structural adjustment
than when they were not; and with the economically successful Southern
countries of recent decades ignoring and contradicting central tenets of
the structural adjustment policy package. In restructuring national
economies so that international corporations and financial institutions
can maximize returns on investments, production and trade, structural
adjustment policies have destroyed the productive core of domestic
economies. The World Bank, with the IMF, has successfully demanded
“labor flexibility” measures which have undermined workers’ legal
protections and wages and facilitated mass layoffs. The Bank and Fund
also routinely press countries to rapidly remove trade barriers (such as
tariffs on imports) and government subsidies for basic needs (e.g.
bread) and to raise interest rates.  In dramatically reducing consumer
purchasing power, increasing the cost of borrowing and forcing
competition with heavily subsidized and powerful foreign multinational
corporations, these policies have devastated small and medium-sized
enterprises and farms, which produce for the local market and employ the
vast majority of workers in most countries. This widespread phenomenon
and many other debilitating effects of imposed adjustment policies have
been documented on four continents by the Structural Adjustment
Participatory Review Initiative (SAPRI), an initiative in which the Bank
itself was involved with civil society and governments.  


For further information:

• For more on SAPRI, see <www.saprin.org>.  For additional assessments
of structural adjustment, see <www.developmentgap.org>.

• For more on the World Bank’s interactions with civil society, see
“Critics’ Attempts at Constructive Dialogue Find World Bank Less Than
Engaging,” at <www.developmentgap.org> or <www.irn.org>.  

• For background on how the World Bank and IMF coerce governments into
accepting structural adjustment conditions, see
<www.challengeglobalization.org>.

• For an examination of the record of developing countries, comparing
the last 20 years under structural adjustment with the previous two
decades, see <www.cepr.net/globalization/Scorecard.pdf> 


MGJ Demand #3: Stop all World Bank support for socially and
environmentally destructive projects such as oil, gas, and mining
activities, and all support for projects such as dams that include
forced relocation of people.

Communities that have lived with oil, mining, gas, and large dam
projects, and NGOs which have analyzed them, find that such projects
consistently have negative social, environmental, and developmental
impacts. World Bank lending for these projects runs directly counter to
its stated mission of helping the poor. A recent internal paper
commissioned by the Bank’s private-sector lending division noted that:
“The notion that governments invest incremental rents/returns from
extractive industries profitably and for the benefit of poor people is
all too often more of an aspiration than a reality.”  In addition,
according to a recent Oxfam report, countries whose economies are
dependent on oil and mineral exports also show: exceptionally low living
standards, higher poverty rates, exceptionally high rates of child
mortality, malnutrition, income inequality, low rates of literacy and
life expectancy.

The Bank’s own staff have examined the relationship between extractive
industries and corruption, authoritarian governments, governance, and
conflict, and found strong evidence for a “repression effect,” which
holds that resource wealth retards democratization by enabling the
government to better fund the apparatus of repression. 

In addition, large dams and fossil fuels have well-documented negative
local and global environmental impacts. According to recent research by
the Institute for Policy Studies, the $20 billion in World Bank fossil
fuel projects financed from 1992 to September 2001 will ultimately
release 40.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide, an amount greater than all
current annual global fossil fuel emissions.

The Bank states that “energy is critical in enabling developing
countries to grow, to reduce poverty and to improve the quality of life
for their citizens.”  The question, then, is how best to meet the energy
needs of the most impoverished.  The Bank currently devotes less than 5
percent of its energy lending and investment to meet the needs of the
poorest 2 billion people, who, according the Bank’s own studies, would
best be served with clean and renewable sources of energy.  Despite
this, the overwhelming majority of Bank energy lending continues to be
for fossil fuel projects. As the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network
has shown, the ratio of fossil fuel funding to funding for clean,
renewable sources of energy is approximately 20 to 1.

The World Commission on Dams was established not just to “define
standards” for dams (as the Bank maintains), but also to review the past
record of large dams and assess alternatives for water resources and
energy development. The World Bank has been silent on the WCD’s findings
on the destructive impacts of dams and its criticisms of the World
Bank’s role in promoting them over more appropriate alternatives. While
it is a positive signal that the Bank says it will “promote the seven
strategic priorities for future decision-making on dams,” this is not a
sufficient response to the report. The WCD guidelines cover not just
decision-making on dams, but the whole process of energy and water
planning. Given the Bank’s poor record on compliance with its own
safeguard policies, if the WCD guidelines are not given the force of
policy, there will be no enforcement mechanisms, no accountability to
the Bank’s Inspection Panel, and few incentives for compliance. The
Bank’s back-tracking on the WCD is one reason NGOs are currently viewing
the Bank’s Extractive Industries Review with great skepticism.


For further information:

• Sustainable Energy & Economy Network  <www.seen.org>

• Extractive Sectors and the Poor, Oxfam America, October 2001
<www.oxfamamerica.org>

• Does Resource Wealth Cause Authoritarian Rule?, Michael L. Ross
Visiting Scholar, Development Research Group, World Bank, April 2000

• Friends of the Earth International <www.foei.org>

• International Rivers Network <www.irn.org>


MGJ Demand #4: Cancel all impoverished country debt to the World Bank
and IMF, using the institutions’ own resources.

The international Jubilee movement succeeded in drawing attention to the
“debt treadmill” which forced most developing countries to borrow year
after year to pay off old loans, with no end in sight. Since private
lenders  are unwilling to make loans to governments that do not receive
the World Bank/IMF stamp of approval, indebted countries had little
choice but to submit to the structural adjustment policies that were a
condition of the loans. Unfortunately, structural adjustment policies
invariably led to an increased debt burden, as exports failed to keep
pace with surging imports.

The World Bank has tried to reverse the damage done to its public image
by the Jubilee movement by claiming that it “strongly supports debt
relief.” Its Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, however,
is more a tool for inducing governments to accept new IMF/World Bank
programs than a way of helping countries get out of debt.  Governments
wishing to benefit from HIPC must demonstrate prior compliance with
IMF/World Bank structural adjustment conditions and commit to three,
six, nine, or even twenty more years of structural adjustment to receive
the maximum benefit (some portions of the promised debt relief are not
wholly enacted for 20 years, thus giving the institutions prolonged
leverage).

HIPC relieves too little debt for too few countries, at little or no
cost to the World Bank and IMF. Under HIPC, the World Bank and IMF
relieve less than 50% of the most impoverished countries’ debts, leaving
them to pay more than $700 million each year in debt service to these
institutions. HIPC’s perverse sustainability formulae mean Zambia and
Niger both face increased debt service payments after qualifying. Five
years after the introduction of HIPC, only three countries (Uganda,
Bolivia, and Mozambique) have jumped through all its hoops and gotten
the relief promised.  Under intense pressure from Jubilee campaigners,
the Bank and IMF quickly approved 20 countries for entrance into the
program by the end of 2000, but new hurdles are now being erected for
them. Meanwhile, indebted and impoverished countries like Bangladesh,
Haiti, and Nigeria do not even meet the Bank’s criteria for
consideration under HIPC.

Many of the debts claimed by creditors, including the World Bank and the
IMF, were accrued by dictators, corrupt officials, and non-democratic
governments — often with the complicity of the lenders, who were  guided
by political, rather than economic, motivations (hence loans pocketed by
leaders like Mobutu in Zaïre, with IMF knowledge, which the IMF now
insists the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo must repay).
Many of the debts claimed have in fact been paid back, even several
times over; they persist only because of high interest charges.  

The World Bank also glosses over the reality of how the debts of
countries benefiting from HIPC are cancelled.  When the World Bank and
the IMF agree that a country should receive debt relief, they do not
simply write off their claim; instead, they agree to accept full payment
from a different source – funds made up of contributions of taxpayer
money from wealthy countries (and some, including the initial $500
million, from the World Bank itself).  The Bank and the IMF have
policies against writing off loans (even in part).  They use their
unique status as “preferred creditors,” which gives them priority over
all other creditors, and as “gatekeepers,” which means other creditors
wait for them to certify (through lending) that a country is
creditworthy, to get 100% repayment on all their loans, regardless of
the country’s condition.   Under the HIPC program, neither the IMF nor
the World Bank sacrifices anything; indeed they gain more rapid and
secure repayment of monies claimed of their most impoverished client
governments.

The World Bank and IMF are deeply reluctant to take any responsibility
for the failed loans and bad “advice” they have given over the years by
themselves taking a loss in the cycle of debt.  They routinely protest
that to take money from them is to deny the benefits of their lending to
other needy countries.  While the value of that lending can be
questioned, the institutions are hardly vulnerable: the World Bank makes
an annual profit of over $1.5 billion, and the IMF holds gold reserves
valued at over $30 billion. Independent research by accountants Chantrey
Vellacott DFK demonstrates that even under well-established conservative
accounting  procedures, the World Bank and IMF could find more than $30
billion to compensate for debt cancellation, without jeopardizing their
ability to carry out their overall functions, and without a negative
impact on their credit ratings or status as lenders.  


For further information:

• Jubilee South: www.jubileesouth.net
• Jubilee USA Network: www.jubileeusa.org
• Jubilee Plus Network: www.j2000uk.org


THE WORLD BANK’S DEMANDS OF ITS OPPONENTS

1.  We demand that groups renounce and denounce violence. This is a
prerequisite for constructive discussion and debate.

The Mobilization for Global Justice is, and has been since its
inception, a non-violent organization, as are all the organizations
whose staff have contributed to this response.

The demonstrations at the April 2000 meetings of the IMF and World Bank,
organized by the Mobilization for Global Justice, were free of
“violence” and property destruction by protesters, despite many abuses
by those protecting the meetings and the delegates. Despite over 1,200
arrests, there were no convictions for either felonies or misdemeanors.
We believe that the Bank’s demand requiring specific rejection of
violence is a tactic designed to distract readers from its economic
agenda.  Its failure to recognize the systemic violence of policies that
kill 19,000 children a day (according to the United Nations Development
Program) reflects either a frightened or willful blindness to its
impacts, or an inexplicably strong belief, after over 20 years of
evidence to the contrary, that policies designed to promote corporate
profit will ultimately end poverty.  Our task in the movement for global
justice is to make sure the public understands the violence perpetrated
by these institutions’ power, and to see that they are held accountable.


2.  We also challenge those groups who claim to be concerned about poor
people in developing countries, yet have focused primarily on organizing
protests, to shift their energies away from conflict and toward
constructive dialogue and partnerships with the Bank and its member
governments.

The range of constituencies affected by IMF and World Bank policies is
tremendous.  In its response, the Bank suggests — indeed, demands — that
those who wish to criticize the institution refrain from demonstrating,
but instead engage in “constructive dialogue and partnerships with the
Bank and its member governments.”  This attitude reflects a regrettable
impulse to restrict the legitimate avenues for dissent.  We believe that
the problems with World Bank/IMF policies are not simply economic, but
also very much political problems.  We feel that the urgency of
fundamental change in the global economy is great enough to warrant hard
work on many different levels by many different kinds of civil society
organizations.  There are sometimes compelling reasons for organizations
to meet with the IMF and World Bank, but there are equally compelling
reasons to build opposition to the institutions’ policies by lobbying
their governments, engaging in grassroots public education, and
organizing vivid demonstrations of the passion and numbers of people who
oppose IMF and Bank policies.  It is important to note that there are no
rigid divisions among IMF/World Bank opponents; indeed those who compile
studies frequently participate in mass marches.  Working to improve the
economic and political position of the Global South means seeking
immediate policy changes and building public support for a fundamental
shift in global power relations.

Many groups that have tested the Bank’s expressed desire for dialogue in
recent years have found the Bank’s response disingenuous.  They have met
with the Bank to address issues such as large-dam development (World
Commission on Dams), structural adjustment (SAPRI), fossil fuels and
other extractive industries, forestry, and poverty (PRSPs), as well as a
number of safeguard policies and the Bank’s information-disclosure
policy.  These groups have found the Bank fundamentally unresponsive to
citizen input — even when the Bank has requested it — and to the
initiatives’ findings and recommendations.  Civil-society participants
in those initiatives have been frustrated, finding that the Bank seeks
to manipulate its joint endeavors with civil society, use its
consultations to validate and advance its own positions, and turn the
initiatives into public-relations exercises. When it has been unable to
control initiatives, the Bank has sought to distance itself from them
and from the outcomes they produce and to avoid implementation of
recommendations.

In this context, critics of the Bank have found that a mobilized
citizenry is essential for holding the Bank accountable.  Protests shed
light on the actions of the Bank and put pressure on governments, in the
South and North, to be responsive, and to make the Bank responsive, to
local and global concerns. Especially in light of its aggressive defense
of policies that have inflicted so much hardship around the world, the
World Bank should expect more protests in the future.

Finally, we are deeply conscious of the fact that the Mobilization for
Global Justice and the other organizations in the North that have
participated in creating this document are just one part of the global
movement for economic justice. Our role is to use our position nearer
the seats of power to amplify the experiences and demands of people in
the Global South, the people who actually live under the policies of the
World Bank and IMF. (The extensive history of resistance in the South is
documented, in part, in a report by the World Development Movement:
<www.wdm.org.uk/ cambriefs/Debt/unrest.pdf>)  We believe that no effort
to address poverty, inequality, and environmental destruction can be
satisfied by discussions among people in Washington, but must instead be
led by the people closest to the problems, and the possibilities, on the
ground.  



The following organizations participated in the composition of this
rebuttal:

Mobilization for Global Justice – Washington, DC USA -
www.globalizethis.org
Global Democracy Ottawa - Ottawa, ON Canada - www.flora.org/gdo
50 Years Is Enough Network - Washington, DC USA - www.50years.org
Halifax Initiative – Ottawa, ON Canada - www.halifaxinitiative.org
The Development GAP - Washington, DC USA - www.developmentgap.org
Social Justice Committee – Montreal, QC Canada - www.s-j-c.net
Jubilee USA Network - Washington, DC USA - www.jubileeusa.org
Sustainable Energy & Economy Network - Washington, DC USA - www.seen.org
Essential Action - Washington, DC USA - www.essential.org
International Rivers Network – Berkeley, CA USA - www.irn.org
INSAAF International – Bhatinda, Punjab, India -
www.geocities.com/insaafin/
RESULTS - Washington, DC USA - www.results.org
Africa Action – New York, NY & Washington, DC USA - www.africapolicy.org
Religious Working Group on the World Bank & IMF - Washington, DC USA -
www.religiouswg.org
Center for Economic Justice – Albuquerque, NM & Washington, DC USA -
www.worldbankboycott.org
Global Exchange – San Francisco, CA  USA - www.globalexchange.org
Civil Society Initiative for the Environment – Panamá City, Panamá
Sisters of the Holy Cross – Notre Dame, IN  USA - www.cscsisters.org
Campaign for Labor Rights – Washington, DC  USA
-www.summersault.com/~agj/clr/
Friends of the Earth-U.S. - Washington, DC  USA - www.foe.org