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Subject: MM: BATTLING THE WORLD BANK
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BATTLING THE WORLD BANK

An Interview with Nilufar Ahmad

[Published in the October 1992 issue of Multinational Monitor]

Trained as a statistician and an economist, Nilufar Ahmad is a
university professor in Bangladesh and works with grassroots
organizations of rural women.  "Born in a well-to-do family, I never
faced hunger myself," she says.  She first came face-to-face with hunger
as a university student working with rural women during Bangladesh's
1974 famine.  "At that time," she says, "I made up my mind to work with
rural people, especially rural women, because they are at the bottom of
the pit."

Multinational Monitor.  Could you describe your work in Bangladesh?

Nilufar Ahmad:  My associates and I mobilize rural women, help them form
their own organizations.  The first step is awareness-raising.  These
people are illiterate.  They have no information.  They do not know
their rights as citizens.  They have basic human needs and they have the
right to all the resources that are available in our country.

After a little while, if we see that the women are becoming more
powerful, we make credit available to them, so they can set up small
businesses to make--I would not call it a sustainable living--but a
living at their own subsistence level.

MM:  Do you work independently or with a group when you're working with
the rural women?

Ahmad:  We work in groups because, in Bangladesh, we found that
networking is most important.  In times of stress we need each other's
help, so if there is a problem in some village, we can immediately call
on our friends to come to our support or legal aid.

MM:  How are the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank
involved in Bangladesh?

Ahmad:  It is a sad situation.  We fought a nine-month war with Pakistan
in 1971.  The United States supplied arms to Pakistan, so after
Bangladesh was liberated, the Americans had no great footing in
Bangladesh.  In fact, they were very much hated.  And the World Bank did
not have much footing in Bangladesh at that time either.

But, during 1974 there was a big flood and a great famine in Bangladesh.
At that time, Bangladesh was politically more connected to the Soviet
Union, which helped us during the war with Pakistan.  We also sold the
Soviets and the Cubans jute, a fiber mainly used to make grain sacks,
that was our main export.  Because of its trade embargo on Cuba, the
United States stopped all the grain supply to Bangladesh.  Thousands of
people died during the few months when the grain supply was cut off.  So
though we tried to maintain an independent international policy,
Bangladesh had to go begging on bended knees to the United States.  The
World Bank started to gain a footing in Bangladesh at the same time.

During that period, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the leader of our country,
was attempting to get rid of the military.  He said that we only needed
the police and militia, not a big military.  In 1975, the military came
out one night with tanks and killed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his
family.  Under military rule, Bangladesh shifted its policies towards
the United States and World Bank.

At the time of the military takeover, Bangladesh was suffering; a lot of
people were dying of famine.  Everybody wanted to help out.  The World
Bank somehow convinced all donor countries that Bangladesh would not be
able to manage all this money coming into the country; that it would not
be able to fashion programs and strategies.  So the World Bank took the
coordination of relief and aid out of our hands.

The World Bank became the coordinator of a consortium of donor groups.
Now the World Bank decides what our policy and our budget will be, and
it allocates all the money to different sectors.  We are totally be-
holden to the World Bank.

Whatever the World Bank says, we have to say yes.  For example, the
World Bank and Western states all say that population is Bangladesh's
biggest problem.  Bangladesh is a highly populated, very small country
--we have about 2,000 people per square kilometer.  So the first
priority of foreign lenders is population control.  Of all the money
that goes into Bangladesh, 55 percent goes into population control.
They give us Depo-Provera, Norplant, all kinds of IUDs.  And they
actually set targets for the number of each type of contraceptive that
has to be distributed.  If we do not satisfy the target, they can keep
the money in the pipeline and not give it to other sectors.  They [cur-
rently] give only 2 percent to education and only .4 percent to women's
health.  We have no control over our population policy; it is totally
controlled by the World Bank.

In the last 20 years, however, Bangladesh's population has not
decreased.  This is because population is not the problem; the problem
is poverty.  We have a high infant mortality rate in Bangladesh.  If a
woman does not know if her child is going to survive or not, she's not
going to use contraceptives.  So our first priority is to put money into
basic human needs:  education, health, shelter, food.  But the World
Bank decides that population control is the first priority.

MM:  How are World Bank-imposed structural adjustment policies
affecting the country?

Ahmad:  The World Bank is trying to liberalize Bangladesh's trade laws
and promote export-oriented policies.  It has cut off all of the money
for the social sector, so there is more and more poverty in Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh, the industries were nationalized.  But the World Bank has
forced us--and all the weak countries in the world--to privatize
state-owned enterprises.  In selling off the enterprises, government
officials took many bribes.  The public industries that earned millions
of dollars each year were sold to the private sector for just a couple
of million dollars.  Those were public goods.  And the people got
nothing for them.

Because we are a land-poor country, our economic policy should promote
industrialization.  Sixty percent of our population is landless and
there is simply not enough land for everybody.  But the people who
bought the privatized factories just sold the machinery, took the money
and sent it abroad.  They just ran away.  Now there is almost 50 percent
unemployment in Bangladesh and a lot of additional shadow
underemployment.

MM:  One of the export products the World Bank is urging for
Bangladesh is shrimp.  Could you talk about the origin of the shrimp
industry and its impact on life in the coastal areas of Bangladesh?

Ahmad:  The shrimp industry right now is a very touchy subject.  The
World Bank has planned a big project for the shrimp industry, designed
to bring in a lot of foreign exchange for Bangladesh.  The shrimp we
grow is not for our own consumption; it is for rich countries to buy.

In the 1960s, the government built embankments around the coastal area
to stop the tail-line waters from coming in, to gain more land from the
ocean.  The coastal areas were the surplus food areas where a lot of
grains grew.  One-fourth of the population of Bangladesh lives in the
coastal areas.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, the World Bank said, "Go for shrimp."  And
some rich people who lived in the area--with the compliance of the
government--cut through the embankments and let the tail-line water come
in.  They leased a lot of land from the local people and said they were
going to cultivate shrimp.  The local people didn't know what was going
to happen:  their fields were flooded with salt water and used by the
shrimp cultivators to grow the shrimp.  They catch the shrimp right from
the ocean and put it in these flooded areas, inside the land.  When the
shrimp reach a certain size, the cultivators sell them to outside
markets.

People are living on bamboo huts on top of the salt water because they
have no place to go.  They are sort of like hostages to the shrimp
cultivators; the shrimp cultivators hire goons to intimidate the local
people.

The women working those shrimp areas must go in the ocean to catch
shrimp, and they are in the cold water from eight to 10 hours each
day--many of them die of heart attacks or catch fever.  When the shrimp
are bigger, the women catch them from the cultivating areas where salt
water is mixed with lime, which does a lot of internal damage to the
shrimp workers' bodies.  They wear no gloves, and their hands and feet
are totally decayed, totally rotten.

The foreign exchange just going to the pockets of a few rich people.
The poor people are not able to eat the shrimp, they're not getting
agricultural production, they're not gaining anything in any way The
World Bank says development is growth, but the point is development
for whom?  Not for a few rich people, when 25 million people are dying
of hunger.

So we do a lot of mobilization in the coastal areas.  The women form
groups and they guard embankments so that shrimp cultivations do not
invade land and cut new embankments.  There was a big demonstration in
November 1990 involving thousands of people.  The goons working for one
of the very rich cultivators attacked the women.  One woman was killed,
another was abducted--she was never found.  But the women there are not
afraid.  They are still in groups, they make protests.  They say that
they are going to win this battle, that they are not going to go away,
that they are going to stay on their land and continue whatever agricul-
tural production they have.  They just will not give up.

MM:  What are some of the other impacts of the shrimp industry?

Ahmad:  The shrimp cultivation causes serious environmental problems.
The land that has been flooded by salt water is already damaged and
agricultural cultivation there has decreased by 30 percent.  There is
simply no vegetation--no trees, no plants.  Scientists say that it will
take three decades to relieve the land of this salinity.  It also
contributes to deforestation.  In the coastal areas we have the great
mangrove forest.  They cut the mangrove forest to make room for more
shrimp cultivation, and this has depleted the forest by about 40
percent.

We are going to have an ecological disaster in Bangladesh.  Only 4
percent of the land is forested and we need at least 25 percent.  We
have big cyclones in the bay--last year there was a big cyclone and
about one million people were killed.  The bay is tunnel-shaped, and
when the cyclone comes it creates a big tidal wave about 20 or 30 feet
high.  Because the people live in huts, they're all washed away into the
ocean.  They just cannot survive.  But where the coastal area is
forested, the water cannot come in and people are protected.

The government simply has no policy on forest protection.  Forestation
in the coastal areas should protect the people, protect their land,
protect their livestock, protect their resources.  But the government is
going to deforest the whole coastal area.  That is the sad truth.

MM:  So it is almost guaranteed that there will be future disasters on
the scale of the recent flood?

Ahmad:  Yes.  Let me tell you a story:  In 1988, we had a big flood in
Bangladesh.  Fifty percent of the land was flooded.  Even Dhaka, the
capital city, was totally under water.  I have never seen such water in
my whole life.  And the whole world was really concerned when the flood
was shown on international television.  The donor countries really
wanted to help Bangladesh; they wanted to find policies and strategies
to help the people.

The World Bank again got into the act and became the coordinator of the
relief effort.  It came up with a strategy called the flood action plan.
The proposal was to build embankments beside the main rivers.  We have
the three biggest rivers in the world in Bangladesh-- the Ganges, the
Brahmaputra and the Meghna.  Can you imagine building embankments on
those rivers?  Those are totally unstable rivers.  We already have 7,000
kilometers of embankments, and still every year we are flooded.  But
the World Bank is going ahead with the plan.

At the time, we had a corrupt, autocratic ruler and he was very happy to
implement this plan.  Ten billion dollars will be spent just to make the
embankments, and $600 million will be needed every year to maintain
them.  We are going to borrow $10 billion from the whole world.  How is
it going to be repaid?  It's all loans, not aid.

When we heard about this, we started to protest, but the government went
ahead anyway.  In 1989, the government built an embankment around Dhaka
without conducting any feasibility studies.  Now in Dhaka we are
drowning in our own drain water because the government didn't put in any
sewage--the water inside Dhaka cannot go out.

Meanwhile, the World Bank has already spent $150 million just on the 26
studies it has done for the flood action plan.  The Bank has put in all
sorts of wasteful conditions we have to follow.  For example, for each
study we have to include something like six foreign consulting firms.
Each consultant that comes to Bangladesh gets paid something like $800
per day-- while the average per capita income in Bangladesh is $160 per
year.  Do you think these people are really helping Bangladesh?  We have
calculated that for each dollar that comes into Bangladesh, we have to
repay $1.50 back.  Where is this money going to come from?

What I am saying is that the donor countries are not actually helping
the developing countries, the poor countries.  They're just doing good
business for themselves.  It is their own self-interest they are
satisfying.

But I also want to say another thing:  that it actually takes two
parties to do it.  Our government is complicit.  The World Bank could
not force all these policies on us if our government didn't agree to
them.  The government consents because government officials do not have
enough political will and because they want to line their own pockets.
Only the people can stop this process.  Our main work should be to help
the people understand that the government is selling them to the donors.
Then we can make the government accountable and devise our own policies
without being beholden to the World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund, U.S.  Agency for International Development or anybody else.

MM:  How optimistic are you that the people of Bangladesh will be able
to successfully resist World Bank and government policies?

Ahmad:  A great story of hope just happened two months ago.  This is
delta country.  In Ramgati, on the coast, 50 landless families went to a
piece of land that rose up in the ocean.  They just stayed there and
cultivated a bit of that land.  After the harvest, the landlord who
lived nearby came with the police, claiming that it was his land and
that he was going to collect all the grain that had been harvested.

The women asked their men to go.  They knew there was going to be
violence because the police always protect the interests of the
landlords.  The women gathered the grain in a field and stood around
that grain with their babies in their arms.  They told the police, "You
have to kill all of us to get this grain."  And the police backed away.

I was in a nearby area when I heard this story, so I went to meet these
women who were so brave.  I asked one of them where they got the
courage.  And this woman, who is only in her twenties, told me that she
is an orphan, that she does not have any parents or brothers or
sisters, that she has lived in the streets all her life, that she has
been raped many times because she sleeps on the streets and that she
does not know the names of the fathers of her children.  She told me
that she has no money, that she has no shame, that she has nothing left.
She has only her life to lose.  And if she loses it to help other women
who are in the same condition, she said, then it is no loss at all.

I think it's a great sign of hope that these people will really fight
and that they are going to get what they want.

-----------------
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