Richard Thomas in London
The World Bank is privately warning that Haitian peasants could be forced to emigrate in order to find jobs, in stark contrast to the bank’s public endorsement of a “people first” development strategy.
Ahead of the bank’s annual meeting in Washington in a fortnight’s time, aid agencies said the disclosure would undermine attempts by the bank to recast itself as a friend of the world’s poor.
A draft bank strategy paper on Haiti says that the two-thirds of the country’s workers based on the land are unlikely to survive the free-market measures imposed by the bank.
Even if strenuous efforts are made by international organisations to secure agricultural employment, the paper concludes: “The small volume of production and the environmental resource constraints will leave the rural population with only two possibilities: to work in the industrial or service sector, or to emigrate.”
Andrew Simms, a representative for the charity Christian Aid, said the bank’s admission would damage its credibility in the developing world.
“I dearly hope this is not bank policy,” he said. “The suggestion that people in Haiti — a country rooted in rural life — should have to emigrate is impractical, insensitive and politically preposterous.”
Embarrassed bank officials insisted the document was a draft of a Haiti Country Assistance Strategy paper and stressed that emigration was not part of the bank’s policy agenda. Geoffrey Lamb, the World Bank representative in London, said: “It is simply an analytical warning of the way trends are going. It is not our intention that people should have to emigrate.”
But the bank’s admission will fuel the already heated row within Haiti over the “structural adjustment” programme enforced on the country as a precondition of loans from the bank and International Monetary Fund.
Opposition parties and trade unions in the Western hemisphere’s poorest nation have fiercely criticised plans to privatise nine state-owned enterprises and lower import tariffs as detrimental to prospects for the poorest families. Aid worth $200-million has been held up until the state sell- offs go ahead, according to aid pressure groups.
The Haitian president, Rene Preval — who has styled himself “President of the Peasants” — is already struggling to force the privatisation bills through Parliament. But the World Bank’s top brass, including president James Wolfensohn, have argued that privatisation and export growth are necessary to boost economic growth, which they argue is the best long-term anti-poverty strategy.