WCC
meets IMF
At
its own request, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has
held talks with the World Council of Churches (WCC).
Mr
Masood Ahmed, IMF Deputy Director, Policy Development and
Review Department, Washington D.C., led a three-person team,
which visited WCC headquarters in Geneva last July.
General
Secretary, Rev. Dr Konrad Raiser, represented the WCC and
was joined by Rev. Dr Sam Kobia, Director of the Cluster
on Issues and Themes, and Dr Rogate R. Mshana, Executive
Secretary for Economic Justice.
Mr
Ahmed said the IMF wished to discuss its policies with the
WCC. He underlined how the WCC’s very broad world wide
network was closer to the grassroots than the IMF. This
put the WCC in a unique position to receive feedback from
those affected by IMF policies. By developing its contact
with the WCC, Mr Ahmed added, the IMF expected to receive
adequate feedback to it policies.
Topics
The
IMF and WCC teams discussed ‘The Poverty Reduction
and Growth Facility’ (PRGF) and ‘The Highly Indebted
Poor Countries Initiative’ (HIPC 2).
Mr
Ahmed said that after two years of the implementation of
HIPC, there was need to accelerate deep debt relief because
of the current falling of commodity prices for poor countries,
and the deepening poverty. He also conceded it took a long
time for the IMF and the World Bank to realise the inadequacy
of previous debt relief measures and the need to focus on
poverty reduction: “We admit that there are cases where
international agencies did things which weakened nations.”
He outlined steps that the IMF had taken to avoid these
mistakes in future.
WCC
response
In
reply, Dr Raiser thanked the IMF delegation for its visit
and explained that the WCC is an open network of member
churches from which the voice of the people, advocacy and
solidarity are manifested. The WCC, said Dr Raiser, had
a history of dealing with economic matters within the context
of faith, ethics and values. It has always raised challenges
to the continuing debate of the global economy, and the
main concern of the WCC was to put people at the centre
of development. Indeed, the WCC does not consider values
and ethics as abstract concepts but rather translates them
into people.
The
WCC, added Dr Raiser, considered the issue of debt to be
one of economic justice, which calls for the total cancellation
of debts for the poor countries. Cancellation should not
wait until conditions set by creditors are met. There is
a need to introduce a new, independent and transparent arbitration
process for negotiating and agreeing upon international
debt cancellation. There is also a need to implement measures
to promote the accountability of debtor countries when debts
are cancelled. These measure must be determined and monitored
by local community organisations, including churches and
other representative groups in civil society, to ensure
debt cancellation leads to a just distribution of wealth.
Funds illegitimately transferred to secret foreign bank
accounts must be returned to debtor nations.
In
a further response, Dr Rogate Mshana said the WCC is concerned
that the vision of the people and the kind of society they
want are not given time to be formulated because of the
timeframe constraints imposed by the IMF
For
example, Dr Rogate explained, PRGF policies are enshrined
in the paradigm of growth without limit, and very little
has been done on issues of equity, ethics and the ecological
impact of growth without limits. Poverty reduction instead
of eradication is a sign of the trickle-down approach to
development where some people are expected to remain poor.
There is therefore a significant difference between the
way the WCC and IMF see development.
Dr
Rogate also said they must be genuine institutional reform
of the IMF to make it more democratic.
At
the conclusion of the one-day talks, the WCC and IMF agreed
to meet regularly to continue the dialogue.
