Old Monk

The Old Monk is a special section of the Forum website maintained by the Forum's International Convenor, Wilfred D' Costa. It features articles, essays and opinions on global issues affecting common people.


Made money by creating emissions,
Making more by reducing them
July 30, 2008

Who are the IFIs and the capitalists fooling? First they realized that manufacturing is not going anywhere. Mergers, acquisitions and vertical integrations have not been enough to fill their coffers. Taking a cue from the windfall profiting brought by the reconstruction days of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), they made money out of infrastructure, profiting from the basic needs of the people, such as education, health, water, and food.

But that was not enough to satisfy their greed — they're longing for profits and their determination to ensure the survival of their class. So the capitalists suddenly came up with a bright idea — why not make money by undoing the carbon-damage we've done?

And so came the birth of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which was housed in the World Bank — the most notorious bank among other banks. But unlike the rest, it has all the privileges and leverages over governments as a "multilateral institution." Its track record of devastating the ecology has been well known.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank's private-sector arm, had promoted the expansion of livestock herds, soybean fields and palm oil plantations — which all tend to propel deforestation in the tropics, even as the World Bank simultaneously warned about forest loss — and created a fund to curb deforestation.



World Bank Criticized on Environmental Efforts
By Andrew C. Revkin

The World Bank and its partners need to do a far better job of considering the environmental effects of projects they finance in poor countries, its internal review group concludes in a new report.

The review, released Tuesday, examined some of the $400 billion in investments in nearly 7,000 projects from 1990 to 2007. It found that recent pledges for environmental sustainability by the bank and sister institutions, including the International Finance Corporation, were often not put into practice when dollars were turned into dams, pipelines, palm plantations and the like. Full story


Feedback welcome
1 comment

Ninglun said...
he is grabing the whole Queen Bee colony ..probably for HONEY to distill the 7 years old blended ....cool monk ..!