If columns were troops, we'd be in great shape. Those of you that live in the US, and have not yet succumbed to the view that calling your Member of Congress makes you a naive tool of the Man, are strongly encouraged to call your Member of Congress ASAP and encourage her/him to oppose the Administration bill and co-sponsor the HOPE bill. Congress is in recess this week; it's a good time to hit them in their home districts; a local call for which you won't have to pay anything. --------- Sunday Journal (suburban DC) February 21 "On the Left" Robert Naiman Keep HOPE Alive in Africa Keep HOPE Alive in Africa The globalization at any price faction of Congress, big business, and the Administration has again locked horns with the advocates of labor rights, environmental protection, and other free trade skeptics over proposed trade legislation. The African Growth and Opportunity Act, dubbed NAFTA for Africa by its critics, has been re-introduced in the House of Representatives, and will likely be voted on in the coming weeks. The battle lines are familiar, with proponents of the legislation claiming that reducing trade barriers to textile goods from Africa will promote economic growth there, and critics saying it will do nothing to help ordinary African workers, while threatening the jobs of textile workers in the U.S., largely due to the expected transshipment of Chinese textiles through Africa. But there are important new elements in the debate: the devastation caused by structural adjustment policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on sub-Saharan Africa, and the crippling burden of external debt these countries face under IMF rule. IMF policies have been an key feature of the economic model behind trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the World Trade Organization (WTO). For example, many policies which Mexico locked itself into by joining NAFTA in 1993 had in fact already been imposed on it by an IMF structural adjustment program in 1982. But the role of the IMF in serving as a battering ram to open developing countries to free trade with multinational corporations has escaped general notice. That is changing. The Asian financial crisis and resulting record US trade deficit have shown that IMF programs can be just as damaging as trade agreements to US jobs. Steelworkers, for example, have seen plants close and thousands of workers laid off due to a surge of steel imports from Asia and Russia. This surge is largely a result of IMF austerity policies imposed on these countries, which reduced their demand for US goods, while the IMF forced these countries to try to export their way out of crisis. In practice this largely means exporting to the United States. In the case of NAFTA for Africa, the legislation itself drew attention to the issue of IMF policies because compliance with IMF policies was included as a condition that African countries have to meet in order to receive the trade benefits offered by the bill as well as trade benefits these countries already enjoy. But opponents of the Administration have taken the debate a step further by introducing their own bill, the Human Rights, Opportunity, Partnership, and Empowerment [HOPE] for Africa Act. The HOPE bill, whose sponsors include Reps. Jesse Jackson, Jr. and David Bonior, would also give trade benefits to African countries, while targeting them to African workers and protecting labor rights. There would be no IMF conditionality; instead, the HOPE bill would act to weaken the power of the IMF, by addressing the greatest obstacle to African development: the crushing burden of external debt. Jubilee 2000, the international movement for debt cancellation, has highlighted how poor countries are being forced by the IMF to spend money servicing external debts that they should be spending on health care and education. For example, Africa spends four times more on debt service payments than on health care. In Mozambique alone, Jubilee estimates that spending half the money on health care and education that is now spent on debt service would save the lives of 100,000 children a year. The Hope bill begins the process of debt cancellation by eliminating the bilateral debt owed by African countries to the United States. It also enjoins the US to advocate for debt cancellation at the IMF and World Bank, which hold the bulk of these countries debts. The obstacle to debt cancellation is political. While the debt is crippling to poor countries, it is a pittance compared to the resources of the rich countries. But the debt is very useful to the IMF, because it allows the IMF to dictate economic policy to poor countries. With the debt burden removed, it is unlikely that poor countries would accept the brutal structural adjustment policies of the IMF, which have resulted in drastic cuts in spending on human needs, and undermined the ability of these countries economies to feed and meet other needs of their own people. If the NAFTA for Africa bill is defeated, it would be another nail in the well-deserved coffin of the IMF. ------------------------------- Robert Naiman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Preamble Center for Public Policy 1737 21st NW Washington, DC 20009 phone: 202-265-3263 fax: 202-265-3647 http://www.preamble.org/ -------------------------------
