Fear and Loaning
Anuradha Mittal: “When suddenly farmers are told what to grow and the prices are dictated by the guy who is going to buy the crops… They all put them in some kind of servitude and take away what was honorable about agriculture”
The World Bank is like a bank, for the world. That must have sounded so much more optimistic in 1944, but 70 years of post-colonial high financing has done uncountable damage to the developing world. Well, probably not uncountable since they are bankers.
The Oakland Institute has been keeping track of the damage in their new report Willful Blindness: How the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business Rankings’ Impoverish Smallholder Farmers. Oakland Institute’s Anuradha Mittal calls in to explain how global finance groups like the World Bank, USAID and Gates Foundation leverage poverty and instability to usurp tradition and sustainability.
Anuradha Mittal is founder and executive director of the Oakland Institute, and serves on the board and advisory committees of several nonprofit organizations including the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) and the International Forum on Globalization.