'No medicine is better than bad medicine' - PHA 2000 delegates blast World Bank policies on health
- Press Releases
PRESS RELEASE - December 6,
2000
‘No medicine is better than bad medicine’
PHA 2000 delegates blast World Bank policies on health
He came, he defended the World Bank- but failed to impress anybody at the People’s
Health Assembly.
Senior Bank representative Richard Lee Skolnik was blasted by delegate after delegate on
the third day of the Assembly blaming the Bank’s policies for the devastation of
Third World economies, public health systems and the lives of the poor. And at the end of
a special four hour session on `The World Bank faces the People’, most of the
delegates raised their hands to say "yes" when asked whether the bank was guilty
of pursuing policies detrimental to the health of poor people around the globe.
“The World Bank must be dismantled” said Antonio Tujan, a long-time social
activist from the Philippines pointing out how the Bank’s promotion of neo-liberal
economic policies in his country had only resulted in the commercialization of health-care
and benefited drug multinationals. Less than 3 percent of the US$ 1.8 billion dollars
given in loans by the World Bank to the Philippines he said were being spent on public
health. “No medicine is better than bad medicine” he said calling for a
rejection of the Bank’s policy prescriptions.
“We don’t need charity but justice” said Charles Mutasa of Zimbabwe blaming
the World Bank for a global economic system in which Africa was now caught in a debt trap.
“The money spent by African countries on servicing debt is now four times the amount
they spend on health and education” he said accusing the Bank of helping transfer
resources from the poor to the rich.
Thelma Narayan from India called the World Bank an `undemocratic’ institution which
functioned with no transparency and was controlled by United States which dominated most
of its decision-making. She asked who will take responsibility for the disruption in the
lives of people and even the deaths caused by World Bank promoted projects. Muzaffar
Ahamed of Bangladesh accused institutions like the World Bank of co-opting politicians,
bureaucrats, NGOs and making them into compradors. The NGO’s he said were being
funded and pushed by the World Bank as the main provider of health services to the public
and the role and responsibility of governments was being undermined.
In his speech to the PHA 2000 delegates Richard Skolnik, Regional Director for Health,
Nutrition and Population for South Asia at the World Bank admitted that the Bank’s
structural adjustment policies in the past did not pay attention to the its impact on the
poor. “In the last ten years however the World Bank has asked governments to spend
more on the social welfare projects, particularly on health” he said. He denied that
the Bank recommended the wholesale privatization of health-care and said that they asked
for cuts in subsidies only in sectors like power and infrastructure and not health. He
added that the World Bank is the largest lender for programs to control diseases like TB,
Malaria, Polio and HIV/AIDS. In Bangladesh the World Bank is the largest supporter of
nutrition programs.
Delegates at PHA 2000 however countered Skolnik’s defence of the Bank and pointed out
that its policies promoting privatization of state-owned companies, cut in subsidies to
infrastructure projects and putting profits before people had affected the health of the
poor all over the world. World Bank loans they said came with strings attached that
weakened the role of the government and allowed only private corporations to flourish at
the expense of the people.
“The New World Order is structured in ways that discriminate against poor
countries” said David Legge of Australia pointing out that the World Bank was a key
operator in the running of the global economic system that kept large portions of the
world in perpetual poverty.
PHA 2000 delegates also called for greater cooperation between countries in the South to
shake off the dependence on loans from institutions like the World Bank. The four-hour
session with the World Bank representative was frequently punctuated with slogans against
the Bank’s policies and applause for speakers who countered Skolnik’s defence of
the Bank with specific examples of how they were actually harmful to the poor.
