UN Poverty Programs Criticized

UNITED NATIONS -- A major new study of the United Nations says the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund should attack the world's economic inequalities rather than overestimate their value to poor nations.


"The World Bank, has, of course, done useful work but the realities do not really match the mystique," said the report, financed by the Ford Foundation.


Titled "Renewing the United Nations System," the study was written by Erskine Childers and Sir Brian Urquhart, former senior UN officials and authors of several authoritative books on the UN.


Their book recommends radical reforms of other UN structures, including grouping all of its specialized agencies in one location instead of scattering them around the world.


It analyzes UN economic and social activities rather than peacekeeping operations, saying that the world body has been denuded of a meaningful role in many such activities.


Both the Washington-based World Bank and the IMF, nominal members of the UN system, have pledged to coordinate with UN bodies but do so accidentally rather than by design.


The authors characterized recent separate negotiations with the El Salvador government by the bank and the IMF on one side and the UN on the other as akin to performing "unrelated surgery" on the same patient.


Among their recommendations are:


?UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali should organize world experts to make proposals on the World Bank and IMF when heads of state gather for the UN 50th anniversary next year.


?The United Nations should consider setting up its own non-commercial bank to complement the commercial lending to developing states by the World Bank.


?The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which they say denies too many states a fair share of world trade, should be replaced by a genuine international trade organization to include all countries in the world.


At minimum, the authors contend that the IMF should live up to claims of devising macro-economic or big-picture strategies.


"While the United Nations has been denied its role as a forum for agreeing equitable macro-economic strategies, such strategies have not been formulated at the International Money Fund either," they say. "For most developing countries the experience has been disastrous."


In 1990 there was a global surplus of $180 billion while indebtedness from developing countries was eight times higher. But there was no real remedial effort by the IMF, they said.


Most of the surplus went to private capital markets in rich countries while the World Bank was taking in $1.7 billion in interest and principal payments from poor states.


As for the IMF, its structural adjustment policies have actually "undone painstaking" work by the UN system in public health and education, the authors said.


"In fact, all the original intentions of the IMF in assisting member UN countries have long disappeared."


The report contends that the World Bank openly claims intellectual leadership but too often follows "the succeeding waves of Pnew development panaceas that arrive in developing countries in Northern briefcases.


"And despite many years of urging by competent authorities for far more small-scale lending, the World Bank has been wedded to gigantism," the report says. Instead, the bank should come under scrutiny like other UN institutions and coordinate development policies with the major UN agencies funded by the same governments.