Message-ID: <199509060348.UAA06597@cdp.igc.apc.org> Date: Tue, 5 Sep 1995 20:48:36 -0700 From: Jagdish Parikh <mailto:jagdish@IGC.APC.ORG> Subject: Women: War On SAPs (Beijing Conf) To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
/* ---------- "Open declaration: War on Structural" ---------- */ Subject: Open declaration: War on Structural Adjustment From: <mailto:marina@wcw.apc.org>OPEN DECLARATION War on Structural Adjustment Programmes !
We the indersigned, assembledfor the NGo forum of Women - Beijing '95, announce to the Workd that we declare war against all IMF-dictated Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP's). These programmes have traumatised whole continents, torn apart the social fabric of entire societies and are wreaking havoc on the lives of billions of peoole woelswide, especially women.
At the root cause of these policies is the agenda of the IMF to ensure that the monstrius debt of the Third World is regularly and faithfully serviced , in order to fill the coffers of the big multinational banks and international finance institutions. This Third World debt, which has crossed way over one trillion dollars, is one of the principal levers of bleeding the forme colonial countries. According to the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation (OEDC), from 1982 through 1990, total resource flows from the developed to the developing countries (new loand, grants, trade credits, etc.) was $927 billion, while developing countries remitted in debt service alone a total of $1345 billion to the centres of finance capital. Thus the inflow-outflow difference from the underdeveloped countries to the coffers of the big banks was as much as $418 billion. This massive haemorrhage from the underdeveloed countries to a hadful of international banks has intesified since then. The SAPs of the IMF-World BAnk are directed to ensure that this heamorrhage contunues without obstacles!
SAPs ensure that the debtor countries orient their whole economies towards export market, even at the cost of starving their own people. THis insane drive for exports by the debtor countries has led to an unprecedented fall in their commodity prices. In 1988 alone, famine-ravaged Africa lost something in the region of $19 billion.
These adjustment programmes have inflicted brutality and violence not only on the people of the Third World. They are also directly affecting the people of the developed countries. The crumbling of social welfare policies, the rising unemployment and the bankruptcies of small businesses in these countries is the automatic structural adjustment programmes inflicted on the developing countries. Therefore SAPs cannot be the concern of only people of the developing countrie. They have to be opposed by the people of the developed countries as well.
Worldwide, women have been the main victims. All indicators of human wellbeing have shown a rapid deterioration ever since the implementation of SAPs. The responsibility of childcare has become more agonising and painful for billions of mothers forced into starvation and malnutrition. Rising infant mortality rates, a rising proportion of high-risk pregnancies and babies with low birht weight, declining educational standards, an increase in the prevalence of diseases, the re-emergence of diseases previously thought to have been eradicated, have all become facts of life. Widespread unemployment of menfolk due to layoffs, closures and retrenchment is forcing milions of women into a labour market whose brutality is more savage than that of the jungle. Women and children are being devoured by the monster of sex tourism, encoiuraged by third world governments to earn more foreign exchange. Some of the most criminal consequences of SAPs have been the spread of shameless consumerism amid widespread destitution, the lumpenisation of sections of the youth, the brutalisation of social life, and the intensification of social alenation and mental traumas. Mass cynicism and selfishness have been institutionalised. All human values have been reduced to meny, creating a spiritual and intellectual void in society.
For the women's movement, the most profound consequence of the crisis has been the increse in the inequality and discriminations already suffered by women. And yet despite this, should our struggle be for the designing of policies "that will distribute the adjustment burdens equally and fairly between women and men"? NO. We are not struggling for a world in which IMF-World Bank created barbarisms and savagery fall wqually on the shoulders of men and women. We aim to wipe out the very system that produces this barbarism and savagery!
We declare that this system of barbarism and savagery cannot be ended byt the present rulers of the world, who themselves are in the forefront of implementing IMF-World Bank policies. It cn only be ended by an international mass movement from below. Structural adjustment programmes are not only traumatising women worldwide. They have unwittingly succeeded in creating a basis for women to unite globally even as they organise locally.
We declare that our struggle is not for "adjustment policies with a human face". What human face can there be where the most savage law of the jungle prevails! We declare that without the unilateral cancellation of the entire debt of the developing countries, the necessity of the structural adjustment programmes will continue. There is only one way to dight and end the constant traumatic adjustments that are being enforced on us - the unilateral cancellation of all third world debt. This debt has been repaid many times over. Therefore, either we force the international banks to adjust to us or we have to be prepared to adjust to them. Thsi or that. There is no midway choice.
We declare that we women will bear no more the pain and suffering of adjusting to the big international banks. When the interests of these banks have become a threat to our economies and society itself, we women cannot and will not remain silent. We pledge to make our struggle to every corner of the world.
What we are demanding is not only rational and just but also practical. Every minute as much as $2 million is being spent on arms, i.e. as much as $1000 billion a year. This is as much as the total debt of the developing countries. Thus the resources of the world are being criminally squandered in the manufacture of mass death and the destructuion of human societies, even while millions die due to hunger and poverty. Therefore in one voice we declare - Down with criminal wars! War against debt!
Beijing, 1995