Read the full statement here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qUQ-JApvPxGeHIk20BY3_vNHk17oH18vb0Q0bs50GkY/edit?usp=sharing

The recently concluded 2021 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WBG) were held amid another crisis of neoliberalism. The meetings followed the exposure of the corruption of the monopoly capitalist system in the Panama Papers which uncovered the hidden wealth of the world’s elite stashed by big banks in offshore shell accounts. In September, the World Bank Group discontinued its flagship publication Doing Business Report - which ranked countries according to “ease of doing business” or compliance to neoliberal reforms - after issues of data manipulation surfaced.

Today’s crises have unraveled these pitfalls of the current economic system. We come together to assert people’s rights and sovereignty, and reclaim our future away from neoliberal globalisation. As social movements, people’s organisations, and civil society:

1. We reject the IMF-WBG’s so-called Green, Resilient, and Inclusive Development (GRID) framework and the broader push internationally to rehabilitate the interests of corporations and finance capital in the name of economic “recovery.”  Instead of a superficial makeover and potential greenwashing of the current system to further corporate plunder, we need systemic changes. We stand for a people-centred development that democratises development paths, pursues the rights of working people, especially women, as well as food sovereignty, and the self-determination of Indigenous Peoples.

2. We condemn the WBG’s support of pandemic profiteering. We assert that vaccines are public goods which should be matched with the creation of strong, national healthcare systems.

3. We join calls to cancel debts especially in the global South. The perpetual indebtedness and plunder of the global South must end, together with the austerity measures and the extraction of resources imposed in the name of paying these debts. Conditionalities, as tools of neoliberal and neocolonial influence, have no place in people-centred development.

4. We join movements’ long-running calls to end the policy regime of privatisation, deregulation, liberalisation, and denationalisation, along with its major institutional proponents such as the IMF-WBG. We believe perpetuating the IMF-WBG’s influence would drive humanity to catastrophic conditions.

5. We support people’s calls to focus public resources to health and socioeconomic relief, and to gear development toward strengthening capacities to address domestic needs. This entails the minimum of reversing the anti-worker drive for labour flexibilisation, and also heeding the calls for genuine agrarian reform, land redistribution, and national industrialisation in the global South.

Today, as we face a pandemic and its extensive socioeconomic impacts and a life-threatening climate crisis, we endeavour to broaden and strengthen our alliances to oppose neoliberal IFIs as institutions of monopoly capitalism. Our fight for rights and sovereignty and a future free from the dictates of the IMF-WBG draws from people’s historical resistance.  They have shown us that it is possible and  just to resist the IMF-World Bank’s dominance and to build a future for people’s rights and people-centred development. #