Global Policy Forum

By Paul Blustein

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which canceled their annual meetings in Washington last month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, announced yesterday that their top policy-setting committees will meet in Ottawa next month.

The gatherings on Nov. 17 and 18 will be a pale version of the meetings the IMF and World Bank ordinarily hold in the autumn, which involve delegations from all their 183 member nations and typically attract thousands of private financiers. Convening in Ottawa next month will be the finance ministers and central bankers from the United States, Japan and other countries belonging to the 24-member International Monetary and Financial Committee and the 24-member Development Committee, which oversee the fund and the bank, respectively.

Anti-globalization activists, who had planned to stage massive demonstrations in Washington when the annual meeting had been scheduled for Sept. 29 and 30, said they would hold protests and "alternative" events in Ottawa, though they differed on whether the action would be confrontational. The D.C. police had been girding for violence by some of the tens of thousands expected for last month's meetings, and while some activists have said the shock of Sept. 11 would force changes in their approach, others said their tactics would remain the same.

"We had built up all of this momentum for a protest, and then there was no meeting and there was no protest, and now we have an occasion to take our case to the streets," said David Levy, an organizer with the Mobilization for Global Justice, one of the main organizations rallying people opposed to IMF and World Bank policies. The fund makes large loans to developing countries with funding shortages, and the bank provides loans aimed at promoting development and easing poverty. Critics fault the institutions for demanding excessive economic austerity and hurting the poor.

Levy predicted that Canadian activists will "pull together a very vociferous and powerful protest." Asked about the political risks involved in mounting demonstrations at a time when the public's abhorrence of violence is high, he replied: "I think it's fairly easy for us to persuade reasonable people that there is a several order of magnitude difference between people who advocate non-violent civil disobedience, such as sit-ins and human blockades, and people who crash airplanes into buildings."

Soren Ambrose of 50 Years Is Enough Network, a longtime critic of the IMF and World Bank, said his group plans to coordinate with Canadian counterparts, but he added: "I suspect that what we're going to see -- and this is pure speculation -- is fairly small, fairly non-confrontational protests."

He questioned whether large numbers of Americans would go because of other protests scheduled for the same weekend.

One of the main reasons the IMF and World Bank want their policy-setting committees to meet is to provide impetus and direction for increased lending that both institutions expect to make in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Developing nations' economies, which were already hit hard by the global slowdown, are now facing even more dire circumstances because of a plunge in tourism, falling prices of export commodities and heightened jitters among international investors.

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