Dear Mary Anne.

Here is another article, by Dr. Sara Roy, which speaks on last Fall's GH seminar
theme, how Israeli policies in Gaza contribute to ill health and hunger crisis
in the area. Gaza was the focus of one of the seminar sessions in Fall quarter.
Dr. Sara Roy is an expert on the Gaza Strip and teaches at Harvard’s Center
for Middle Eastern Studies and is the author of Failing Peace: Gaza and the
Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.

Amineh

If Gaza falls . . .
Sara Roy

Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack
inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between
Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the
agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by
firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then.
Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the
Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have
no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is
to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of
tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly
regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of
Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed.
In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the
majority of the population.

On 5 November the Israeli government sealed all the ways into and out of Gaza.
Food, medicine, fuel, parts for water and sanitation systems, fertiliser,
plastic sheeting, phones, paper, glue, shoes and even teacups are no longer
getting through in sufficient quantities or at all. According to Oxfam only 137
trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of
4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October
this year and 564 in December 2005. The two main food providers in Gaza are the
UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and
the World Food Programme (WFP). UNRWA alone feeds approximately 750,000 people
in Gaza, and requires 15 trucks of food daily to do so. Between 5 November and
30 November, only 23 trucks arrived, around 6 per cent of the total needed;
during the week of 30 November it received
12 trucks, or 11 per cent of what was required. There were three days in
November when UNRWA ran out of food, with the result that on each of these days
20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John
Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are
entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution
for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade.

The WFP has had similar problems, sending only 35 trucks out of the 190 it had
scheduled to cover Gazans’ needs until the start of February (six more were
allowed in between 30 November and 6 December). Not only that: the WFP has to
pay to store food that isn’t being sent to Gaza. This cost $215,000 in
November alone. If the siege continues, the WFP will have to pay an extra
$150,000 for storage in December, money that will be used not to support
Palestinians but to benefit Israeli business.

The majority of commercial bakeries in Gaza – 30 out of 47 – have had to
close because they have run out of cooking gas. People are using any fuel they
can find to cook with. As the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has
made clear, cooking-gas canisters are necessary for generating the warmth to
incubate broiler chicks. Shortages of gas and animal feed have forced commercial
producers to smother hundreds of thousands of chicks. By April, according to the
FAO, there will be no poultry there at all: 70 per cent of Gazans rely on
chicken as a major source of protein.

Banks, suffering from Israeli restrictions on the transfer of banknotes into the
territory were forced to close on 4 December. A sign on the door of one read:
‘Due to the decision of the Palestinian Finance Authority, the bank will be
closed today Thursday, 4.12.2008, because of the unavailability of cash money,
and the bank will be reopened once the cash money is available.’

The World Bank has warned that Gaza’s banking system could collapse if these
restrictions continue. All cash for work programmes has been stopped and on 19
November UNRWA suspended its cash assistance programme to the most needy. It
also ceased production of textbooks because there is no paper, ink or glue in
Gaza. This will affect 200,000 students returning to school in the new year. On
11 December, the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, sent $25 million
following an appeal from the Palestinian prime minister, Salaam Fayad, the first
infusion of its kind since October. It won’t even cover a month’s salary for
Gaza’s 77,000 civil servants.

On 13 November production at Gaza’s only power station was suspended and the
turbines shut down because it had run out of industrial diesel. This in turn
caused the two turbine batteries to run down, and they failed to start up again
when fuel was received some ten days later. About a hundred spare parts ordered
for the turbines have been sitting in the port of Ashdod in Israel for the last
eight months, waiting for the Israeli authorities to let them through customs.
Now Israel has started to auction these parts because they have been in customs
for more than 45 days. The proceeds are being held in Israeli accounts.

During the week of 30 November, 394,000 litres of industrial diesel were allowed
in for the power plant: approximately 18 per cent of the weekly minimum that
Israel is legally obliged to allow in. It was enough for one turbine to run for
two days before the plant was shut down again. The Gaza Electricity Distribution
Company said that most of the Gaza Strip will be without electricity for between
four and 12 hours a day. At any given time during these outages, over 65,000
people have no electricity.

No other diesel fuel (for standby generators and transport) was delivered during
that week, no petrol (which has been kept out since early November) or cooking
gas. Gaza’s hospitals are apparently relying on diesel and gas smuggled from
Egypt via the tunnels; these supplies are said to be administered and taxed by
Hamas. Even so, two of Gaza’s hospitals have been out of cooking gas since the
week of 23 November.

Adding to the problems caused by the siege are those created by the political
divisions between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Hamas
Authority in Gaza. For example, Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility
(CMWU), which is not controlled by Hamas, is supposed to receive funds from the
World Bank via the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA) in Ramallah to pay for fuel
to run the pumps for Gaza’s sewage system. Since June, the PWA has refused to
hand over those funds, perhaps because it feels that a functioning sewage system
would benefit Hamas. I don’t know whether the World Bank has attempted to
intervene, but meanwhile UNRWA is providing the fuel, although they have no
budget for it. The CMWU has also asked Israel’s permission to import 200 tons
of chlorine, but by the end of November it had received only 18 tons – enough
for one week of chlorinated water. By mid-December Gaza City and the north of
Gaza had access to water only six hours every three days.

According to the World Health Organisation, the political divisions between Gaza
and the West Bank are also having a serious impact on drug stocks in Gaza. The
West Bank Ministry of Health (MOH) is responsible for procuring and delivering
most of the pharmaceuticals and medical disposables used in Gaza. But stocks are
at dangerously low levels. Throughout November the MOH West Bank was turning
shipments away because it had no warehouse space, yet it wasn’t sending
supplies on to Gaza in adequate quantities. During the week of 30 November, one
truck carrying drugs and medical supplies from the MOH in Ramallah entered Gaza,
the first delivery since early September.

The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is
little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European
Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with
Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of
the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with,
it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah
– which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. On 19
December Hamas officially ended its truce with Israel, which Israel said it
wanted to renew, because of Israel’s failure to ease the blockade.

How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of
Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more
than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well
as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be
next.


On Fri, 26 Dec 2008, MaryAnne Mercer wrote:

> Happy Holidays to Global Health-ers around the world,
>
> Fall quarter at UW included the Global Health seminar with a focus on food
issues, and the Problems in International Health course that presented some of
the ways that international policies contribute to ill health in poor countries.
The following article presents evidence linking these two themes, discussing
World Bank and IMF policies as they have contributed to the current world hunger
crisis.
>
> Mary Anne
>
> [Excerpt: The World Bank has 'given consistently wrong advice,' said Jose
Ramos-Horta, the president of East Timor in Asia and the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize
winner. It is their advice -- that buying externally is cheaper than producing
-- that has resulted in this, he said.]
>
> World Bank's 'Wrong Advice' Left Silos Empty in Poor Countries
>
> By Alison Fitzgerald and Helen Murphy
>
> Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Inside and out, the rusted towers of El Salvador's
biggest grain silo show how the World Bank helped push developing countries into
the global food crisis.
>
> Inside, the silo, which once held thousands of tons of beans and cereals, is
now empty. It was abandoned in 1991, after the bank told Salvadoran leaders to
privatize grain storage, import staples such as corn and rice, and export crops
including cocoa, coffee and palm oil.
>
> Outside, where Rosa Maria Chavez's food stand is propped against a tower wall,
price increases for basic grains this year whittled business down to 16
customers a day from 80.
>
> It's a monument to the mess we are in now, says Chavez, 63.
>
> About 40 million people joined the ranks of the undernourished this year,
bringing the estimate of the world's hungry to 963 million of its 6.8 billion
people, the Rome-based United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said
yesterday. The growth didn't come just from natural causes. A manmade recipe for
famine included corrupt governments and companies that profited on misery.
Another ingredient: The World Bank's free- market policies, which over almost
three decades brought poor nations like El Salvador into global grain markets,
where prices surged.
>
> The World Bank made one basic blunder, which is to think that markets would
solve problems of such severe circumstances, said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the
Earth Institute at Columbia University and a special adviser to UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki- moon. ?But history has shown you need to help people
to get above the survival threshold before the markets can start functioning.
>
> The Washington Consensus
>
> Created in 1944, the Washington-based World Bank Group spent much of its first
35 years dispensing low-interest loans, grants and development advice to poor
countries with an eye toward promoting self-reliance. In 1980, the bank's
executives began attaching conditions to loans that required 'structural
adjustments' in the recipients' national economies. The mandates were designed
to have poor countries cut import tariffs, reduce government's role in
enterprises such as agriculture and promote cultivation of export crops to
attract foreign currency.
>
> The philosophy, which came to be known as 'The Washington Consensus,' was
based in part on assumptions that importing basic grains would be inexpensive
and that farmers in developing nations could earn more producing exports. Food
prices had fallen for years and few economists thought that would change, said
Mark Cackler, manager of the bank's Agriculture and Rural Development Department
in Washington.
>
> Exporter to Importer
>
> In 2007 and the first half of 2008, an index of more than 60 food commodity
prices compiled by the FAO rose 82 percent. While costs have since eased, they
were 20 percent higher on Nov. 1 than at the end of 2006.
>
> The increases hit hard in countries such as El Salvador, which had adopted the
principles of the Washington Consensus in return for loans. El Salvador's
Central Reserve Bank said the total amount of the lending was 'not available.'
The Agriculture Ministry did provide this measure of their effects: The country
was a net exporter of rice 20 years ago; now it imports 75 to 80 percent of what
it consumes.
>
> The World Bank has "given consistently wrong advice," said Jose Ramos-Horta,
the president of East Timor in Asia and the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
>
> "It is their advice -- that buying externally is cheaper than producing --
that has resulted in this," he said.
>
> More Than Underinvestment
>
> Current and former World Bank officials say small countries hurt their own
agriculture industries by suppressing prices, taxing farms, inflating exchange
rates and favoring urban development. They reject the assertion that structural
adjustment loans hurt developing nations' self-sufficiency.
>
> "The premise that this crisis was caused by these policies is something that
we don't agree with," said World Bank spokeswoman Geetanjali Chopra. "This
crisis was caused by much more than underinvestment in agriculture."
>
> Still, in nations such as Honduras and Ghana, imports of basic grains climbed
after governments eliminated agricultural subsidies, sold off grain stores or
decreased tariffs to get World Bank loans in the 1990s, according to data from
the UN's FAO.
>
> In Honduras, 23,000 rice farmers went out of business, and employment from
rice fell to 11,200 people from 150,000 after the government trimmed import
duties, according to the human rights group Oxfam International. Honduran farms
now supply 17 percent of the domestic demand for rice, down from 90 percent
before the tariffs changed.
>
> McNamara's Shift
>
> In Ghana, the World Bank required a tariff reduction on rice to 20 percent
from 100 percent. Imports tripled, said Raj Patel, a scholar at the Center for
African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.
>
> The free-market policies were a sharp turn from the bank's earlier efforts --
led by former bank President Robert McNamara - - to develop poor countries'
domestic agriculture and self- reliance, said Uma Lele, a World Bank economist
from 1971 to 1991 and 1995 to 2005.
>
> McNamara, who oversaw the escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam as defense
secretary under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson before joining the
bank in 1968, shifted his views. He introduced the structural adjustment concept
in 1979, in a speech in Manila urging rich nations to open their markets to
imports from poor countries.
>
> "Developing countries will need to carry out structural adjustments favoring
their export sector," he said in the speech. McNamara, 92, declined to comment
for this story.
>
> Free Market Principles
>
> World Bank officials were frustrated that their investment in agriculture
through the 1970s wasn't paying off, especially in Africa, said Pierre
Landell-Mills, a bank economist at the time.
>
> "There were state marketing organizations that were a complete nightmare of
mismanagement and corruption," said Landell-Mills, 69, now a principal at the
Policy Practice, a public policy consulting group in Brighton, England, in a
June interview. "There were unsustainable subsidies."
>
> The 'preferred solution,' he said, was to dismantle the marketing boards,
shrink governments and remove barriers to entrepreneurship. McNamara in 1980
approved the first three structural adjustment loans. By 1985, they made up more
than 25 percent of the World Bank's total lending, according to Kyle Peters, its
country services director.
>
> Free-market principles were on the rise in the U.S. and the U.K., the bank's
major funders. Margaret Thatcher had become British prime minister in 1979 with
promises of privatizing state-owned enterprises. Ronald Reagan was elected U.S.
president in 1980, pledging to cut taxes and government programs.
>
> New Ideas, New Staff
>
> Reagan appointed Alden "Tom" Clausen, a former chief executive officer of Bank
America Corp., to succeed McNamara in 1981. The new bank president was convinced
"that you could fight poverty better and more efficiently and more quickly if
you get the policies of a country right," Clausen said in an interview.
>
> "I loved structural adjustment loans, and I made a lot of them," he said.
>
> As the bank's philosophy evolved, so did its staff. Clausen hired Anne
Krueger, an economist known for her advocacy of 'getting prices right' by
removing government controls, as vice president for economics and research in
1982. She "reshuffled the central economics staff," wrote Devesh Kapur, in the
bank's official history, "The World Bank: Its First Half Century."
>
> "Of course the direction of research had changed," Krueger, 74, said in an
interview on Aug. 25. She acknowledged that some economists left because they
didn't agree with the bank's focus. "Research moved away from big planning
models with unreasonable incentives and swung toward things that were much more
conducive to agriculture."
>
> Dysfunctional Systems
>
> Krueger led a five-volume study that concluded developing countries were
hurting their own agriculture with tax and exchange rate policies. She said the
bank's free-trade principles boosted output and growth.
>
> "These were largely dysfunctional systems," she said. "It made sense to reduce
tariffs so that countries could produce the goods that they were most efficient
at."
>
> After leaving the bank in 1986, Krueger became first deputy managing director
of the International Monetary Fund, which makes loans to help countries correct
balance of payment problems and promotes economic policies.
>
> As structural adjustment loans grew, the portion of the World Bank's lending
devoted to agriculture fell, to about 8 percent in 2000 from 30 percent in 1980.
Last year, farm-related loans made up 12 percent of the bank's $24.7 billion
portfolio.
>
> A Human Face
>
> "One of the reasons we have problems today is because of the cuts in
agriculture," said Montague Yudelman, 86, who was director of the World Bank?s
agriculture department under McNamara. "If they'd made a continuously high level
of investment, we'd have been in much better shape."
>
> By the late 1980s critics began saying the bank, along with the IMF, was
fostering poverty and dependence. UNICEF, the United Nations Childrens Fund, in
1987 published a two-volume study titled, "Adjustment With a Human Face." It
concluded that some of the bank's programs led to increases in malnutrition and
disease in poor nations and urged new strategies to protect the most vulnerable
people.
>
> In 1995, just 30 days into his tenure as bank president, James Wolfensohn
promised changes.
>
> During a meeting with representatives of 12 non-profit organizations,
Wolfensohn heard their argument that 15 years of adjustment lending had wiped
out small farmers in countries from Africa, Latin America and Asia, damaging
their ability to feed people. Some called for the bank to be disbanded.
>
> A Different Way
>
> "What I'm looking for is a different way of doing business in the future,"
Wolfensohn, a former Australian Olympic fencer and New York banker, told them.
Wolfensohn, 75, who left the World Bank in 2005, declined to be interviewed for
this story.
>
> The bank's commitment to free-market principles didn't waver.
>
> In 2000, as a condition for a $6.8 million agriculture loan in East Timor, the
bank demanded that publicly funded agricultural service centers be privatized
and rejected money for a public grain silo and slaughterhouse, according to Tim
Anderson, a political economy lecturer at the University of Sydney. He has
written several papers on East Timor's development.
>
> It also turned down proposals for the government to provide research and
advice to farmers and to supply seeds and fertilizer because "such public sector
involvement has not proved successful elsewhere," according to a World Bank
mission report that year.
>
> Small Farms Ignored
>
> At the time, there was already evidence that private entrepreneurs weren't
serving so-called smallholders, who the bank says make up 60 percent of the
world's 2.5 billion farm households.
>
> A 1998 study by Michael L. Morris, then a senior economist and project
coordinator with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in El
Batan, Mexico, found that private seed companies in Africa focused on supplying
large commercial operations and "often ignored small-scale, subsistence-oriented
farmers located in remote areas." Morris, 53, is now the World Bank's lead
agriculture economist for the Africa region.
>
> In its 2008 World Development Report, the bank acknowledged that limiting
governments' participation in agriculture had hurt small farmers -- citing
Morris's 10-year-old study as part of the evidence.
>
> The expectation was that removing the state would free the market for private
actors to take over these functions -- reducing their costs, improving their
quality, and eliminating their regressive bias. "Too often, that didn't happen,"
the bank said in the report.
>
> No "Evil Force"
>
> In 2000, Wolfensohn defended the bank to critics. During a meeting at Prague
Castle that year, he told an invited crowd of 300 activists, bankers and
government officials: "You should not regard us as a black and evil force. Maybe
we've gotten things wrong. I'm sure we have in many cases."
>
> The next year, several non-profit groups that had worked with the bank to
study its loan conditions released a report saying that the policies "have
undermined the viability of small farms, weakened food security and damaged the
natural environment."
>
> In response to the criticism from the Structural Adjustment Participatory
Review International Network, the bank issued its own analysis that listed
successes as well as missteps. It concluded that the required changes in
agriculture were too much, too soon.
>
> Lessons Learned
>
> "The lessons for future policies are that agricultural adjustments are complex
and require a sequence of modest steps," the bank said in the report.
>
> In August 2004, James Adams, the World Bank's head of operations policy,
declared the end of structural adjustments.
>
> "We have abandoned the prescriptive character of the old policy," Adams said
in a statement. At the same time, he said, the underpinnings of the Washington
Consensus "remain important themes of economic policy."
>
> The next year, the bank demanded that Niger privatize its irrigation systems,
according to a 2007 report by Eurodad, a Brussels-based coalition of 56
non-profit groups. The requirement "has seriously damaging effects on poor
farmers' access to a precious and scarce resource," said the report, based on an
analysis of the bank's databases. In all, the group found economic policy
conditions were attached to 71 percent of loans and grants.
>
> The World Bank in May pledged $1.2 billion for a Global Food Response Program
that's designed to speed money to the neediest countries without the usual red
tape. As of last month the Bank approved $364 million for 25 countries, and $541
million more is designated for 10 others.
>
> Trade Talks Stalled
>
> Current Bank President Robert Zoellick, a former U.S. trade representative,
has promised to double agriculture spending while touting free trade as a
solution to rising food prices. Zoellick, 55, declined to be interviewed.
>
> Poor countries remained skeptical of open markets during the latest round of
World Trade talks in Geneva, in July. They insisted that they be allowed to
raise tariffs to protect domestic agriculture, stalling the negotiations.
>
> El Salvador, meanwhile, has invested about $240 million in agriculture since
2004. It now gives farmers a $30 bag of the seed of their choice and a $30 sack
of fertilizer.
>
> "The World Bank had a very short-term vision; it couldn't have been more
wrong," said Mario Salaverria, El Salvador's agriculture minister, as he
inspected corn in Sonsonate province, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of San
Salvador.
>
> His country must regain self-sufficiency, he said. "We can stop using our cars
because of price increases, but we can?t stop eating."
>
> (Recipe for Famine: Part 3 of 7.)
>
> To contact the reporters on this story: Alison Fitzgerald in Washington at
Afitzgerald2@... ; Helen Murphy in Bogota at hmurphy1@....
>
> Last Updated: December 9, 2008 19:01 EST
>
>
>
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