Roll over northern rock: we can build a new movement on twopence a week

Among all the gloom and doom of the credit crisis, my friend Jen claims there is something to celebrate. Not all banks have gone to the wall: the Cooperative and other mutual or friendly societies are thriving up here in the north of England.

This weekend we went to see the last performance of Mikron’s Fair Trade. Reaping the Dividends, which tells the story of the Cooperative Movement from its beginnings in Toad Lane in Rochdale in 1844 when the first Co-op shop was opened. The show was written and produced before the current financial crisis really took hold – so it was interesting to hear that, during hard times in the 19th century, the reason for the success of the Cooperative, in comparison to other schemes, was their decision not to give credit. “Only deal with cash.” Members contributed twopence a week to get the Cooperative Wholesale Society off the ground, to provide affordable basic food and goods to poor families. And, of course, the movement was also built on that fundamental principle that, for some of us, still holds good today: that any surplus should be divided evenly between members, not hived off by managers.

After being away from Yorkshire for a long time, I’m proud to be back, and back to being a Co-op member. In fact, my mum claims that the first Co-op shop was opened in Meltham (in Yorkshire) - where I was born and bred – and not Rochdale (in Lancashire). We recall how, in the 1950s and 60s, Meltham Co-op ran its own farm, alongside a grocery store, a hardware store, a clothes store, a pharmacy and the village cinema. It built affordable housing. It offered interest-free loans and modest overdraft facilities to its members before payday. It also, importantly, acted as a savings bank, encouraging thrift and forward planning through the scheme to put away a small sum every week towards Christmas, family holidays - and funerals. Truly it provided ‘cradle to the grave’ security.

In contrast, today’s high street banks have made, and continue to make, their unique contribution to heightened insecurity. I’ve had personal experience of this over the past few months. (Mortgage, madame? Of course, but for not less than £25,000. Costing £2,000 in ‘administrative costs’. On condition that you employ a solicitor. Yes, we acknowledge that you are legally entitled to do your own conveyancing, but if you intend to do so you can’t have a NatWest mortgage. Oh and look, our statistics show that fewer people are taking out mortgages. This is clearly a client driven crisis!) And on the backs of these fleas are smaller fleas to bite us – viz the increase in modern day loan shark cold calling, with an insistence on speaking to the owner of the house: “we’d like to offer you debt advice” aka “let us get you deeper into debt.”


See Cristina’s blog on globalisation and cooperativism in Brazil

Fair Trade highlights the growth of the co-operative movement beyond Britain. There are more than 750 million co-operative members in over 100 countries today. One notable example: the 900 rural electricity co-operatives providing energy for 40 million people across the United States. Another: there is a Co-op for employees in the Emperor’s palace in Japan. Strangely enough, the day I picked up Mikron’s leaflet in Holmfirth, I was with my friend Mary, who comes from Warrington but for many years has been living in Mali. “Oh yes,” she tells me, “the French version of cooperativisme used to be very big in West Africa.” And apparently everyone in Mali knows about the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Across countries in the south, on a small scale, farmers are benefiting from Fair Trade agreements, workers’ cooperatives and credit unions - all of which initiatives are seen as providing more autonomy and better security to the poor than World Bank loans with its crippling conditions attached. Cooperativism is increasingly seen as an alternative world order . Also see an earlier post on women and 'the gift economy'.

I’ve picked up a related idea recently from south Wales: that of ‘time banking’. This is a mechanism promoting volunteerism in community development, which enables people to feel valued and to value each other for their contribution ‘outside paid work.’ The impact assessment report on this system, from the Wales Institute for Community Currencies, emphasises that “it is important to treat people as assets.” A concept western society largely seems to have forgotten.

The Mikron Theatre Company, itself a co-operative, provides a good example of operating on a human scale. Now 37 years old, supported by the Co-operative Membership and working out of the Mechanics Institute in Marsden, the company performs across the north of England in local venues – pubs, village halls, community theatres and even sometimes on their own barge – bringing culture, politics and solidarity to ordinary people.

Read more about Mikron at www.Mikron.org.uk

and the Wales Institute for Community Currencies at www.wicc.org


Note on the Tolpuddle Martyrs:
This was the group who, in the 1830s, set up the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, operating as a trade-specific benefit society. But as friendly societies had strong elements of what are now considered to be the role of trade unions, the organisers were jailed and subsequently sentenced to transportation to Australia...

Gender and Trade or Call your bluff

“Critics of the EU’s trade agreements are gambling with livelihoods in the developing world.”

This claim was made last week by Peter Mandelson (EU trade commissioner) and Louis Michel (EU development commissioner) in The Guardian with reference to the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) now under discussion in Brussels. Furthermore, the critics “undermine those in Africa and other ACP countries who are seeking to work constructively for economic reform and a new trade and development relationship with Europe.”

But who are these critics? Clearly not willing to be taken in by a little masculine rhetoric, many of them are representatives of regional and international women’s advocacy groups. They have brought out their own analyses on the likely impact of EPAs, which they believe could blight the future of yet another generation, pushing the dispossessed further to the periphery (Lebohang Pheko’s voice)

Research carried out for the Central American Women’s Network

on the recently launched EU-CA negotiations predicts that women’s working conditions in the ‘free-trade zones’ will get worse, women farmer small-holders will be harder hit by competition and in general “women are likely to be further marginalized, uninformed about their rights and less able to organize to defend them”. Women in Costa Rica are already struggling against the US imposed Central America Trade Agreements (CAFTA).

The International Gender and Trade Network have also published a paper discussing the policy linkage between aid and trade under the Doha Development Agenda. This puts trade at the center of growth promotion and poverty reduction strategies at the national, regional and multilateral level. “This political shift affects the way development policies and technical cooperation (including gender-related activities) are to be designed and implemented in the future and will not go without implications for funding provided for other sectors.”

The paper argues that Aid for Trade should go beyond the general policy declarations related to ‘gender-sensitivity’ and ‘sustainable development’. “It should be part of a specific global plan aimed at improving female employment, ensuring higher employment standards and more stable and sustainable income.”

At the World Social Forum in Nairobi at the beginning of the year, EPAs were top of the agenda, seen as a mechanism for compromising national and regional autonomy (and more: an end to sovereignty in Africa) The organisers of the discussion theme on ‘women farmers cultivating local markets and defending food sovereignty’ talked to me about the importance of the united south-south struggle for fair trade. “Asian women are looking to the African social movements to win over EPAs this year - because we know that Europe will soon be coming after South Asia.”

Sure enough, bilateral EU-India free-trade negotiations are now underway. And the Brussels-based organisation Women in Development Europe have a new report out looking at the implications of EU-India trade for social development and gender equality . The paper questions the main interests behind these free trade agreements on both sides - looking at who is actually going to benefit. It points out that, while Indian economic growth rates now rank second in the world behind China, UNDP ranked India's human development at 126 (out of 177) and gender-related development at 96. One quarter of the population of India lives below the poverty line and female foeticide is systematic.

Since bilateral trade negotiations are held in great secrecy, the paper aims “to provide civil society actors in the EU and India with background information and to build their capacity to engage critically in policy-making on trade and development and in trans-regional networking.” Sounds reasonable in a global democracy?

Speaking out

While I’m on the subject, here’s a plug for another international publication: Unpacking globalisation: markets, gender, work. Edited by Linda E. Lucas this reprints papers from the Women’s Worlds Congress (Kampala, 2002) providing a range of case studies on and by women workers from Mexico through Tanzania to India to exemplify what Saskia Sassen calls the feminisation of survival.

If anyone has real authority to speak about the impact of the current trade system on livelihoods in the south, it has to be the women who live there. And there is plenty of research from women north and south to back them up. In fact, you could say that women have a vested interest in becoming experts on globalisation since they bear the brunt of its effects. And yet it’s still so difficult to be taken seriously.

In December last year Lebohang Pheko took part in a round table on EPAs organised by the European Commission in Brussels where she was due to present a paper giving the gender perspective. What was the response of the EU? She told me:

‘Oh, they said, “let’s stay with the real discussion and look at the gender aspect at the end.” It’s the usual response. But we need to be at the centre of discussions. It’s a question of social inclusion - otherwise, women, men, children, all those who are marginalized, are just taken out of the game. There’s got to be a humanity to these trade agreements.’

As I’ve written before,

it’s easy for western politicians to gamble when someone else is paying for their habit. But if this is a game of poker, the cards are stacked in Europe’s favour. Not a gamble at all then, just a con trick.

Read more

Justice, not globalisation: Lebohang Pheko’s voice

A-Genda. Gender and Trade in Central America. October 2007


The Doha Development Agenda and Aid for Trade: Finding The Policy Link


Economic growth without social justice: EU–India trade negotiations andtheir implications for social development and gender justice

Christian Aid’s campaign for trade justice

Unpacking globalisation: markets, gender, work

The People v The World Bank

Star Trek fans will remember that episode back in 1993 where Q puts Captain Jean-Luc Picard on trial for crimes committed by the human race. Unless the captain can convince the court of humankind’s basic goodness, the entire race – past, present and future - will be wiped out. With his Shakespearean eloquence, of course, the actor Patrick Stewart pleads his defence successfully.

It’s only a story, but the dramatic conceit of this scenario is tremendously powerful. That is, if one honest citizen is prepared to stand up and speak from the heart, he or she can save humanity.

Multiply that by thousands and perhaps the concept is not too far-fetched. What we’ve seen increasingly since the 1960s, especially in the last decade, is the incidence of the people’s tribunal, which, conversely, puts the state or international institutions on trial for crimes against humanity - and where honest citizens are invited to bear witness for the prosecution, again emphasizing the power of personal testimony.

Not surprisingly, argues the Center for Women’s Global Leadership feminist organizers were among the first to see the potential of popular tribunals as a way to claim the “public” space of a tribunal to expose previously “private” violations. The first international tribunal on Crimes against Women was held in Brussels in March 1976. A more recent landmark in 2000 was the international women’s War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s military sexual slavery.


The 2004 Brussels Tribunal against the war on Iraq

One of the people’s favourite criminals in the dock is the World Bank - along with the neo-liberal capitalist ‘democracy’ it represents. In January 2006 during the polycentric World Social Forum, a session of the World Court of Women sat to hear women bear witness on ‘wars of globalisation, wars against women’.

In early 2007 the film Bamako was shown widely in the US and Europe and promoted by Christian Aid as part of its trade justice campaign. In the film, a trial takes place in a typical African courtyard, where the World Bank and IMF are found guilty of crimes against humanity. Some Western film critics suggested the film lacked concrete proposals for change, but it had enormous impact in Africa, being the first time that this testimony had been raised in public by ordinary Africans for a worldwide audience.



In September 2007 a four-day tribunal was held in India,
where a large number of civil society organisations gathered , yes, as in Africa, accusing the World Bank of influencing national policies to the detriment of the poor. The Bank promised to make a deposition but no-one showed up.

Next up in the middle of October is the polycentric International Women’s Tribunal on Poverty, which will be held in Peru, India, Egypt and at the UN in New York. Given that 70% of the world’s poor are women, these tribunals aim to influence governments by collecting testimony to present to officials on the worsening conditions of women.

Can honest citizens really save humanity? Well, as Captain Picard would say, let’s make it so!



Stop Press: WORLD vs BANK

Also check out this Public Hearing on the World Bank to be held on 15th October in The Hague, organised by The World Bank Campaign Europe in cooperation with the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal. It will be streamed live on http://www.worldbankcampaigneurope.org/ just five days before the World Bank's 2007 annual meetings in Washington DC.

Witnesses from Peru, Nigeria, Malawi, Mali, Nicaragua and Kazakhstan will bring forward cases relating to the effects of the World Bank's push for privatisation and liberalisation of basic services as well as its involvement in fossil fuel projects in developing countries.



human rights

Incompatible objectives: Gender and the World Bank

The film Bamako puts international finance institutions on trial for crimes against humanity. Set in a family courtyard in Mali, it provides a forum for African voices to be heard. They bear testimony against the World Bank’s simplistic understanding of the causes of poverty – and the disastrous effects of its programmes on African society.

But is the World Bank truly evil or merely incompetent?

Let’s explore this through the bank’s new action plan entitled ‘gender equality as smart economics’ which was presented at the Commission for the Status of Women (CSW) at the beginning of March.

Prior to this, as part of the same initiative, the German Ministry for Development Co-operation hosted a World Bank seminar on women’s economic empowerment in Berlin (22nd-23rd February) at the same time as Bamako was being premiered in London. The event, one of Germany’s
programme of meetings in the run-up to the G8 summit, profiled female politicians, public servants and private entrepreneurs from north and south.

On the surface this looks like a promising development. However, for over two decades, feminist economists like Diane Elson have criticised the bank’s approach to economic development, in particular the specific adverse impacts on women. ‘Capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy are interlinked. Markets are not abstract cash nexuses - they are inevitably social institutions in which buying and selling is structured assymetrically to the advantage of some participants rather than others.’ (Male bias in the development process, 1990)

'An estimated 70% of the one billion people living in extreme poverty are women’ Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany’s Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development)

And women’s organisations are not impressed with the new plan. Christa Wichterich of WIDE (Network Women in Development Europe)
suggests that the WB plan is not concerned with gender equality at all but with continuing to exploit female human resources to avoid market failure and distortion of competition. ‘What impresses most about the action plan is the one-dimensional thinking which places markets at the centre and not human beings - or the economic rights and potentials of women.’ Things, she says, haven’t changed in the last thirty years.


A historical perspective

To go back to basics, the WB is the largest and most powerful agency in the UN family, disposing of a programme of $20 billion a year. G8 countries are the largest contributors and size of contribution is related to voting power on the board. The bank gives loans not assistance, and the shareholders naturally expect to get their money back.

In comparison, other UN agencies such as UNDP have an annual budget of $4 billion or less and are increasingly chasing corporations for ‘public-private partnerships’ to support their work.

The World Bank’s gender action plan has a budget of US$25 million. To the ordinary woman on the street in Bamako, or even Birmingham, it may sound initially like a generous amount. But you don’t need to be a development specialist to see that on a global scale – over four years – this barely amounts to pocket money

Budgets: World Bank $20 billion; United Nations Development Programme $4.4. billion; UNICEF $2 billion; UNESCO $600 million; UNIFEM $50 million

The bank is not in fact a development agency but - because it ties the purse strings - it has a stranglehold on development policy.

From the 1980s, in an attempt to stimulate economic growth and enable developing countries to repay outstanding debts from the 60s, the WB introduced the so-called ‘hard loans’. These loans were dependent on countries in the south adopting structural adjustment programmes (SAPs): notably cutting public expenditure in education and health and privatisation of essential services. These particularly impact on women because of their primary responsibility for the entire household.

‘The concept of structural adjustment is based on women’s capacity to cope, to continue in increasingly adverse conditions and to deny their own needs and interests for the survival of their families and communities. In other words, structural adjustment relies on women providing those service previously provided by the State.’ (NAWO, Women’s strategies to deal with SAPs, 1990)

Opening up foreign investment opportunities and establishing free trade zones to attract external companies provided employment for women in the form of low-paid, insecure jobs with poor working conditions and without labour rights. (Angela Hale, Trade myths and gender reality, 1994)

In particular the slashing of education budgets impacted on succeeding generations of women, since girls’ schooling always takes second place in times of hardship. As Benedicta Egbo points out, women’s economic activity is closely linked with literacy (and numeracy) since, as well as increasing confidence, this facilitates access to information, financial credit, training and opportunities for further support.

In other words, it can be argued that the current lack of economic empowerment for so many women in the south is a direct result of previous World Bank programmes.

Nevertheless, SAPs had the opposite effect to that intended: countries were still not able to repay debts (by now incrementally higher). Therefore, at the World Summit on Social Development at Copenhagen in 1995, the World Bank economists pushed for a new approach – ‘soft loans’ related to multi-year national development plans – and so the current era of poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) began.

Each PRSP is developed ‘in agreement’ between government and donors, who ‘align’ themselves and ‘harmonise’ with each other behind the national plan, following the Monterrey conference in 2002 (OECD) ). In fact, PRSPs tend to be donor-driven - even though individual donor representatives on the ground in different countries around the world have privately expressed serious reservations about the one-size-fits-all solution.

In order to qualify for PRSP related loans or any other grants and financing, the IMF must approve a country’s economic programme – and may also apply ‘conditionalities’ (unsurprisingly, more cutting of public expenditure…). As a result of the current system, 40% of the national budget of African countries like Mali is still being used to repay old debts - compared with 6% for social services.

As the authors demonstrate in the recent Gender Action report on the IFIs, this ‘new’ model not only continues in the same direction as the ‘old’ one but imposes even more conditions than before.

Their report, based on analysis of PRSPs in eleven countries, identifies the following conditions as having the greatest impact on women’s livelihoods:

Privatisation
Cuts in government spending
Trade and labour reforms
Financial sector reforms

In summary:
‘Standard World Bank and IMF policy-based loans that require public health expenditure cutbacks increase women’s home care for sick family members and reduce their time available for paid work; public sector and enterprise restructuring eliminates many jobs and benefits—women are often the first to lose jobs and last to be rehired because they are assumed to be secondary breadwinners; developing country tariff reductions threaten the livelihood of manufacturing and agricultural workers, the majority of whom are women in the poorest countries; financial sector reforms decrease women’s access to financial services while increasing their risk of financial crisis.’


Some concrete examples

One of the aspects under discussion by the WB and its partners in Berlin was the need to facilitate women’s access to infrastructure (transport) water and electricity.

Clearly no-one is going to argue with access to basic services for either women or men. The provision of piped water and electric power immeasurably lightens the load of women’s daily chores, freeing up their time and energy for other activities. So why isn’t that already a reality?

Could it have something to do with the fact that the privatisation of water, electricity, transport, is a normal requirement in the poverty reduction strategies papers? Privatisation benefits the north rather than the south since it is multinational companies that pick up the contracts, the most infamous being the British-German-Tanzanian company City Water that was eventually kicked out of Tanzania. But there are many more…

In the meantime, the poorest citizens of the south, most of them women, find it difficult to pay for basic services even when they are available. This is one of the key issues around which the social movements rallied at the World Social Forum in Nairobi. They see that their own governments, in collaboration with multinationals, continue to deprive them of a basic human right.

In the film one woman witness claims: ‘ A country which does not control its own basic services can barely be said to be a sovereign state.’

Enterprise

Another aspect on the WB’s gender agenda is supporting women’s economic activity through finance and private sector development, in particular increasing women’s agricultural productivity and their contribution to rural development.

But fluctuating prices on the world market have an adverse effect on the prices women can get for their own produce and what they can afford to buy. Women and men both work in the cotton industry in Mali, which has been developed as the foremost in West Africa. Cotton farmers and their families are currently living in penury because cotton prices have been pushed right down by US subsidies to their own farmers - subsidies which amount to $4 billion a year. Meanwhile, China is flooding African countries with cheap cotton products. And, while the WB is still promoting the micro-credit model for women, banking sector reforms have decreased access to loans especially for small-scale women farmers in rural areas.

In Mali, Kané Nana Sanou, president of the coalition for women’s human rights organisations (Groupe Pivot Droit et Citoyenneté des Femmes) has expressed concern to me about the number of women victims of a vicious cycle of debt due to similar schemes, with many having recourse to loan sharks to get more money to repay original loans: an unfortunately neat microcosm of the WB scenario at macro level.

And in the field, I have spoken to women’s associations who have gone through the process of constitutionalisation - in order to become eligible for funding - only to find that there is no financial support available.

The women’s collective at Bandiagara told me they had spent several seasons growing and selling green beans together so they could afford the legal expenses involved in the drawing up of the constitution (in a language they don’t read well). Now they are ready to start up in business, I asked them why they don’t arrange a bank loan. Their answer was simply ‘we are reluctant to start off already in debt.’ For women and families who do not have a reliable regular income, this seems to be a responsible viewpoint.

Even the WB’s own research has indicated that the poorest of the poor prefer to rely on informal credit and social capital rather than formal loans. There’s no lack of enterprise among women, it’s real money that’s missing! Why not give each association $200 and let them show what they are capable of?

Market women in Ghana are grateful for World Bank loans, despite the fact they are paying an unbelievable 36% interest rate.

Such examples are an attempt to engage with the WB on its own terms. But one of the worst impacts as described by Aminata Traoré in Bamako (there are real Malians giving testimony) is the effect of the WB top-down approach on the self-image of Africans. ‘The WB holds up a mirror showing us as poverty-stricken, conflict-ridden, lacking in capacity and needing direction.’

In contrast, the reality is that, like other countries in Africa, Mali has untold wealth – her traditional social capital now being eroded; her music; her gold mines (controlled by Anglo Gold); her beautiful women of all ages who always find some work to get by, her eloquence whatever language is used, her traditional skills such as hand-dyeing of cotton cloth with the richest colours and patterns under the sun… the film reflects these better than I can.

Incompatible objectives

As regards the effectiveness of gender equality policies, independent evaluations of the very same institutions involved in the Berlin conference (Norad, OECD, DFID, SIDA, the EC and the World Bank itself) raise serious questions. A survey of these evaluations emphasises one of the main causes for lack of progress: ‘insufficient resources have been provided to implement strategies at operational (field) level’.

But the problem is clearly more fundamental than that. The World Bank drives the development agenda and the promotion of gender equality is in direct contradiction to the bank’s approach.

The bank in fact works in opposition to other UN agencies. In South Africa UNDP and UNIFEM concerns have led them to develop a checklist for carrying out detailed gender analysis of PRSPs. In addition, UNDP’s latest human development report highlights the fact that inequality in general is increasing within and between countries because of IFI conditions. And UNRISD is now developing research on the additional impact on policy and social development of the new relationships between governments and trans-national companies.

As well as now driving forward MDG3 ‘gender equality’, the WB has also been given the lead for MDG2 ‘universal primary education’ which is of utmost importance for the future generation of women’s empowerment. My research on this in 2005 highlighted similar contradictions.

For example in the case of Burkina Faso the WB economists calculated that if all children were in school, there wouldn’t be enough money to pay the teaching force required. The solution was to reduce teachers’ salaries, bring in temporary staff (who could be laid off at short notice) and recruit volunteers. This didn’t go down well with the teaching union and education plans were put on hold until this could be resolved.

This scenario was explained to me by a couple of very charming and completely straight-faced World Bank economists as an example of ‘incompatible objectives.’ I understand this to mean setting an international target for developing countries while at the same time requiring them to operate in a way which makes it impossible to actually achieve the target. I think that about sums up their approach.

When one woman testifying in Bamako claims she can read a balance sheet, the WB’s defence counsel calls her an ‘upstart’. Women across the world are experienced in managing the household budget and, whether using a computer or counting out cups of rice, we all know when things don’t add up

In summary, the WB is clearly guilty. But the witnesses in Bamako plead only for the bank to respect its original mandate, which should be to support national development ‘in a spirit of humanity’. Instead of which it has simply become the worst kind of debt collector on behalf of the G8 - whose hypocrisy and cynicism in promoting women’s economic empowerment within the current system cannot adequately be described.

The solution, according to feminist economists and activists in both south and north is for the WB and other donors to put an end to policy-based lending and provide space for governments to address gender equality and social justice in more appropriate, locally-driven ways.

So, World Bank, $25 million for gender equality is not smart economics – when no-one seems to be benefiting from the rest of the $20 billion budget except multinational companies, corrupt officials and, of course, G8 countries.

Readers who wish to raise their own voice against World Bank iniquity and incompetence can sign the online petition organised by Christian Aid, to put pressure on the UK government’s position in the upcoming WB and IMF spring meetings.

Patricia Daniel
March 2007