Wednesday, January 14, 2004

World Bank.. Posted here Wednesday, January 14, 2004 at 2:21:18 PM     Documentation from fiction.. From the God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy "Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans. Most of the fish had died. The ones that survived suffered from fin-rot and had broken out in boils." The Bank would loan money so that it would go, through local bureucracies, to the richest farmers who would buy fertilizer and buy out the poorer. It could be shown that income went up on average by a factor of three, but of course the average is skewed by the new income of the richest,  and the fact that food prices had gone up by more than a factor of three (mostly because local crops were replaced by export crops for dollars) did not get into the reports. ********