They demand changes, inside and outside the IMF and the WB

Washington and New York. Yesterday, hundreds of protesters closed the street in front of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) with slogans demanding the cancellation of the debt of developing countries and an end to fuel financing. fossils, while inside the elegant glass buildings, official delegates participating in the annual meetings of these multilateral institutions lamented the failures to meet development goals and what implications an electoral victory for Donald Trump will have.

Activists, from as far away as the Philippines, and as close as, including climate change refugees, to the Washington region, described what they called the devastating impacts of financing World Bank fossil fuel projects, the deaths that have result of structural adjustment policies of the IMF and environmental damage from agroindustries, among other things. Many of the protesters also protested the United States’ failure to stop the genocide in Gaza.

After an hour of speeches and music, the protesters took to Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of the IMF and World Bank headquarters, where the official delegates were meeting; From there they marched a few blocks to the White House, where they focused attention on the United States as the largest contributor to these institutions and, therefore, the one who controls a large part of their policies. Some official delegates walking to their sessions stopped to take photos with their phones or hurried at the sight of the protesters and their blankets.

Inside the headquarters of the IMF and the World Bank, the final plenary sessions began with a frank assessment that the world is not in good shape. Families are suffering and looking ahead the world faces a trajectory of low growth and high debtdeclared Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the IMF. He added: We know that globalization has not benefited everyone, and we must address the needs of those who have not prospered.

But for the IMF and the World Bank, the solution to these problems is to prepare developing countries to be better hosts of private capital. The United Nations estimates that we need 4 trillion dollars each year to meet sustainable development goals, but these resources do not exist between development banks and governments. We need the private sectordeclared the president of the World Bank, Ajay Banga.

For those inside the official meetings, the darkest shadow over this annual meeting was uncertainty about what will happen to these institutions if Trump wins the presidency of the United States. The Republican candidate has promised to push for new tariffs and a US withdrawal from multilateral institutions. The government plan for a Trump regime prepared by some of the country’s main conservative organizations, coordinated by the influential Heritage Foundation, includes proposals for the withdrawal of the United States from both the IMF and the World Bank. Trump has said he is not committed to the proposals drawn up by these centers, but they remain the most detailed blueprint of potential policies of a new Trump regime, and his own vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, authored the document’s foreword.

In their public statements, World Bank and IMF officials have avoided talking about the US election, but in the hallways and in private informal meetings over the past week, it is one of the main topics. Delegates here speculate on possible members of a Trump cabinet, and ask their American colleagues how it is possible that the magnate is still a candidate with a chance to win.

Whether Trump wins or not, it is clear here that there is a retreat, both in the United States and in Europe, from the era in which free trade was considered the vital engine of economies. We must ensure that trade remains an engine of global growth, especially for developing countries. They have so much more to lose if we fracture the global economyGeorgieva warned in comments Thursday.

Faced with this problem, IMF and Bank officials highlighted the commitments to free trade areas in Latin America and other parts of the world, and signals from Spain and other countries about new financing for specific programs and some progress in the reprogramming of debt payments as examples of the functioning and commitment of initiatives related to globalization. But the programs and initiatives announced here this week fall far short of addressing the main problems facing the world at this juncture.

The global community is running out of time and falling further behind in funding shared climate and development goals.write the authors of a new report commissioned by Brazil in its capacity as president of the Group of 20, which was prepared by the Center for Global Development Policy at Boston University. They point out that the UN has warned that 85 percent of the sustainable development goals agreed upon by the members of that world organization almost a decade ago are not being met, or are stagnant or even going backwards. Meeting even some of the most modest of these goals requires multilateral development banks to increase their lending by a factor of 3 – something that many delegates here believe is impossible at this juncture.

Officials from Brazil, Barbados, South Africa, among other countries in the global south, have been very active this week, participating in various forums, demanding urgent reforms. At the same time, the threat that several countries are contemplating creating other institutions, such as the BRICS, which just held a summit in Russia this week, was also a topic of conversation and concern. But, at least in public, government representatives from Mexico and some other Latin American countries, apart from Brazil and Barbados, remained absent from the debate over how to address the world’s development needs.