Thoughts from London

Hark, Harrold the angel sings
It was decidedly uncomfortable for Peter Harrold last week. The JVP that looks at the World Bank with the same disinterest as an enraged bull at a red flag, wanted the Country Director sent packing.

Half the country would have gladly rushed into his air-conditioned office and dragged him away to the airport, having suffered for years the slings and arrows of World Bank economic policies - from slashed subsidies to the selling off of public assets.

As though popular anger at Harrold's purported remark to this newspaper would still not penetrate the rhinoceros-like hides of World Bank officialdom, Tourism Minister Anura Bandaranaike added his voice, not to mention his considerable weight, to the verbal onslaught.

Not to be outdone, Deputy Foreign Minister Wisva Warnapala fired a diplomatic broadside. All this appears to have forced Peter Harrold to take to the barricades.

Hardly had the heavy artillery ceased when the World Bank's man in town not only denied he ever used the words "a kind of unofficial state" but went further to explain the role of one of Washington's terrible twins and how it operates in Sri Lanka.

He even said that a "careful review of the recording of the interview", would establish what he actually said. What puzzled me was this emphasis on "careful review". Why careful? Is it suggested that just listening to the recording in the usual way would not reveal what he actually said? Why is great concentration necessary?

Even more puzzling is the fact that the paragraph is shown as a direct quote in the news story. Those not privy to the recording (whose recording is it anyway), cannot review it- carefully or even cursorily.

So I am somewhat reluctant to quote Peter Harrold's purported words from other interviews lest he refers me to some recordings. Still, at the risk of being contradicted some 16 months after his wise words appeared in a State-run newspaper, I return to that interview because it is too rich not to be aired every now and then. Such delightful economics should not be allowed to go unsung and unhonoured.

In the opening paragraphs of that interview - and repeated at the butt-end which shows the importance of those words - the country director says the whole of Sri Lanka should be linked through roads and technology. In the technology area e-connectivity or access to modern technology is a key issue. Then came the Socratic wisdom: "If a farmer can get the prices of goods at different towns through a village internet kiosk and could decide himself where to sell his goods, that's the kind of development we anticipate to see in Sri Lanka."

Who else but the great thinkers of the World Bank and the IMF would have given birth to such screaming naiveté. With the likes of Peter Harrold planning and plotting the economic future of our country, why, we will achieve the UN's Millennium Development Goals long before the 2015 deadline and probably end up as an economic superpower.

Just picture the scene in the mind's eye. Dingiri Appu treks four miles to the village internet café, sorry kiosk, carrying his two gunny bags of wambottu (egg plant or aubergine to you, Mr Harrold). There, at Podi Rala's all-purpose boutique, Dingiri Appu will tell Podi Rala's son (who'd rather play with the computer now than go to school thanks to World Bank ingenuity) to surf the vegetable markets.

Okay so far. Ah, says Rala's son. Wambottu is selling one rupee a kilo more at Kilinochchi than at Kandy. So off goes an ecstatic Appu in a state of utter kulappu even forgetting his serappu to catch a bus to Kilinochchi. But in this era of privatised bus transport (under the advice of the World Bank, I suppose) discarded coaches from Japan that intermittently ply the roads carry 25 passengers instead of the 15 they are designed to take.

By the time Appu reaches the check point to cross over to the unofficial state, oops sorry for that, the LTTE-controlled area, he is in better shape than his wambottu.

Once he has been forced to pay the LTTE taxes, simple arithmetic will tell him that he would have been better off selling his produce at Podi Rala’s boutique to begin with. Meanwhile his crushed wambottu is hardly likely to end up in dear old Prabha's sambar.

One wonders whether Harrold and his World Bank wunderkinder in the Colombo office have ever stepped into the rural farming areas where transport, electricity and telephone services are rare, if not unavailable.

It is in these rural hamlets, miles away from the next village, where communications are sadly lacking that Harrold and his minions want to run sophisticated electronic systems that could access markets with non-existent daily prices posted on the internet.

Is Harrold deadly serious or does he still read fairy tales in bed? Now that we are into this Silicon Kelani Valley why not go the whole hog. Why not give every peasant farmer a laptop (preferably American but even Japanese would do) so that instead of walking the walk to the kiosk, he could surf the markets in his mud hut with leaking thatched roof.

Just imagine Dingiri Appu. He wakes up at the crack of dawn and, instead of stuffing up the crack and going back to sleep like the great wise men from the WB (World Bank not Waste Bin) and the IMF, he opens his laptop and looks for the best price for his pathola. Meanwhile his wife Menike makes him a cup of tea-no sugar, no milk. The price of sugar is too prohibitive, thanks to Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPS) fathered on us. No milk because he does not have a refrigerator. And unlike in days gone-by he cannot rear any cattle. When he asked some important officials who came to his hamlet from Colombo for money to buy cattle so his children could have milk, he was told that most of the animals have joined some institution in Washington.

Appu asked whether he could go to Washington, wherever that is, and bring a few cows home. The important official told him that the cows in Washington are not for milking because their job is to milk the country to which they are posted. That is done in different ways. First the SAPs and now the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Milking by any other name is still not the milk of human kindness that Harrold and his colleagues blithely talk about.

"If you accept the basic rationale as to why the World Bank is around- to alleviate poverty, …" he said in the interview. Whose poverty, pray? The western commercial banks? The multinational corporations that cherry-pick public assets for privatisation. It surely cannot be the numerous countries that adopted World Bank/IMF policies and found themselves several fold poorer than before.

The next interviewer should ask Harrold about Ghana where he served previously. Ghana once hailed by the World Bank as a "model" is today what Tony Blair would call a scar on the conscience of the world. Ghana was once self-sufficient in rice. But WB/IMF policies led to slashed subsidies and open markets.

Result - Ghanaians are now eating American rice because American rice farmers are heavily subsidised, the very policy the WB stopped in Ghana. There is much more that can be said about the failed policies of the WB-from Latin America to Africa and Asia.

But let Harrold sing his angelic lyrics on poverty alleviation. However I won't put him in a developing country choir. He is totally out of tune.

Back to Columns