Memorandum submitted by the Forum for
African Alternatives, Senegal
THE MYTHS AND DANGERS OF PRSPs
INTRODUCTION
1. The Forum for African Alternatives is
a Dakar-based research association, whose mission is to contribute
to an in-depth reflection on Africa's development challenges in
order to promote alternative development policies. It is a network
of researchers and social activists involved in the Global Justice
Movement.
2. Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs),
required by the IMF and the World Bank for access to debt relief
and concessional assistance, are loaded with a number of myths
that should be debunked.
THE MYTH
OF "NATIONAL
OWNERSHIP"
3. According to these two institutions,
PRSPs are country-driven and reflect the priorities of each country
in its fight against poverty. They insist that PRSPs are drafted
through a large participatory process involving the government,
civil society organisations (CSOs) and the private sector. But
"national ownership" is more theoretical than real.
In many cases, CSOs have been frustrated by the process and have
found they had been used more as an alibi, or guinea pigs, than
considered as genuine partners. Democratically elected parliaments
have been bypassed. And the fact is that African governments put
in PRSPs what the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWI) would like
to see, rather than what the poor really want. The reason: PRSPs
have to be consistent with the BWIs' preferred policies in order
to get their endorsement.
THE MYTH
OF "PRO-POOR"
POLICIES
4. There is a big gap between policies that
are in the interest of the poor and those that the BWIs consider
as sound. The privatisation of public and essential services,
like water, health and education, is at the core of the BWIs'
policies and has contributed to spreading poverty. A case in point
is Senegal where, because of water privatisation, poor groups
in urban areas pay three to four times more than rich groups.
The liberalisation of the country's groundnut sector, imposed
by the BWIs, cost more than 400 jobs following the dissolution
of transport company SONAGRAINES, and led millions of peasants
and their families to the brink of famine. The Government had
to draw up an Emergency Relief Plan to avoid a national catastrophe.
Price deregulation and the elimination of subsidies have squeezed
the purchasing power of average citizens, leading more than 64
per cent of people surveyed in the Senegalese PRSP to say that
their situation has deteriorated over the last five years, a period
of supposedly high growth rates.
THE MYTH
OF "POVERTY
REDUCTION"
5. How, under these circumstances, can the
IMF and the World Bank claim that PRSPs aim at reducing poverty?
The forced liberalisation of the groundnut sector in Senegal led
to a sharp fall in agricultural production in 2002. This, in turn,
resulted in the decline of economic growth from 5.6 per cent in
2001 to an estimated 2.4 per cent in 2002. This translated into
an income loss of roughly $200 million for a country where two
out of three citizens live under the poverty line.
6. In many other countries, local industries
have been destroyed by cheap imports in the name of free trade
imposed by the BWIs. No wonder in sub-Saharan Africa about 500
million people live on less than $2 a day. This number is projected
to rise to more than 600 million in 2015, despite all the fuss
about the Millennium Development Goals. So long as PRSPs, like
the now discredited Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP), are
within the framework of the neoliberal model, they will generate
more poverty than they reduce.
7. After spreading poverty at an unprecedented
scale in Africa, the IMF and the World Bank are trying to mislead
world public opinion, especially in the North, into believing
that they are really committed to poverty reduction. Their real
mission is to promote the interests of global capitalism by opening
Africa's economies to multinational corporations and financial
speculators and by transforming them into markets for Northern
countries' products.
8. In conclusion, what the BWIs are trying
to achieve with the PRSPs is to:
— create the illusion of poverty reduction
while continuing the same failed policies;
— promote a superficial national consensus
on short-term poverty reduction programmes at the expense of a
serious reflection on long-term development policies;
— drive a wedge between so-called "reasonable"
and "radical" civil society organisations; and
— shift the blame to HIPC governments
and citizens for the inevitable failure of the PRSPs.
October 2003
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