Commentary: A new president of the world’s bank or the World Bank?
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| Published on Saturday, June 2, 2007 |
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By Sir Ronald Sanders
US President George W Bush has nominated Robert Zoellick to replace Paul Wolfowitz as the President of the World Bank. His endorsement by the Board of the Bank is likely to be effortless.
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Sir Ronald Sanders is a business
executive and former Caribbean
diplomat who publishes widely
on small states in the global
community. Reponses to:
ronaldsanders29@hotmail.com |
Since the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the convention has developed that the managing director of the Fund would come from Europe and the head of the Bank would be a nominee of the US President.
This accounted for why Paul Wolfowitz was nominated and accepted even though many European governments and many others around the world felt that he was a bad choice, not least because he had a reputation as being part of the neo-conservative cabal around President Bush and also for being a hawk in promoting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and for the unilateralist style that the administration developed in international relations.
Countries and regions all over the world will now be wondering what Mr Zoellick’s appointment means for them. He has been a faithful servant of the US government in various capacities, more recently as a Deputy Secretary under Condoleeza Rice in the State Department and before that as the US Trade Representative.
In these last two roles, Mr Zoellick became well known to government representative in many parts of the world including the Caribbean. During his stint as US Trade Representative, he was intimately involved in the negotiations at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and he was active in discussions across the regions.
He will, therefore, have some knowledge of the difficulties and problems that confront these countries.
I last encountered him in at a WTO ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico when desperate efforts were being made to get the Doha round of trade negotiations back on track after years of failure. He was active then in trying to build bridges across huge divides, and in that connection, he energetically arranged meetings with every region.
The talks failed in the end largely because he, as the US Representative, and Pascal Lamy, then the Trade Commissioner for the European Union, could not get their masters to agree policies on reducing – if not eliminating – their subsidies to agriculture.
Agricultural subsidies are a serious bone of contention between Europe and the US since governments in the US and some European nations, such as France, place considerable importance on the votes and other support of the farming community.
And, of course, while these two giants contend over access to the world’s markets for their subsidised agricultural projects, agricultural exports from developing countries suffer, particularly from Africa in the case of cotton.
I recall Mr Zoellick at one point of the Cancun meeting calling for countries “not to give up the good for the perfect” in terms of the offer that the US and the EU had devised to put to the conference on cotton. The problem was that few saw the offer as good. Indeed, I described it at the time as “derisory”.
Nonetheless, if the World Bank is to have as its head a former US government official, Mr Zoellick is a good candidate. And, in this case, the world cannot reject the good for the perfect.
He will have many challenges ahead. The first will be to pull the Bank together after the public and bitter bruising it has just gone through over Mr Wolfowitz. He is likely to achieve this fairly easily, because he is instinctively a bridge builder as was evident in the WTO negotiations. And, in this new role, while he will have to carry the members of the Executive Board of the Bank on any initiatives that he might develop, that task might be easier than trying to convince politicians to change policies that suited their supporters.
There will be no shortage of people in the Bank itself, in Washington, and from all over the world who will be trying to persuade Mr Zoellick to adopt one policy or another. What will be essential for small countries like the Caribbean is that they should be part of the many who will try to see him early to get their ideas on his agenda for consideration.
It is not clear how soon Mr Zoellick’s appointment will be ratified by the Board, but if he is in place by mid-June, when Caribbean heads of government and their foreign ministers are scheduled to be in Washington, it would be enormously useful if their schedules allowed a meeting.
In any event, many Caribbean ministers have met and know Mr Zoellick, especially from his term of office as the US Trade Representative. They ought to seek a meeting with him soon.
Reform of the World Bank in the interest of the global community is desperately needed. The glaring example of this is the fact that Bank’s head must come from the US and be nominated by the US President. The time has long since come when the head of the World Bank should be sought from around the entire globe and the very best person appointed.
In the case of the Caribbean, there should be a review of the Bank’s lending policies to eliminate the disqualification of small and vulnerable states from soft borrowing because of their per capita income. The criterion is a false measure of development and a poor calculation of needs. More than anything else it has forced small countries into commercial borrowing that has burdened their economies.
Also, in today’s world where small countries are pushed into huge investment to beef up port security as part of the war on terror, and where trade liberalisation causes dislocation in their economies, the World Bank should add these to the areas of priority for which they lend, and such lending should be on affordable terms.
Caribbean countries and all other small states have to hope that Mr Zoellick will see himself as the head of the World’s Bank and not just the World Bank.
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