Shorter IMF meetings victory for protesters?

By Mark Egan

WASHINGTON (Reuters): Anti-globalization protesters may have won a hollow victory by forcing a shorter IMF annual meeting, leaving precious little time to work on problems facing the world's poorest people.

Protesters have criticized the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as undemocratic bodies that formulate ill-suited austerity plans for poor nations behind closed doors. But the lenders counter that they reduce poverty by promoting stronger economic growth and more free trade.

Now, officials at the lenders maintain that the very presence of the protesters later this month will curtail the work of the meetings -- eroding time that could have been spent working on the economic woes of the world's poorest nations.

Scott Scheffer, of the Washington office of the protest group the International Action Center, hailed the truncated meetings as a success.

"(The decision) was received as a victory because it shows the IMF and the World Bank are on the defensive politically," he said, adding it proves his movement is "enduring."

"We look upon it as a victory," agreed protester David Levy of the Washington-based Mobilization for Global Justice, adding that the institutions were making their meetings, "even more inaccessible and undemocratic."

One executive director on the IMF's board, who represents some of the world's poorest nations, said he respects the "idealism" of the protesters, but that they have no right to speak for elected officials of the IMF's 183-member nations.

"The demonstrations will hamper the number of countries that can have consultations with the IMF. Who will be hurt most is the poor because their elected officials will not be able to speak," said the IMF decision-maker, who asked not to be identified.

"The protests will drown out the voices of the poor."

Indeed, the fund has advised all countries to keep delegations for the upcoming meeting to a bare minimum -- a tacit admission that business will be limited by the protests.

IMF spokesman Bill Murray defended the meetings as the largest economic forum of the year for developing nations to have their opinions heard on the international stage.

"This is the only event on the calendar each year where the economic leaders of developing countries can come and meet the people they need to meet with," Murray said.

In normal times, the IMF and World Bank's annual meetings are a quiet event, a two-week long smorgasbord of economic seminars, speeches and statistics.

The relatively academic meetings touch on esoteric topics ranging from the impact of worker productivity on poverty alleviation to the effect of user fees for water, but much of the real business is done behind closed doors.

Delegates from poor developing nations, often in Africa and Asia, use the meetings to make presentations to IMF staffers, win over friends at the World Bank and lay the groundwork for improving their economies and negotiating new aid.

But with tens of thousands of protesters expected to descend upon Washington at the end of the month, there appears to be much less time for senior IMF and World Bank staffers to hold such off-the-schedule meetings, especially amid a global economic slump.

Instead of a leisurely two-week stay at a swanky hotel in the tony, tree-lined Woodley Park neighborhood, delegates will likely endure a harsh weekend in downtown D.C., battling their way through throngs of protesters and negotiating a two-mile long, nine-foot high fence just to get to the IMF's campus.

The World Bank also admits there will be less opportunity for informal meetings.

"Access will be somewhat curtailed. It's true that some development ministers will not get to meet the funders they will like to see," World Bank spokeswoman Merrel Tuck said.

In anticipation of the sort of violence that marred summits in Seattle, Quebec City and Genoa, D.C. police have drafted in more than 3,000 officers from nearby cities to augment their forces as they try and avoid the chaos seen elsewhere.

Protesters claim they are taking to the streets to make the IMF's meeting more open, but those inside the lender say the opposite is true -- that the threat of violence has turned a normally open affair into a tense, high-security proceeding.

IMF and World Bank meetings and related events will now be crammed into just three days from Sept. 28 through Sept. 30. With the schedule tight, much of the work will focus on how to improve global growth prospects -- the single most important item on the meetings' agenda.

The IMF's World Economic Outlook, to be released at the meetings, is expected to forecast global growth at a mild 2.7 percent this year, down from 4.8 percent last year, as U.S. and European expansions have slowed and Japan stagnant.

And the ability to focus on other issues has been further handicapped because the IMF and World Bank have canceled a planned series of seminars set to take place in the first week of October over security concerns.

The IMF and World Bank's meetings in April last year were dogged by protests, leading to more than 600 arrests. Protesters again rallied at the lenders' meeting in Prague last September. But earlier this year, protesters ignored the IMF meetings, choosing to target a trade summit in Quebec City.

Fears of violence were heightened in July when clashes in Genoa left one protester dead and many more injured.

These latest anti-IMF and World Bank protests will come amid moves to reform by the IMF and World Bank.

The lenders were sharply criticized for their actions during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1999. With economies from Thailand, South Korea and as far afield as Russia and Brazil toppling like dominoes, they were accused of being inflexible and doing too little, too late to avert calamity.

But since then, both lenders, the IMF particularly, have undergone some soul searching and launched reforms aimed at putting borrowers largely in charge of engineering their own economic policies.

The protests also come at a time when the IMF has increased its openness, holding regular press briefings and making huge amounts of information available on the Internet.

Despite those improvements, the IMF's Murray admits that his employer is not perfect and will "never be loved." But, he still hopes more openness will help some protesters change their opinions of the lenders.

"Globalization is here ... and it does have downsides. But the fund and the bank are the only institutions with the capacity to deal with some of the economic dislocations caused by more open markets ... and all the other things associated with globalization that are at times very negative," he said.