Bangladesh Week of Action against Poverty, Hunger and Unjust Development Paradigm

[12 October, Dhaka] Speakers at a press conference said that the international financial institutions (IFIs) have a disastrous consequences over people's life and livelihood over the years due to policy prescriptions and bad projects of IFIs.  The press conference was held at the Dhaka Reporter's Unity in the city today to observe the Bangladesh Week of Action against poverty, hunger and unjust development paradigm. The Bangladesh Social Forum organized the press conference on the eve of World Bank-IMF annual general meeting scheduled from coming 15-17 October in Washington DC.

Ahmed Swapan Mahmud, the member of the organizing committee and also the executive director of Voice, a research organization read out the written statement. He said that unjust and undemocratic interventions of the financial institutions like World and International Monetary Fund created negative impacts on people's livelihood and created dependency through imposing conditionalities on government. He also said that Bangladesh should look into developing its own policies without any dependency to make the country self-reliant. He put seven points demands to consider, such as cancellation of all illegitimate debt, make any information related to bilateral or multilateral agreements public with highest standard of openness and transparency, to compensate for climate disaster already caused to environment and communities, to form a national body to regulate multi-donor trust fund for climate change, stop blanket privatization of essential services and allocate sufficient resources for public services like health, education, agriculture, water etc to uphold people's right.

Among others, the members of the organizing committee of Bangladesh Social Forum Mohsin Ali also the executive director of Wave Foundation, Mohammad Hilaluddin executive from Angkikar Bangladesh, Prodip Roy fromk Supro, 'Mustaque Ali from Incidin, Shamsuddoha from EquityBD attended the press conference.

Speakers also said that the global financial architecture and the dominant role and policy impositions of the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Asia Development Bank (ADB) should be an end in the country. An unjust economic order should be replaced by justice and equality, speakers told.
A weeklong campaign programme was declared at the conference that is taken place from 12-18 October and will be observed countrywide to undermine the unjust and undemocratic nature of activities by the international financial institutions. Among programmes, there are rallies, human chain, seminar, workshop, capacity building training, meet the journalists, cultural show
etc.