Breaking the bonds: an international campaign takes aim at World Bank bonds.

On a rainy Washington, D.C., morning four years ago, Vineeta Gupta set out at dawn with a letter in her hand. A medical doctor from the Indian state of Punjab, Gupta had witnessed her state's public health sector turn private at the behest of the World Bank. Under privatization, her patients were forced to pay "user fees" before they could receive basic health care services. Gupta says she saw treatment for the vast majority of Punjab's poor slip beyond their reach. "I remember an anemic woman lying along a road in need of blood," she recalls. "She was shrunken, deathlike, but she was not admitted to the hospital because she couldn't pay."

On that April morning the World Bank, based in Washington, D.C., was gearing up for its spring meeting. Gupta was prepared to confront that organization--and she planned to do it up close and personal. Just after 5 a.m., she and a group of others from countries like South Africa and Haiti marched toward the home of bank president James Wolfensohn. They sang songs in Urdu, Creole, and Zulu and held signs urging the bank--and Wolfensohn to wake up. The letter Gupta carried was signed by organizations in 35 Global South countries and detailed their concerns. World Bank loans come with harmful strings attached, it stated, and have "crippled economic growth, hindered economic development, promoted dependency, and increased misery and poverty in developing countries."

When they reached Wolfensohn's home, he emerged to greet them. Gupta says he was polite. "You got up early," he joked with her. Wolfensohn asked if he could take the letter and read it later. But Gupta wanted him to stay and listen to their demands. "He took hold of the letter, but I kept holding onto the other end," she says. The presence of television cameras helped her case. Wolfensohn stood in the rain and smiled for the cameras. Gupta read him the letter. And thus began the World Bank boycott, an international, grassroots campaign to exert moral, political, and financial pressure on the World Bank, which controls more investment capital and, with its sister institution the International Monetary Fund, has more policy influence in the world economy than any other institution.

Soon after Wolfensohn's wakeup call, the campaign "grew like wildfire," says Beverly Bell, founder and director of the Center for Economic Justice, based in Washington, D.C., and Albuquerque, which serves as the boycott's convener. A coordinating committee with representatives in 14 countries quickly formed to provide direction and to articulate demands, among them a call to cancel 100 percent of debts owed to the bank by impoverished countries and to end lending practices that require poor nations to implement privatization and austerity measures in exchange for loans.

"What we are witnessing today is a process of recolonization where powerful institutions based in the West have taken away basic elements of our sovereignty," says Basav Sen, an Indian activist with the Boston-based group Bankbusters who was recently hired on as a boycott co-coordinator with the Center for Economic Justice. "Citizens have less and less input on the policies of their own country."

How member countries decide to take back their sovereignty--that is, how they fashion their own boycott campaigns--is decided locally. "From the very beginning the boycott has been owned by and its policies and demands determined by people in the countries impacted," Bell says. For example, in India, Gupta's struggle against World Bank--imposed health care user fees continues, while in Nigeria organizers challenge multinational oil corporations and potential World Bank support for a proposed West African gas pipeline.

Organizers in the United States decided the best way to show solidarity with partners in the Global South was to work on cutting off the World Bank's major revenue source--its bonds. (The campaign in Europe does the same.) The bank raises most of its funds from the sale of bonds, which are purchased by investors, including pension funds, labor unions, churches, municipalities, and universities. Everyday people invest in the bonds, the logic goes, and everyday people can boycott them.

"It's modeled on the anti-apartheid movement, which eventually led to the downfall of apartheid in South Africa," says Katrina Abarcar, who co-coordinates the bonds boycott with Sen. "It's a strategy that has worked."

And it's a strategy that appears to be working again. Through the efforts of more than two dozen local coalitions and national networks, nearly 100 municipalities and institutional investors have boycotted the bonds, including the cities of San Francisco, Boulder, and Milwaukee; international labor unions such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the American Postal Workers Union, and the Service Employees International Union, as well as numerous locals throughout the country; and 31 religious communities.

"It's a fantastic way that grassroots citizens can demand accountability over how their own dollars are invested their college tuition dollars, their union dues, their municipal and state tax dollars," Bell says. "It brings home in the most real way the largest institutions in the global economy and their relationship to one's own community."

Numerous financial institutions have refused to buy World Bank bonds or to renew previously held bonds. Twelve socially responsible investment funds, including the Calvert Group, considered the granddaddy of socially responsible investing, support the boycott. A number of charitable foundations are also on board, including the Ben & Jerry's Foundation, the Needmor Fund, and the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation.

Abarcar says investors buy the bonds because they're considered safe, conservative investments, with AAA bond rating, the highest there is. The campaign aims to drive down that rating. Perhaps one of its biggest coups, TIAA-CREF, the largest public pension fund in the United States, dropped its bonds in November 2002, citing financial reasons.

"When TIAA-CREF says they are selling because World Bank bonds are not a good investment, you had best believe that is going to quake World Bank officials in their boots," Bell says.

Making Local Links

Organizers say their success lies in making the local-global connection. "We always emphasize that this is not only about the horrible things the World Bank and IMF are doing in Africa and Asia," says Sen, who helped Bankbusters get the city of Cambridge, Mass., to adopt the boycott. "All of these policies have effects right here at home.

"These institutions force countries to cut their wages and their labor laws, so workers are more easily exploitable," he adds. "Then multinational corporations move in to set up sweatshop-type industries. That leads to job loss in the U.S." For the boycott to succeed in Milwaukee, activist Frances Bartelt says she needed to make the very same links. "This is a very conservative city," she says. "I knew this was not going to be a slam dunk."

Bartelt's first victory was amassing a few others who were interested in working on the campaign. That group, under the auspices of the Wisconsin Fair Trade Campaign, then approached Don Richards, a sympathetic alderman on the Milwaukee City Council, about sponsoring a resolution supporting the boycott. At first, Richards was not convinced. "He said it was not a local issue and he didn't know how he'd get other aldermen to vote for it," says Bartelt, who directs a health and safety organization.

But over a period of months her group lobbied Richards and started a postcard campaign. Along the way, they gained the support of key groups such as the United Steelworkers of America Local 1527 and the Milwaukee County Labor Council. Finally "a light went on," Bartelt says. In March 2002, the City of Milwaukee passed a resolution citing the World Bank as a "principal architect and enforcer of corporate globalization," promoting policies that have led to the relocation of manufacturing jobs from the United States.

The bank "refuses to respect internationally recognized core labor standards of freedom of association and the right to engage in collective bargaining," the resolution stated, "and seeks to make poor countries convenient and cheap for foreign investment." Such trade policies have affected Wisconsin directly. The state has lost 19,000 manufacturing jobs since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, according to the resolution, and the job loss has devastated Milwaukee's central city. Sen says another issue local communities can relate to is that of privatization. The World Bank actively promotes privatizing education, health care, water, and public pension systems in Global South countries, he says. In 2000, the World Bank was behind a plan to privatize water in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the country's third largest city, in exchange for millions of dollars in World Bank loans, according to the Democracy Center, based in San Francisco and Cochabamba. The plan would have put a private subsidiary of the California-based Bechtel Corporation in charge of the city's water supply for a 40-year lease. But the plan failed miserably amid mass protest when ordinary citizens saw their water prices double and triple and found themselves faced with a choice: water or food? Bechtel was forced to leave the country.

The same drive toward privatization in the developing world is "coming back to bite us" in the United States, Sen says, with several U.S. cities, such as New Orleans, undergoing plans to privatize water supplies.

Speaking for Themselves

In the early days of the boycott, those who jumped on board first were the archetypal anti-globalization activists, most of them young and white. But organizers say that the campaign has become increasingly owned by coalitions of people of color, working people, and immigrants--those who are most negatively affected by globalization.

In Dayton, Ohio, Migwe Kimemia, Africa program director with the American Friends Service Committee, has brought together local African immigrants and refugees from countries such as Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania to educate the community about the World Bank and convince the City of Dayton to embrace the boycott. "These are people who have been affected by World Bank policies and came to the United States as a result," says Kimemia, who is from Kenya. "Our vision is for Africans to speak for themselves."

Kimemia knows firsthand how lending to developing countries can drive them deeper into poverty. After earning an MBA at Clark Atlanta University, in Atlanta, Georgia, he joined Citibank and moved back to Nairobi to monitor bank loans in East Africa. He says he was often required to consult with the World Bank and IMF. "Early on what touched me was the amount of money leaving Africa," he says. "I saw the loans Ethiopia had to repay during the 1980s when the country was undergoing serious famine.... I realized that I was really part of the problem, working for a corporate bank taking so much money out of Africa." After two years on the job, Kimemia resigned.

Eventually he found his way back to the United States. Now, in addition to his work at AFSC, Kimemia pursues doctoral studies looking at corporate social responsibility in the global marketplace. He says the bonds boycott helps African immigrants feel there is something "tangible and concrete" they can do to create change. And he says there's no one better to do it: "I have learned that the people most affected by a problem are the only ones who can really make change."