In return for borrowing, countries must open up their markets and natural resources to global investors. Such measures, critics charge, wreak havoc on the environment, upend local economies, and force governments to slash social spending to balance budgets and tamp down current account imbalances. Cameroon's lumber exports, for example, shot up by nearly 50 percent between 1995 and 1997. While this may help boost local economies in the short run, critics fear it will lead to deforestation and soil erosion. Moreover, IMF-inspired changes in both timber and agriculture policy have redounded to the benefit of agribusiness and large growers, instead of poor farmers and other indigent residents.
Corporate welfare is raw meat for other watchdog groups.
A proposed 650-mile oil pipeline would run from landlocked Chad to Cameroon and deposit the oil at the Gulf of Guinea. Ranked dead last on Transparency International 's corruption perception index, Cameroon itself seems a dubious business partner. But we're also concerned about the people of Chad and Cameron, and bringing them out of desperate poverty. Jubilee 2000 will hold a rally on April 9 calling for debt cancellation for the world's poorest countries, whose economies are staggering under the weight of billions of dollars in loans. A blue-ribbon commission of economists recently recommended to Congress that the IMF and World Bank forgive the crushing obligations of the world's most indebted countries.