World Bank giving more to the poor

Funding for safety net schemes such as school feeding tripled to $18 billion

By Bhagyashree Garekar, US Correspondent


A girl drinking soup under a child advocate group's feeding plan in Manila. The World Bank is tripling its support for safety net programmes amid fears that the recession will result in more people going hungry. It is also providing more funds for infrastructure and agriculture projects. -- PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE


WASHINGTON: During the Asian financial crisis, there was a 22 per cent increase in anaemia among pregnant women in Thailand. In Indonesia, the average weight of children under three declined.
But 'the debate about numbers silenced a debate about people', noted World Bank president Robert Zoellick as he announced a new US$55 billion (S$82 billion) infrastructure initiative to help blunt the impact of the global recession.

'We need to ensure that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past,' he said at a press conference here on Thursday, ahead of the weekend spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Mr Zoellick sees it as the World Bank's business to protect the most vulnerable against the fallout of the global recession.
Statistics showing the rise in the number of malnourished pregnant women in Thailand and underweight children in Indonesia, among other developments - traceable to severe cuts in basic health, nutrition and education budgets - 'aren't temporary blips on the computer screens', he said. 'The results can be lifelong.'
And society often pays the price, he said, in the form of violence and social unrest.
Amid concern that the present economic crisis is pushing millions more into poverty, the World Bank announced this week that it was tripling - to US$12 billion (S$18 billion) over the next two years - its support for safety net programmes like school feeding, which provides poor children with school meals.
'Their cost, at less than 1 per cent of GDP (gross domestic product), is a small price to pay,' Mr Zoellick said.
With around a billion undernourished people in the world, the World Bank is also stepping up funds for agriculture projects and food security.
As Mr Zoellick recently remarked: 'In London, Washington and Paris, people talk of bonuses or no bonuses. In parts of Africa, South Asia and Latin America, the struggle is for food or no food.'
By ramping up infrastructure spending, the World Bank hopes to build a foundation for national growth and create jobs. In certain Latin American countries, every US$1 billion spent on rural road maintenance projects can create as many as 500,000 jobs. But during an economic crisis, infrastructure projects are typically the first to be cut.
During the Asian crisis, Indonesia's total public investment in infrastructure dropped from about 7 per cent of its GDP in 1995-97 to 2 per cent in 2000.
In the Latin American and Caribbean crises of the 1990s, some 50 per cent of government budget cuts came from reductions in public infrastructure spending.
However, China saw both job and productivity gains in keeping up its infrastructure investments during the crisis, said Mr Zoellick, calling it a wise move.
The former US trade chief also urged policymakers to make sure trade protectionism did not exacerbate the crisis. He noted that since the Group of 20 meeting in London earlier this month, nearly half of the countries represented there had implemented some form of protectionist measures.
'The danger of protectionism is increasing,' he said. 'As the recession deepens, leaders will be under pressure to protect home markets.
'You definitely want to do everything you can to avoid negative shocks. A retreat to protectionism would be the type of negative shock that would pull you back to a 1930s scenario.'
bhagya@sph.com.sg