event to do last year twenty two million hc to a fertile arab and was stolen from african farmers by c. d. k. other words it was handed over to board by a hedge funds and multinational societies we. so when the world bank says yes we have to encourage foreign investment. give this pool exploited african land rights to the fruit farms in ma say. or to new york hedge funds. did york because then they are capable of making this land profitable now that is a moderate argument for the farmers who work locally. the source of price i think for a country to make the best use of those resources that it has in abundance and to.

given the limits of its own domestic market of course to export those resources in order to generate wealth and that's a strategy that a number of not just african countries but countries in throughout the world that have done very well by this so i wouldn't look at it in the narrow perspective of just been able to reimburse death debt but in fact as a way of generating wealth and generating opportunities for growth and through growth progress on poverty reduction everywhere where the i.m.f. imposes structural adjustment involving the extension of land devoted for export led agriculture the greater the number of people going hungry. only twenty percent of our. because population has access to drinking water and contrary

to widely held belief there is no lack of water in sub-saharan africa however the policies put in place by the i.m.f. in the aftermath of structural adjustment plans have only aggravated the difficulties people experience in accessing water sources. locke said access to drinking water in this village is an acute problem and it is because of these structural adjustment programs because the state has considerably reduced its budget for the water sector and has not provided the economic and financial resources to create or improve existing water sources use them. so the situation is drastic when it comes to what i feel my bucket of water because there is no point to hope for running water which you have only a few hours during the night not every night and sometimes you can go for five or

six days without any running water at all so everyone looks for a place where there are wells those who can go to the well let's go to the river and make do with that. the reason that the heavily indebted poor country of issue do was. thought to be desirable was in fact by me the international community it was that it was very clear that the. poor countries were drowning under the amount of debt. and so every year they would borrow money and they would use that same amount of money to pay back old debts. and the net result was that it was really nothing remaining in the middle. names wolf and so on played

a very significant historical role by launching the heavily indebted poor countries initiative. and by making the governments of the o.e.c.d. countries understand and admit that it wasn't possible to continue to. refinance an african debt even with subsidies which in fact amounted to gradually stopping it but within a system that kept african countries in a situation of political financial dependence which was politically economically and culturally highly damaging for everyone. to. put in place another process of reform which this time instead of dumping growth which has often been the case with structural adjustment programs encourages growth we began by preparing a strategy document to reduce poverty which emphasizes social aspects this is not necessarily the case with structural adjustment programs it is

a range of reforms that takes into account social aspects which largely seem beyond structural adjustment programs. i will not tell you about the details about how difficult it was to set up something that was completely new at the time. that the results in the countries that have already benefited from this debt relief have been positive we have seen that these resources have been reassigned in large part to human development activities. the board to swipe clean. no alas no if you look at what in two thousand that is to say just after the introduction of this new policy of wiping out that movie and two years of adjustments and then in two thousand and six. after all these here is after some cancellation measures you notice that the debt

for the poorest was reduced by one point four percent so i see who i was making fun of. an example of how developing countries economies were caught in a vice like scenario where on the one we are told that our debt will be reduced so that we won't have to get into debt again and on the other hand we have no money in our accounts so we should make do with a little money we have i don't give a damn about the conditions for cancelling the debt when they say we will cancel the day you will now have health care and education but how will we have it when in order to cancel the debt they make you a forest code a mining code in an investment which no longer allow you to be sovereign in your national resources we see this how much plundering of mineral resources goes on forests environmental destruction the very confiscation of some public companies

confiscation i say so how will the government have money to take care of social affairs even if we cancel the debt so it's really a masquerade when they talk about reducing poverty the world bank program that the debt forgiveness programs of the world bank and the i.m.f. promote these days in the u.s. government and the others are shams for the most part because they're telling these countries and the african nations particularly recently have suffered under this that ok we'll forgive your debts but you have to accept these conditionality. use you have to open your doors totally to privatization by our corporations you have to sell off all your assets to our corporations your utility companies your water and sewerage system companies your telephone companies your schools your jails are going to sell all that off to our corporations they call it is this if you amputate a person's limbs that's how explain it they cut off one of your limbs here one

there and then they say to you you are free but you are free server so we fought against poverty but when you asked the question but how am i going to eat if i have no arms how am i going to walk much of it they say to us no no we will come with a spoon and we will feed you is that what you call freedom. the so-called heavily indebted poor countries initiative allows states that have respected i.m.f. recommendations to obtain a cancellation of a share of that debt. which logically should give them a boost in terms of budgets. and reality though he only makes it possible for the new financial actors to step into the breach and make outrageous speculations which would be nicknamed vulture funds. if you would tool for the duty to the process of vulture funds is quite straightforward in fact your investment fund you buy it tends to

a hundredth of the value of a debt contracted ten years ago it is now twenty years old and everyone thinks that it will never be reimbursed he'd go before the court and demand the full reimbursement of the debt in addition to interest and areas this means that you have a grotesque situations where for example kensington a fund based in the cayman islands coincidentally two million of deaths from congo brazzaville and afterwards went to demand one hundred twenty million before the courts in other words sixty times the national some what it of course do they said your rights the credit to is always right it is the contract that wins out over the constraints that the country in question makes period. we have been victims of vulture funds we have been by vulture phones we have almost lost our dignity as a sovereign country because of these vulture funds so these funds have made it

possible to capture oil cargo destined for export on the high seas these vulture funds have hunted down. i'm going to tell you a story that is my predecessor arrived in washington for the annual assemblies of the i.m.f. and the world bank there he saw a man bring him an arrest warrant which would send him to prison in the united states. my predecessor had officially come to take part in these general assemblies . but this man had come in the name of. it was a nightmare for us we knocked on all the most important doors of the world to ask for help to solve this problem so overwhelming it was for us it didn't happen we took things in hand we sat down with these people and we talked today we are rid of these people but. it's true it hurts but if i had one piece of advice

to give even if i am badly placed to give advice it's that every country should avoid anything to do with these people especially control its debt so that it doesn't find itself on the second markets by the vulture funds which make money on the backs of so-called weak states. but the paradox is also that thanks to the. discovery to conquer. the secret council of. but i think. it is. because as oppose to for example. dead being worth nothing sometimes it can be traded at a discounted rate and that is acceptable commercial practice what we don't want is to have speculation that artificially inflates the value of the debt is

a critical to cut that creates a lot of problems. many difficulties and do we have to think about limiting the use of these instruments for highly indebted countries. i play this street cleaner. in love with a waitress i go on stage managing that there's an audience and i used to take drugs and drink like a fish called the police told me about the circus but i was such a punk i was like what circus. school or circus is clearly comes down and we break down stereotypes about kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.

please please. please please please please. please. please. deliberate torch is on its epic journey to such. one hundred twenty three days. through two thousand nine hundred cities of russia. relayed by fourteen thousand people or sixty five thousand killings. in

a record setting trip by land air sea an outer space. a limp a torch relay. on r t r t dot com. tenable situation since the adoption of a new mining code imposed by the world bank the country which before. is no longer but a minority shareholder. and is a perfect example of an organized hold up on the country's gold. despite months of secret negotiations with. presumptions weigh on this mind which contaminated the region with. nikki used in the treatment of precious metals. talk of it without

their faces covered for fear of losing their job. as somali i can talk about it. concerns us the workers in the mine and the locals is that we haven't learned anything for ten years. we don't live here there's nothing to drink here there's no drinking water these little boxes which you see surrounding us. this is where the work of the mine live in these boxes here. where does the money from the mine go i don't know. i really don't know they're a big caymans within the government although we all of the west give them goes into their pocket. the. exploitation company does not allow us to film in his village despite ministerial authorization.

we have. some villages brave the confessing to us that women regularly a miscarriage is here and that the contaminated water from the. ground supply is surely responsible for all of the evils and the dust causes serious respiratory problems especially for children. today we speak about the plundering of resources in congo because the world bank in its h i p c program initiated different reforms especially the forest code in the mining code permits for mining exploitation were granted the world bank was their experts to help congo and in all of these authorizations from mining exploitation

almost all of the authorizations have to be reviewed because there was a systematic pillaging of resources and the world bank watched on we were told that the world bank was a development bank wrong it's of bank of under development it has to be said it's clear. the big outside is china china has two point five trillion dollars in currency reserves and china is now present in africa latin america and in other asian countries where it offers extremely high sums for new loans. china has committed to invest six billion euros in projects in the democratic republic of congo these are aimed at the development of road infrastructure schools hospitals as well as the revival of the mining sector. in exchange the chinese will have access to six and a half million tons of refined copper two thousand tons of cobalt and three hundred

seventy two tons of gold this minerals for projects barter agreement to surprised western countries and the i.m.f. and the world bank in particular both of whom were on the verge of cancelling the democratic republic of congo's debt these two institutions have set as a precondition that the contract be reviewed downwards. and so negotiations have been extremely hard with it has to be said with being blackmailed by representatives presidents of european countries have told us. cheney's contracts we get treated at death you don't give them up. to make it we're happy to say that. the government and its chinese partners works very hard to take a second look at that package and have indeed improved it so now we'll be

benefiting from both debt relief and additional resources for infrastructure which it's desperately i think china understands that africa is a continent. as for many of the things that it needs particularly natural resources it has the potential of being a significant market because it's under a million people now the twenty fifty it'll be close to two billion people today they are certainly at a stage which resembles a lot like what was practiced by france in the seventy's and its own commercial relations with africa we will also review operations which resemble line for line what could have been done china is welcome india is welcome brazil is well come friends as well you know it's a place with tremendous potential. my

experience was. that until i arrived at the bank the word corruption had never been used by a president of the bank it had never been discussed at the board and the reason was as i was told by the general counsel was that unfortunately many member countries had corrupt governments and what you didn't want to do was to offend countries that were corrupt even some of the big company countries were thought to be corrupt and i. decided that i didn't care whether any of my members were corrupt or not but that i was not going to run an institution that was giving money. knowingly to corrupt governments deposit but i think that it is no accident that we began to

speak about corruption after the fall of the soviet union before them on because at that time but we couldn't really speak about this sort of thing without risking moving to the other side i think we changed the moral stick and it's. but i can tell you it wasn't easy. and not every country even today. regards that contribution as ring constructive and by the way not every country to . administer this anti corruption practices. there are many countries. that use it as a competitive tool. i won't name the countries but they must be known to you. and some pretty large countries. sure thing the bun corruption here is

a way of life it's even that's how people live because you can work for the big companies of these countries one of us take for example our customs company off. when you go to our feeder you will find really old fashioned buses but the people who work there travel around in all some jeeps. you would see people who work at a feeder with all some houses these people build skyscrapers but there's something fishy going on at a feeder where do they find what they earn because they only work at a feed of course so are optional rules here. is to sit bascom see that it seems as if the fight against corruption works for low level corruption only. but as soon as you reach the government with that in the head of state the prime ministers the ministers it no longer

works they investigate or start and presidential personal richmond political financing and then the richmond to friends is no longer tolerated. and i'm claiming that this is right not only in their frica. but. i know in that context we. worked with our membership to improve the institutions that make for better governance. economic governance and in public financial management in other areas that we work with. our membership i think we we think there's been considerable progress in in focusing. progress in. corruption in a number of countries. when we treat people as corrupt we're not there to clear

their name if they are corrupt they are corrupt but the truth is that this corruption was supported by the great powers at the time of the cold war it's the same today no african leader keeps his money at home not in congo the ivory coast brazzaville. they always keep it in switzerland spain in the united states it's true too in south africa and in morocco not only in europe. africa should seek inspiration from the example of ecuador in two thousand and seven and eight this latin american country proceeded with the ordered of its debts to determine the illegitimate and odious debts there is

a whole series of contracts and we see it in the african case. absolutely unacceptable including from the point of view of international international law both of which are particularly rendered void. the purpose of the audit is to identify what must not be paid and it's on the basis of an order that the government of ecuador decided to no longer pay illegitimate debt. and i believe that if we don't want to be a martyr it's true. even by the time has come for us to take action the congolese have to understand that it doesn't have to be like this i'm sitting on a gold mine and diamonds on wood and coal to. an electrical energy like

being a say and despite it all we have no electricity. i am standing alongside an oil palm and despite that we import palm oil and i'm in a country where there are thinned leaders who have spoken out the lakes simon combine grew kimbo. and loom. but the problem is that people are disengaged today but i'm not despairing. things will change.

i was thinking somehow i had to come back because mom was waiting for me. i just knew that everything would be fine for some reason we were so confident because we were going to get married officially after he came back how could he not come back the mere thought of it never crossed her mind. the militants decided to try and break through her new guinea airport screening grenade. go the explosion blow them all run his

back toward. and it was all over all of us. we know that our comrades and our commander won't leave us no matter how tough it gets we're team. you're move getting was a senior in his military trio. he knew that if he didn't smother that grenade with his body more of his comrades would die he gave his own life to save his friends. we are the problem we in the west of the problem especially the united states government so it really is quite ridiculous that we get manipulated into say no we have to take care of this problem over there the problem is in our own backyard and we know that.

they look like bounty islands where the locals can enjoy the sun and the ocean. but what was buried here years ago. means these people are suffering the consequences. how much more poison lies on the vis ground. behind this zone there is what we call the callet bank on which there was a deposit of plutonium left by security test which caused the dispersion of radium you clyde's despite previous cleaning efforts there remains a deposit of a little less than two kilos of plutonium stuck in the rock and the coral reef is about ten meters down you can test a never ending legacy. what defines a country's success. faceless figures of economic growth. for

a factual standard of living. like you came from. a place.

ukraine's prime minister complains of threats against his family from anti-government protesters as demonstrations rage on in cave over integration. a tiny village takes on a us energy giant we travel to a media world locals are desperate to stop shale gas exploration close to their homes. and as the world mourns mindell the death of the anti-apartheid icon sparks fears and wide and claves that racial tension could return to south africa. this is r.t. international coming to you live from the russian capital on marina joshie well.