now that is an. argument for the farmers who work locally. to process 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. 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 africa's 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. 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. the

situation is dressed take when it comes to what i feel my bucket of water because there is no cooling 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 planning later at all so everyone looks for a place where there are wells those who can go to the us go to the river and make do with that. the reason that the heavily indebted poor country initiative was. thought to be desirable was in fact by me the international community 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 did you 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 perpetually refinance 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 on the mash-up . we have put in place another process of reform which this time instead of stunting 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. but i will not tell you about the details and about how difficult it was to set up something that was completely new at the time. but 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. so we then set. 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 wiping out

movie and two years of adjustments and then in two thousand and six. after all this 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 courts going to advice 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 debt 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. yes you know you have to open your doors totally to privatisation 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 cicle 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 sir 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 a new financial actors to step into the breach and make outrageous speculations which would be nicknamed vulture funds.

for the duty to the process of vulture funds it's quite straightforward in fact. unless mn funds 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 to 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 lynched by vulture funds and we

have almost lost our dignity as a sovereign country because of these vulture funds so these funds have made it possible to capture the oil cargos 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 the vulture funds 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 debts 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 the issue of buying and selling dead is. in market. because as oppose to for example. dead being worth nothing sometimes it can be traded at the

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 we succumb to clip that creates a lot of problems. in many difficulties and we have to think about limiting the use of this instruments for highly indebted countries. self for the workers more of their lives for their pension account their cash that you can be used to leverage all kinds of a synthetic obligations on wall street so that money has to be stolen clearly whether you're in the u.k. or detroit what are you learning i'm richard. your pensions are up for grabs on the show yesterday on wall street led by the show's stars a number ten and number eleven a boris johnson they want to take your money and they want to turn it into all kinds of flora and fauna there it is spinning the globe right would give an income

for doing nothing but when it does. dramas that can't be ignored. stories others refuse to know. if it's changing the world. picture. from around the globe. one hundred twenty three days. through two. thousand people. or sixty thousand. in

a record setting trip. on our team. finds itself in an untenable 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. serious presumptions weigh on this mind which contaminated the region with. used in the treatment of precious metals. nobody dares talk of it without

their faces covered for fear of losing their job. as somalia console 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 gives them goes into their pockets. the mayor of said an employee of mining exploitation company does not allow us to film in his village despite ministerial authorization.

we have. a neighboring mine where some villages braved the taboos confessing to us that women regularly stuff a miscarriage is here and that the contaminated water from the ground supply is surely responsible for the evils of 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 the authorizations have to be reviewed because there was systematic pillaging of resources in the world bank watched 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 project barter agreement are surprised western countries and the i.m.f. and the world bank in particular both of whom are 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 who have told us. here cheney's contracts we get treated well you don't give them up. to make it we're happy to say that. the government and its chinese partners very hard to take

a second look at that package and have indeed improved it so that now we'll be benefiting from both debt relief and additional resources for infrastructure which it 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 that in 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 welcome friends as well you know it's a place with tremendous potential. my

experience. 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 and 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. i think that it is no accident that we began to speak about

corruption after the fall of the soviet union before them on the cause at that time but we couldn't really speak about this sort of thing without risking moving to the other side i think we've 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 a. administers anticorruption 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 but corruption here is

a way of life it's in 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. well when you go to our feeder you will find really all fashion 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 feed where do they find what they earn because they only work at a feed of course so are optional rules here. is to surpass conceit and 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 naff reka. but then you. 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. 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 of brazil. 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 audit of its debts

to determine the illegitimate and debts but 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. if at 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 things leaders who have spoken out. like simon combine grew kimbo veto and loom. but the problem is that people are disengaged today and i'm not despairing. things will change.

they look like. the ocean. years ago. people are suffering the consequences. how much more poison. behind this is that there is what we call the

bank on which there is a deposit of plutonium. which caused. despite previous cleaning efforts there remains a deposit of a little less than two kilos of plutonium stuck in the rock the coral reef about ten metres down. a never ending legacy. right to see. the first strike. and i think that you're. on a reformist. instrument. the in the. do you think that you as a representative of the. gazan government and government in general could achieve

dad easing off live for the palestinian people through the way they communicate through the way the present themselves to do want to crimean it can i need we need respectful of from all of the kind of governments good and to recognize this government which recollected a from the people actually. presented to from the palestinian people themselves respect our china says respect i what i would believe is our need someone runs. so the lesson we teach to the world is that the best way to defend yourself is to get yourself a nuclear weapon and of course the biggest culprit of using nuclear weapons and producing nuclear weapons and weapons about struction is my birth nation of the united states and i find it absolutely insane that we sit here and talk about iran

suppose have nuclear weapons program where you know the united states is producing every kind of weapon under the sun is spending more than every other military on the planet combined and it's involved in more war and more death and more suffering than every other nation combined and yet it's sitting there on a pedestal talking about other nations developing weapons of mass destruction it isn't that we even allow them to do this the first nation that needs to disarm without question is the united. speak or language. programs and documentaries in arabic. from the world's hot spots the v.o.i.p. interviews intriguing stories for you to. see.

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only. headlines on our t.v. anti fracking rage in romania clashes erupted between police and locals who are furious at the prospect of american energy giant chevron drilling for shale gas nearby. european politicians pour oil on the flames of the protests in ukraine as they reiterate their support for the crowd's anti-government sentiment. as the world continues to grieve over the death of nelson mandela among south africa's white minority are afraid of a new wave of apartheid and bloodshed this time aimed at. get more on any of those stories on our web site at r.t. dot com but now no mercy for the big bankers.