Information You Can Use: A Bi-monthly Service for the UN and Civil Society
Volume 1, Issue 5, October-November 2004

Brazilian NGOs Forum removes itself from the WB consultation

29 September 2004
Source: Amazônia

The Brazilian NGOs and Social Movements Forum - which joins together more than 1,200 civil entities - decided today to remove the representatives of its organisations from the international consultation that the International Finance Corporation - sector of the World Bank (WB) that makes loans to the private sector - is holding in Rio de Janeiro this week.

The protest is the response to the failure by the institution to fulfill what was promised last week by the WB's president, James Wolfensohn. After Wolfensohn had guaranteed last Tuesday to the NGO's a detailed response about the environmental evaluation of a loan about soybean expansion in Amazonia, the IFC Board of Directors approved the loan on Thursday without an explanation or at least the demand of an environmental impact evaluation as required in the institution's procedures.

"The Forum registered a break in confidence and understands that the continuance of a dialogue was made impossible by the IFC", commented Roberto Smeraldi, from Friends of the Earth - Brazilian Amazonia, when he announced the departure from the meeting. The Rio consultation concerns another process contested by the NGOs, a global revision of the IFC's social and environmental safeguards. According to the Forum's entities, "the process aims to create a double standard between the WB's more rigorous procedures to be applied to governments and others, quite discretionary, for private corporations.

According to the representatives of the Brazilian civil society, the majority of those who could be potentially affected by the proposed changes were not consulted, such as Indigenous Peoples and local communities. The changes eliminated the obligation, by the IFC, to use the "Ecuador Principles" procedures, adopted by world's private banks. For this reason, the Brazilian civil society entities believed that the process under discussion in Rio sends a signal of retrocession for the international financial community.

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