Coordinated actions are occurring in several other cities around the world, including Jakarta (Indonesia), Lima (Peru), London (U.K.), Geneva (Switzerland), and Potosí (Bolivia).

“This is not a happy occasion for the hundreds of millions of people around the world who continue to suffer under the economic hegemony of IMF/World Bank policies and projects,” said Njoki Njoroge Njehu, Director of the 50 Years Is Enough Network, a coalition of over 200 U.S. organizations founded in 1994, on the institutions’ 50th anniversary.

“The World Bank and IMF have reinforced the structures of corporate globalization and imposed them from Argentina to Mexico, Senegal to Mauritius, and Jordan to South Korea and Fiji with disastrous results for millions of people,” she added.

“The results of IMF & World Bank policies and projects are all too clear: ecosystems ripped apart to sell valuable minerals, communities subjected to ever-increasing poverty, the mounting debt burdens that keep countries enslaved, and record profits for multinational corporations,” said Morrigan Phillips of Mobilization for Global Justice (MGJ), a Washington activist group focused on economic justice.

MGJ and the 50 Years Is Enough Network were among the organizers of demonstrations at the World Bank/IMF spring meetings in Washington three months ago. The demands made then have not yet been met; they include the cancellation of impoverished country debt; an end to imposed economic austerity programs; an end to financing for socially and environmentally destructive projects; and the opening of the institutions’ board meetings to the public.

Added to those demands now is one focused on the Extractive Industries Review (EIR), a three-year process initiated by the World Bank and completed last December. It found that oil and mining projects funded by the Bank do not contribute to poverty reduction (the World Bank’s ostensible mandate), and that the Bank should phase-out its involvement in coal and oil projects. For those projects the Bank does participate in, it recommended that it obtain free, prior, informed consent of the communities affected. It also called for other practices that are not yet standard for the Bank: respect for human rights; establishment of land rights for indigenous groups; requirement of freedom of association (to form unions, etc.); re-direction of funding to renewable energy; and protecting biodiversity by establishing “no go” areas for critical habitats.

Soren Ambrose of the 50 Years Is Enough Network noted that “The management of the World Bank has released a draft response to the EIR which pays lip service to many of its ideas, but makes very few firm commitments. It is apparent that the Bank’s top-level staff want to continue providing subsidies to the mining and oil industries, including some of the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world.”

Ambrose continued, “We are here to reinforce the worldwide call on the Board of the World Bank, which has the last word on the institution’s position and will be making a decision in the next two weeks, to recognize the seriousness of the issues addressed by the Extractive Industries Review, and to adopt its recommendations in full.”

“For over ten years we have been talking with the leadership of the World Bank, urging that care for people, especially the most vulnerable, and for all of creation be made the centerpiece of economic policy decisions. We hope that the EIR does not become one more case where the World Bank promises much but delivers very little,” observed Marie Dennis, Co-Chair of the Religious Working Group on the World Bank and the IMF, a coalition of religious denominations, institutions, and social justice organizations that educate, advocate, and bear public witness on global economic justice issues.