In mid-January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, representatives of the World Food Program stopped the meeting in its tracks with the revelation that for the first time in WFP history it was hard to procure essential food supplies. A range of factors, including soaring food prices stoked by the international community threatens, yet again, to add to the hunger and poverty of the developing world.

It immediately reminded me of the astonishing story on Malawi, filed recently, by Celia Dugger of the New York Times.

You may recall that it described the startling agricultural revival of Malawi as a result of the government subsidizing fertilizer costs for small farmers, and assisting them with improved seed varieties as well.

The decision to provide subsidies contradicted years of World Bank directives of no subsidies ... directives that can be seen, in retrospect, as deeply destructive of the Malawian agricultural economy. Indeed, the headline on the article said it all: "Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts".

But those experts have more to atone for than the misdirected manipulation of the Malawian economy, a manipulation that worshipped the ideological inanities of ‘structural adjustment'. Celia Dugger chronicles at least one death as a result of these perverse World Bank policies, and you can be sure there were many many more. Why does the World Bank get off scot free? How is it that the principle of impunity applies to the International Financial Institutions? 

Malawi has also been fighting HIV/AIDS. And everyone knows that people on anti-retroviral treatment need food in order for the anatomy to be able to digest the drugs. How many AIDS victims died because of World Bank policies? Why is no one interested? Why is the Bank never held accountable? 

The slogan for this year's World AIDS Day was "Leadership". The World Bank is a member of the co-sponsoring group of agencies that is overseen by UNAIDS. Has UNAIDS asked for a meeting with the World Bank to have it explain its policies? The Bank has already apologized for its dreadful history of structural adjustment. Perhaps the mantra of the World Bank should be a ‘mea culpa' in perpetuity.

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