La Via Campesina to Protest World Bank, IMF Meetings in Bangkok

La Via Campesina, a global peasant alliance with millions of members, will stage a protest in Bangkok this week to oppose the meetings of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The alliance has six demands, ranging from cancelling the debts of poor farmers and ordinary people to raising government revenue through corporate and wealth taxes and democratising central banks around the world.

When asked by Khaosod English during a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand (FCCT) in Bangkok on 7 October whether they planned to meet representatives from the World Bank and the IMF, one of the alliance’s key members insisted they would not seek meetings with leaders or representatives of either institution.

“We don’t think the World Bank and the IMF can be reformed to serve the interests of the people,”

said Morgan Ody, a French activist and European member of Confédération Paysanne, adding that these institutions should be dismantled. “The World Bank is basically owned by the US, with veto power. And there’s no point in trying to democratize the World Bank.”
Paitoon Saloisod, secretary-general of the Assembly of the Poor, which is a member of La Via Campesina, blamed both the World Bank and the IMF for pushing the Thai government to promote various cash crops and neoliberal policies that eventually led many Thai farmers into debt traps and broken homes.

Many farmers eventually had their land confiscated after using it as collateral for loans. What followed, said Paitoon, was rural adults having to leave their home provinces in search of jobs in Bangkok and other big cities, leaving their young children to be cared for by their grandparents back home.

“When I was six, I was also left [by my parents] to be looked after by my grandparents,” Paitoon said. “We were a kind of orphan because although our parents are still alive, we couldn’t live with them.”

Tassanai Wangon, a villager affected by the Pak Mun Hydroelectric Dam in Ubon Ratchathani province, which was supported by the World Bank, said the villagers’ fishing livelihoods have been decimated over the past decades as rapids were destroyed to make way for the dam’s construction.

She hopes those affected will finally receive proper compensation from the government.

“It was the World Bank which inspired the dam project,” she said. “I want the World Bank and the government to give affected villagers 15 rai of land or give us monetary compensation.”

Baramee Chaiyarat, an adviser to the Assembly of the Poor, said the group will march from Lumpini Park to the Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre, where the World Bank and IMF meetings are taking place, on Friday, 16 October, starting at 09:00.

“We do not seek to stop the meeting but we want air our grievances, to make it known, as to how we have been affected by them.”