The World Bank and the whistleblower

anyone know much about this guy or this story? wasn't sure what to make of it.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1032328,00.html

The World Bank and the whistleblower

Consultant Peter Griffiths had a choice: speak up against World Bank action in Sierra Leone and prevent a famine, or be silent and save his career. He tells what he did

Sunday August 31, 2003
The Observer

The white man's graveyard, they used to call it. By the time I worked there, it was the black man's graveyard: a baby had only an even chance of surviving until it was five. Malaria and hunger were the big killers.

I was there to do something about it, advising the Sierra Leone government on the economics of food policy. They had tried to get along with no policy, and the effects were obvious. I was starting from scratch, trying to catch up in four months.

I started by talking to, or rather listening to, everyone I could find who had anything to do with food or agriculture. There was the Ministry of Agriculture, my client, of course, starting with the Minister and the Permanent Secretary and my contact man, the Director of Agriculture, and ending up with the people working in the farming areas. Then there were the central bank, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Commerce and the state-owned companies.

I saw foreign aid projects in Freetown and in the countryside. There were the big rice traders, operating out of cramped, dark warehouses in the bazaar. I squatted in the markets watching the women haggling over price before selling a cupful of rice, and I slipped in a question between one customer and another. I spoke to consumers, and to farmers in the field.

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Then I made a routine visit to the Director of Planning, and he handed me the minutes of a meeting between a World Bank team and the Ministry of Commerce. It was the text of a formal agreement between the World Bank and the government. The government had agreed to stop all government imports of food immediately, and leave future imports to the private sector. They had also agreed to stop subsidising food.

I thought about it. How could they cut the subsidies? Already the people in the streets were hungry. There were no fat people. Babies were pot-bellied with hunger, and on the verge of death. Removing the 25 per cent subsidy would mean that people died. In the past, removing food subsidies had caused serious rioting, but I suspected that they were too lethargic with hunger to riot now.

Stopping government imports was a major step, as the imports of rice, the staple food, came to half the country's rice consumption. The World Bank evidently expected the private sector to take over immediately, but this was a serious move, changing the whole marketing system overnight.

Most serious of all, the World Bank seemed to have forgotten that it and the IMF had forced Sierra Leone to float its exchange rate seven months earlier. The leone had collapsed to a tenth of its previous value against the dollar. The rice now on the market had been bought at the old rate. Any new rice would cost at least 10 times as much in the markets. And wages had not gone up. If the people could not afford to buy enough rice at today's price, they certainly would not be able to buy rice in the future, at 10 times the price.

Nor could I see traders importing rice that they could not sell. I visited them to check. Not a hope.

The conclusion was inescapable. Imports that the Government had already paid for would continue to arrive over the next four months. There would then be no more imports of the staple food. Freetown and the urban areas relied entirely on imported rice, so starvation would start immediately. Perhaps a third of a million people would die.

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http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1032328,00.html