Macroeconomic Policies Blamed for Developing Nations' Ecological Decline

Abstract

For the past couple of decades, international lending agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have come under increasing attack from the environmental community for lending programs that didn't take into account damage to the environment. Chemical and metallurgical plants without pollution controls were financed. Dams were built that not only ruined a region's ecological balance but also wiped out whole cultures. Agricultural aid encouraged overuse of farm chemicals and fertilizers that polluted water supplies and poisoned farm workers. Mining ventures that ruined landscapes and introduced toxins into natural systems were financed. By the early 1980s the lending institutions had begun to establish environmental protection procedures in most of their development programs. The World Bank now has an environmental protection department with an ambitious conservation and pollution prevention agenda. Will those reforms finally lead to development that sustains a country's basic wealt...