International

SP Euro-MP Dennis de Jong says that he is pleased by the acceptance of his proposal for recognition of and support for credit unions and cooperative banks. ‘In the last few years Brussels has for the most part only had eyes for the big, commercial banks, their functioning and their wishes,’ he says. ‘That the EU is now at last taking a different course and recognising banks which put the interests of their clients first and operate on a small scale is a major gain.’

Prompted by a report from the campaigning NGO Corporate Accountability International which reveals the World Bank’s shocking bias in favour of the private sector, SP development spokesman Ewout Irrgang put a series of questions to the minister responsible for the government’s support for the programmes in question. Water privatisation has been proven not to help the poor, yet a quarter of all World Bank funding goes directly to corporations. In allocating its funds in this way, the Bank’s funding arm ignores even its own published standards of transparency. It also fails to respond to the failure of privatisation to address the problem of water supply in developing countries. Around a third of all private water contracts signed between 2000 and 2010 have failed or are in extreme difficulties – four times the failure rate of comparable infrastructure projects in the electricity and transport sectors. Below we publish Irrgang’s questions, and Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Ben Knapen’s thoroughly unsatisfactory answers.