[asia-apec 1711] Hawai'i prepares for ADB meeting

[Kevin Yuk-shing Li]

Opposition prepares for investment meeting

By Mary Adamski Star-Bulletin
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Thursday, January 18, 2001

Hawaii groups organizing to demonstrate against the Asian Development
Bank at its May conference here were told to expect a community
relations blitz to persuade them the international investment agency
is beneficial to Asia.

"I'm puzzled about why Honolulu would volunteer to host this
meeting," Phillipines professor and author Walden Bello said last
night.

"Is it because state officials don't follow events outside?"

Bello, an expert on the effects of globalization in Asia, told a
University of Hawaii crowd of 300 people that "ADB will deploy its
(nongovernmental organizations) task force to Honolulu because of the
sense that people here will provide trouble for them." He chronicled
the opposition the bank and other global financial institutions
encountered since riots disrupted the World Trade Organiation's 1999
meeting in Seattle.

About 3,000 delegates are expected at the Asian Development Bank
conference, which opens May 7 at the Hawaii Convention Center.

The United States and Japan are key investors in the institution
established 35 years ago for economic and social development in Asia.
The Manila-based bank is now owned by 58 member nations.

Groups oppose development

The opposition from environmentalists and human rights groups has
grown because "corporate-driven globalization has run over so many
people," said Bello. He is a sociology professor at the University of
the Phillipines and co-director of Focus on the Global South at the
University of Bangkok.

What happened in Seattle was not just street riots, he said, "but
rebellion of developing countries within the meeting halls. They
could no longer allow just a few countries to ram policies down their
throats in the name of consensus."

Bello told the meeting organized by environmental, political and
indigenous rights groups that the goal is not to just demonstrate
against globalization but "to think about, and propose alternatives.
What do we find to replace this model of corporate-driven
globalization? What is the alternative to this globalization that has
muddled the world?"

He said: "At this point (it) is an organization that is stuck. Its
momentum has been lost."

Last May at the banks meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand, delegates
were "confronted by thousands of fishers and farmers asking them to
leave town." The opposition focused on the funding of a wastewater
treatment plan[t] at a place where mussels are harvested, he said.

"I think the moral ascendancy has shifted."

Environmental disruption claimed

Bello said the Asian Development Bank "is known as a nontransparent,
nondemocratic organization. It has funded infrastructure -- roads and
bridges -- and in the process has caused tremendous dislocation,
environmental disruption and uprooting of communities."

"When you talk to the ADB, they say it's in the process of reform.
Most of the changes have been in the area of public relations."

"You now have a responsibility," Bello said. "The ADB can come out
and say it had the best conference ever in hospitable Honolulu. Or it
can come away as a more chastened institution that is more willing to
look at its really terrible record."