In Borrioboola-Gha
AN unbecoming spectacle at these meet- ings is the World Bank in a paler shade of green. Poor old thing, she had a hard time in Berlin last year, when the students actually threw stones at her, and accused her of cutting down the Brazilian rain- forests. So now she parades herself, mut- ton dressed as vegetarian, as the environ- ment's modern friend. Being modern, she is also a feminist friend. She greeted us this week with a lecture on 'Environment in the 1990s — families as victims, women as solution's. Another, on 'Girls and women in development', has followed. Environ- mental assessment is a growth industry in the Bank, and now for every client country there must be a report on women in development — which for the Bank in- cludes contraception. There is much here to feed the Bank's instinct for bureaucracy and to keep the paper flowing along. But the Bank, unlike so many other interna- tional agencies, is not a talking-shop. It is executive and operational, a largely self- financing body promoting development and required by its charter to make its decisions on economic considerations alone. Under its current president, a retired congressman supposedly much in- fluenced by his progressively-minded wife, the Bank has tended to wander from its brief. Now it risks becoming the Mrs Jellaby of international finance, all too busy telling the female natives of Borrio- boola-Gha what to do.
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