During the past few years, we have heard steady proclamations emanating from the advocates of economic globalization that their deepest purpose in pushing economic globalization is to help the world’s poor. They contend that removing barriers to corporate trade and financial investments is the best path to growth, which, they say, offers the best route out of poverty. They also assert that the millions of people who have visibly opposed the economic globalization model are harming the interests of the poor. Globalization advocates say that everyone should back off and leave it to corporations, bankers and global bureaucracies to do the planning and solve the world’s problems. In other words, if the protests would stop, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, Nike and Monsanto would save the day.

With the World Bank meetings in Washington, D.C., at the end of the month, it becomes increasingly important for students to know the platform of the protestors. They are not, as many would like to believe, heartless isolationists who wish to destroy the only hope for the poor. They instead want to help the poor by resisting decade-old practices that have shown very few signs of practicality.

At the heart of the problem lies the efforts of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, trying to aid nations by setting up economic institutions that may help these nations in the long-run. The key word is may. There is proof linking the policies of these institutions both with economic growth and economic disaster. But what these policies do well is take away from the poorest of the poor.

First of all, most of the money given to nations comes in the form of loans. The nations, therefore, are required to pay back that money. For a nation already in deficit, paying back billions more will not help the economy. As University of Pennsylvania professor Thomas Donaldson points out, “Real interest rates for much of Latin America exceeded 30 percent, rates that most economists agree makes growth difficult or impossible.”

But even without the high interest rates, the poor are hurt by these policies. The World Bank, the IMF and the WTO place certain conditions on the aid that they give and among these conditions is the idea that a nation should export more than it should import. Thus, much of the food that would go to feeding the starving in an aided country would instead be shipped out to another country. The ideologies and rules of economic globalization, including free trade, deregulation, privatization and structural adjustment have destroyed the livelihood of millions of people, often leaving them homeless, landless and hungry, while removing their access to even the most basic public services such as health and medical care, education, sanitation, fresh water, public transport, job training and the like. The record shows that economic globalization makes things worse for the poor, not better.

There are isolated instances where some improvement has been achieved among Third World countries over short periods. The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO love to trumpet these examples. But the truth is that the benefit of this “growth” has been very short-lived. In any case, nearly all the benefits have gone to the elites in these countries and the chief executives of the global corporations at the hub of the process; executives whose annual earnings are now astronomical, often in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. All figures show that these discrepancies between top executives and ordinary workers are rapidly growing.

Robert Wade, of the London School of Economics, wrote in The Economist, “Global inequality is worsening rapidly . Technological change and financial liberalization result in a disproportionately fast increase in the number of households at the extreme rich end, without shrinking the distribution at the poor end … From 1988 to 1993, the share of the world income going to the poorest 10 percent of the world’s population fell by over a quarter, whereas the share of the richest 10 percent rose by 8 percent.”

But most importantly, the World Bank and WTO meetings at the end of the month will be conducted in secrecy. Nobody except high-ranking officials will know what is said or done at those meetings. The question now is this: Are these globalizing institutions just blindly following a failed ideological model? The worst-case conclusion is that the institutions surely do know what they are doing and always have. They have an mission: to remove all impediments to the free flow of global capital as it seeks to pry open the world’s last natural resource pools, markets and cheap labor (and to keep it cheap). To suggest they do all this to help the poor is high cynicism.

Chirag Dedania is a freshman in the School of Foreign Service.