The Bank's continued enthusiasm for agribusiness was evident in its March report, Growing Africa, which highlighted the potential of the African agriculture sector, currently valued at $313 billion a year, to triple if governments and business leaders engage in radical policy reform and generate public private partnerships.
Land grabs
Accountability
News
IFC Honduran client linked to death squads
The International Finance Corporation (IFC, the Bank's private sector arm) loan to Honduran palm oil producer Corporaci
Accountability
Background
UK Civil Society Meeting with Minister of State Rt Hon Alan Duncan MP
This was a meeting on 1 October 2012, between the Minister of State of the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) and civil society representatives, focusing on the World Bank.
Accountability
News
Call for freeze on World Bank 'land grabs'
As Oxfam called on the World Bank to freeze large scale land acquisitions, the Bank's new agriculture strategy remained under wrap. Concerns have also been raised about ongoing initiatives on 'climate-smart agriculture' and the development of Doing Business in Agriculture.
IFI governance
News
World Bank-IMF annual meetings 2012
Analysis, news, and about the events inside and around the World Bank/IMF annual meetings 2012. This page is being updated regularly.
Land
Background
Halting the global land rush: protecting land rights and promoting food security
This event discussed how to invest in agriculture in a responsible way, including research on the scale of the global rush for land, and explored potential solutions to the problem, including the role that the World Bank can and must play.
Land
Background
Notes of meeting between UK Executive Director to World Bank Susanna Moorehead and UK civil society
Civil society organisations met UK Executive Director to the World Bank Susanna Moorehead and staff from the Department for International Development to discuss IDA, education finance, infrastructure finance, fragile states, agriculture and land, Doing Business rankings, Oyu Tolgoi project in Mongolia.
Accountability
News
New claims of rights abuses in World Bank-funded 'land grabs'
As the World Bank held its Annual Conference on Land and Poverty in April, campaigners accused it once again of facilitating and legitimising 'land grabs' that harm local communities.
Accountability
Commentary
Accountability squandered?
Despite a 2011 victory in Cambodia, where a mass eviction in the centre of Phnom Penh was halted and remaining affected families finally gained legal title to the land they had been wrongly denied under a World Bank project, recent arrests have put justice in jeopardy and led to calls for a continued lending freeze by the Bank.
Land
News
World Bank's land policies under fire
In February about 200 people from across Asia demonstrated outside the World Bank office in Bangkok to highlight the failure of the Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI) principles, co-authored by the Bank, to protect small farmers
Featured briefings
6 April 2023
World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings 2023
5 April 2023
The IMF at the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The need for governance reform
As the world celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is time the IMF’s shareholders use the opportunities provided by the anniversary and growing calls for reforms to the international financial architecture to redesign the IMF’s governance structures and programmes to ensure they are consistent with the commitments outlined in 1948 and with international human rights law.
5 April 2023
The global financial architecture and the international debt crisis: An urgent call for reform
Influence of unreformed international financial institutions and creditor interests in debt solutions in low- and middle-income countries plagued by delay and ineffective when undertaken.