World Social Forum: Ex-World Bank Chief Economist slams Trade Rules by UN Wire 5:14pm 21st Jan, 2004   January 20, 2004.    More than 100,000 anti-globalization activists are in Bombay, India, to air their views on reforming the current world economic order during the six-day World Social Forum, Agence-France Presse reported yesterday.    Speaking ahead of the opening this week of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — the annual meeting of global trade specialists to which the World Social Forum was launched as a counterweight — former World Bank Chief Economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz yesterday criticized the United States' push for rich nations to forgive Iraq's $120 billion debt and said new people should be placed at the helm of global lending institutions.    "Why should Iraq be more deserving of debt forgiveness than Congo, Ethiopia and many other countries whose incomes are low and debts are enormous?" Stiglitz rhetorically asked insisting that debt-relief rules must apply equally to all developing nations.    Stiglitz asserted the need for a new ruling body to be placed in charge of lending institutions and promoting uniform economic policies, ideally the United Nations. "One of the reasons for the excessive narrowness of the trade agenda is the excessive narrowness of the participants," he said, adding that technocrats at financial institutions should not be running economic policy.    According to Stiglitz, the economies of developing nations are made vulnerable and volatile under the current system imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which is based on "market fundamentalism" and "unreal assumptions of the economy".    More than 5,000 Dalits, or members of Hindu society's lowest caste, marched and sang yesterday as part of the "World Dignity Forum," a World Social Forum side event dedicated to ending discrimination against India's 138 million Dalits.    In another forum event, 400 lawmakers from around the world drafted a resolution opposing U.S. President George W. Bush's policies in Iraq. "We strongly oppose the unilateralist military and political intervention of the U.S. in Iraq and other countries," the declaration states. The lawmakers also blasted the World Bank and IMF as "efficient tools to prevent any local, social or economic development."     Illustrating the desperate need for economic reform in developing nations like India, a group of activists traveled from Bombay to Asia's largest slums, in Dharma, to symbolically launch a free-trade banner of intertwined human figures standing amid dilapidated homes and polluted sewers .
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