The Circumstances That Enabled The Crisis

Here:

Neoliberal policies prioritising international debt repayment above social spending added fuel to the Ebola crisis, leading academics warned yesterday.

Professors said that the International Monetary Fund is operating policies that hamper healthcare in the three worst-hit West African countries.

Conditions for loans from the fund had prevented an effective response to the outbreak that has killed nearly 8,000 people, they wrote in this month’s Lancet Global Health journal.

The IMF immediately leapt to deny the charges and quoted World Bank data to support its contention that its programmes contributed to “significantly improved” health outcomes in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

In addition, the finance agency added, it had provided £250 million to fight Ebola in west Africa.

But the professors were unequivocal in their conclusions.

“The IMF aims to become part of the solution to the crisis … yet, could it be that the IMF had contributed to the circumstances that enabled the crisis to arise in the first place?” asked the Lancet article, whose lead author is Cambridge University sociologist Alexander Kentikelenis.

Co-authors are Lawrence King of Cambridge, Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and David Stuckler of Oxford University.

IMF lending requires governments to give priority to short-term economic objectives over investment in health, the authors insisted, backing up their arguments with IMF statistics that showed the terms of loans to Guinea, under an IMF austerity programme for 21 years, Liberia, following one for seven years, and Sierra Leone, in the programme for 19 years.

IMF policies had contributed to “underfunded, insufficiently staffed and poorly prepared health systems” in the three countries — a major reason the outbreak spread so rapidly, they said.

They added that IMF insistence on decentralised healthcare made it difficult to mobilise a co-ordinated response to Ebola.

The IMF huffed and puffed that health spending had increased in the three countries, if it was calculated as a percentage of GDP.

And the agency was working to provide more debt relief that would free funds for increased health spending, it claimed.