An International Monetary Fund team is in Islamabad negotiating a $1 billion loan under the Resilience and Sustainability Facility. The latest negotiations have illustrated some of the problems with how the polluting countries of the West and the affected countries of the global South view climate finance. The ERSF is to be given only to countries already on an IMF programme. That means that if Pakistan completes its present programme, it will have to obtain another if it wants to access more climate finance from this source. The IMF has provided the facility of the same review for both the EFF or ESAF, which does mean that if this ERSF is approved, the upcoming EFF review, due next month, should be considered a done deal.
It is true that those putting up money not only want to know their money is being spent honestly and wisely, but want some input into how it is being spent. The IMF team’s initial discussions are on a carbon levy on petrol. The IMF had proposed the carbon levy during the EFF negotiations, and have apparently not given up on the idea, even though Pakistan is hardly the most responsible for pollution.. This would show that the IMF intends to use the RSF as another stick to beat Third-World governments on the head with. This puts countries like Pakistan in a bind; they are being forced to pay back loans used to repair damage caused by the lending nations’ profligacy. The climate crisis is being used by the West to bind Third-World countries even deeper into the debt trap. It also wants to force them to adopt solutions they have evolved. Just one example of how they will operate is their insistence on the Third World countries buying their equipment at inflated prices, and it goes without saying that ‘experts’ will be paid from loans, which will be repaid by backbreaking taxation of the Third-World peoples.
Pakistan is eager, even anxious, to get this loan, but this does not constitute climate justice. The West, through such Bretton-Woods organisations as the IMF, is merely throwing money at the problem in the hope that it will go away. Though climate change should not become an excuse for Third World governments to display fecklessness and financial irresponsibility, it also should not become just another means for the West to practise colonialism. All must realise that climate change is a problem that all must tackle together.
