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This article provides information about the consequences of the involvement of international financial institutions in the economic and infrastructure development:
Development as an ideology allows the indirect entry of global market domination. It creates the need for international aid and foreign debt, which provide the capital for such development projects that commercialise or privatise resources. Local resources thus increasingly move out of control of local communities and even national governments into the hands of international financial institutions.
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Forestry projects, dam projects and fisheries projects tie the resources of the remotest village to international investment and aid. Multilateral development agencies such as World Bank give loan for environmentally sensitive areas like agriculture, forestry and irrigation and through these loans give primacy to the market economy, and render nature’s economy and the survival economy as indispensable.
The condition for the loan determine the mode of utilisation of natural resources, the rates of return on investments in irrigation projects create an imperative for cash crop cultivation and wastage of water, even though it leaves the land waterlogged or an arid desert.
Through internationally financed development projects, conflicts over natural resources pit tribal and peasant communities against international institutions with the state acting as an agent of dispossession of local communities, to clear the way for global plans and ideologies of development. Integration with the global market economy thus marginalises the concern for nature’s economy and the survival economy.
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The massive involvement of international finance in the economic development of developing world countries changes the natural resource management strategies in drastic ways. Rapid growth of export- oriented resource utilisation has led countries to the debt trap, with its concomitant ecological degradation.
On April 26, 1986 in the Kiev region, Ukrain, 12 kms from the Belarusian Border, a Catastrophe occurred — the major breakdown of a power unit at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. By its scale, complexity to long-term consequence, it is the most severe catastrophe in the entire world history of atomic energy use. As a result of the explosion of the failed reactor, huge amounts of radioactive substance were emitted to the atmosphere. The accident has left its radioactive fallout trace on 23% of the territory of Belarus, 3778 settlements with more than 2 million people had resided therein; or 4.8% of the territory of Ukraine; 0.5% territory of Russia.
After the Chernobyl accident Belarus became a zone of ecological disaster. The situation got worse since the newly emerged area of radioactive contamination coincided with the formerly existing area of high chemical pollution. The area of agricultural lands contaminated with radioactive cesium-137 with a very high density constitutes 1600 thousand hectares. 1685 thousand hectares of forest in Belarus are contaminated with radioactive elements. The catastrophe has affected the destinies of millions Belarusians. The radioactivity contamination of the ecosystem will stifle normal agricultural production and forestry for many decades.