All the best to our President at Davos

We should not expect too much to come out of international conferences like the World Economic Forum at Davos. It was a good occasion for President GMA to meet with the movers and shakers of the world but it has a limited function. There were important speeches and a lot of bonhomie but it is more ritual than the promise of action.

This year’s meeting “promises to be one of the most important events in the Forum’s history”. More than 40 heads of state and government attended, a clear indication of the pendulum swing of focus from business to government.

 The theme of Davos this year was ‘Shaping the Post-Crisis World’ and it is government that will take the lead with the business debacle.

The event may be ritual but something good can happen if the cluster of important persons were only to meet and shake hands. These are gestures of goodwill.

So too, with President GMA. She was not expected to say anything earth-shaking nor was she meant to. But she is our president. We can only wish her well when she seeks what the Palace said was her mission in Davos: to look for more job opportunities in Europe and the Middle East for Filipino workers and invite foreign business groups to invest in the Philippines.

To all Filipino politicians and their media cohorts who dislike her there are other occasions to criticize or insult her. Nothing is gained by the country with unproductive mudslinging when she is out there to represent our country during a severe financial crises unseen since the Great Depression.

All hands must be on the deck including presidential candidates who seem compelled to say something nasty about the President to advance their candidacies in 2010.

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World Bank and corruption. Just to correct misimpressions being created by reports on the World Bank it may be good to know that the world financial body is not exactly the moral leader it is claiming or being portrayed to be.

It is not squeaky clean. We redress the balance if we are as aware that corruption in the World Bank is endemic. As one pundit put it corruption in the World Bank is “as old as empire” which is not to say that the banned firms are innocent either. What might be truer is that there is more than meets the eye when the World Bank is used to be the arbiter of corruption.

The World Bank is hardly qualified to not sit on a perch as an accuser as some local media have made it appear to be. A former World Bank employee, Steve Berkman wrote an insider’s account of the bank’s dealing in his book — The World Bank and the Gods of Lending — in which he paints the collusion between the bank and country borrowers.

So it is not as if this is all new to the bank or that it is playing a clean hand against corruption of projects in the Philippines. The book is well documented and focuses on case studies in Nigeria and the Gambia.

Equally relevant is Berkman’s accusations against the World Bank’s mismanagement and the hypocrisy that has been going on for years.

The World Bank has failed in its mandate to operate honestly, efficiently and openly so it should not be pointing fingers. But as Jim Wesberry, Chief Auditor, Organization of American States, and Georgia senator himself has said in his review of the book, “Unfortunately we may extrapolate these cases to all the other international financial institutions as well.”

During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, peeved at accusations of corruption against his regime, just kicked out both the World Bank and the IMF during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. He refused their admonitions not to bail out the economy and just to let bad businesses fail. Now look who’s talking? Mahathir has been vindicated for fobbing off their ‘moralities’. Now it is the turn of World Bank and IMF to cringe with the turn of the present financial crisis and the West’s trillion dollar bailouts. Who is being hyprocritical now? As for some Filipinos they should try not to be so gullible. Good governance is not possible without good citizenship and good citizenship requires more knowledge and awareness that seems to be absent in the coverage of the World Bank stories.

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The Department of Environment and Natural Resources has finally finished the survey that the Supreme Court requires before its decision on the 12,000 hectare Zobel property in Calatagan can be implemented.

Previous heads of the department sat on this requirement until Secretary Atienza came into the picture and created an action team to monitor the making of the survey. Now that it is done, we can look forward to an amicable settlement of the long-standing feud. I hear it will be only a matter of a few months to wrap up the implementation of the decision that would separate some 2,000 hectares as government property and titled to farmers tilling the lands.

The Zobel and Ayala families have done many worthwhile social projects in the province that are examples of how to do business and be as committed to social and ethical concerns.

The Enrique Zobel Foundation, for example supports social and economic development projects like artshops, teacher training, and the building of schools. With the settlement of the Calatagan case, its charitable projects will be enhanced, not diminished.