ONE of the World Bank’s most important environmental programmes is a sham and should be scrapped. That is the claim of environmentalists on the eve of the bank’s 60th anniversary meeting on 24 April.
Its five-year-old Prototype Carbon Fund pays for plantations in developing countries designed to soak up carbon dioxide from the air. But green campaigners say many of the fund’s projects are bad for the environment: they encourage planting monocultures of fast-growing eucalyptus on former rainforest land and lead to the drying up of rivers. They are also bad for people: workers claim they face “slave-like conditions”.
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