Imperialist debt and plunder, not development! GABRIELA, BAYAN protest as IMF-World Bank open annual meeting

Manila, Philippines – Led by GABRIELA and BAYAN, together with allied anti-imperialist organizations, Filipino activists denounced the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as the two institutions opened their annual meeting in Bangkok, Thailand — the first time the two institutions have held their flagship summit in Southeast Asia since 2018.

“The IMF and the World Bank do not come to our region as partners in development. They come as the economic machinery of imperialism, dictating how our country must be run so that our resources, our labor, and our markets remain captive to foreign profit,” said GABRIELA Secretary-General Clarice Palce. “Every annual meeting they hold is a meeting held over the heads and against the interests of the Filipino people.”

The protest exposed how decades of IMF-World Bank loan conditionalities have shaped Philippine economic policy against the people: the privatization of power and water among other social services, the deregulation of the oil industry, agricultural liberalization, labor flexibilization, regressive taxation through VAT and excise taxes, the plunder of our lands and natural resources, and automatic debt servicing that has locked the country into perpetual repayment to imperialist banks, creditors, and institutions.

“From the moment he took office, Marcos Jr. has pursued the same economic path as his predecessors: courting foreign creditors, courting foreign capital, and selling out the national interest. His imperialist puppet regime has opened the country further to foreign ownership and shackled the budget to debt payments, even as millions of Filipinos struggle to eat three meals a day,” she added.

GABRIELA pointed out that under the present administration, the national government’s outstanding debt has continued to climb to P19.61 trillion (as of August 2026), despite soaring revenue collection, exposing the lie that borrowing generates genuine growth for the people. What it has generated instead, the group said, are higher electricity and water rates, imported farm products that flood and destroy local markets, weakened job security, and an ever-expanding tax burden on the shoulders of the poor.

The women’s group stressed that the burden of these policies falls hardest on the poor, especially women, who absorb the impact of rising commodity prices, shrinking public services, and falling household incomes and are forced to take on the unpaid labor of caring for their families as the state retreats from its obligations.

“Women are the first to feel hunger when food prices rise, the first to lose income when wages are kept low and work is made precarious, and the last to be heard when budgets for health and education are slashed to pay foreign creditors,” Palce said. “There can be no genuine women’s liberation in a country whose economy is chained to the interests of the IMF, the World Bank, and the imperialist powers behind them — nor under a president whose every move only tightens those chains.”

“The Filipino people have paid enough — in poverty and hunger. It is not the imperialist creditors who should be repaid, but the people who have been robbed for decades. And those who have made a career out of mortgaging our future — from the IMF and World Bank down to the Marcos Jr. administration — must answer for it,” Palce added.

The women’s group called on all Filipino women and working people to oppose imperialist plunder and join the struggle for genuine national sovereignty and development, and to hold Marcos Jr. accountable for his hell-bent subservience to imperialist dictates. “Women strike down neoliberalism! Shut down the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank!” Palce concluded

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