It is very hard to say anything new and interesting about structural adjustment.

The sadistically cruel impact on the developing countries of International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank-administered structural adjustment Ð the Reaganomics-like economic policy package including measures such as privatization, government budget slashing and opening up to foreign investment -- has long been evident. Indeed, when we editorialized about this topic 10 years ago ["Brutal Banking," Multinational Monitor, April 1990 -- reprinted on the next page], we began by asking "How many times does it have to be said? Structural adjustment doesn't work."

Another decade's toll of babies dead before age one due to preventable disease, people suffering from malnutrition, adults' economically productive time wasted due to high rates of unemployment, clearcut rainforests and growing income and wealth inequality only serves to reiterate what has long been evident. Structural adjustment kills, and sustainable development policies require rejection of the basic tenets of structural adjustment.

But while the evidence of the failure of structural adjustment has long been available for those who care to look, and is certainly well understood among non-governmental organizations working on development issues, a disturbing number of these organizations in the United States have begun to downplay the importance of structural adjustment issues. Some have even begun to waver on the bottom-line question of whether structural adjustment policies should be rejected.

In the last two years, and following the lead of campaigners in the United Kingdom, dozens of religious and development groups in the United States -- including Presbyterian Church/USA, Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam and Bread for the World -- have participated in a coalition, Jubilee 2000 USA, calling for debt relief for the world's poorest nations.

In contrast to other Jubilee organizations around the world, Jubilee 2000 USA has subordinated any concern about structural adjustment -- and the interrelated question of IMF power -- to an overriding concern to achieve modest debt relief gains.

The coalition stood on the sidelines as Congress debated allocating $18 billion to the IMF in 1998, and refused to support an amendment offered by Cynthia McKinney, D-Georgia, mandating a cap on poor countries' debt payments. It took a pass on the HOPE for Africa bill, introduced by Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., D-Illinois -- the most far-reaching debt cancellation bill ever to obtain significant support in Congress. The coalition was nowhere to be seen when Representative Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, last year introduced an amendment in the House Banking Committee that would have instructed the U.S. president to work to delink IMF-provided debt relief from structural adjustment.

Instead, the coalition devoted all of its substantial mobilization and lobbying efforts to pushing the "Leach bill" (named after lead sponsor Jim Leach, R-Iowa), a bill to provide funding for the IMF to carry out debt relief under its Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility, and also to provide relief of debts owed by developing countries to the United States ("bilateral debt"). Under a complicated administrative formula, this debt relief would provide only modest reductions in debt payments for approximately 15 countries -- but only on the condition that they implement structural adjustment programs to the IMF's manic satisfaction for three years. Although the bill itself was never considered by the full House or Senate, a version of the Leach bill was eventually included in an appropriations bill covering many government agencies and programs.

Why would campaigners to relieve the Third World debt burden settle for such modest gains on debt relief? At the end of the day, the argument came to one reason: "Be realistic."

But this IMF realism was misguided tactically, strategically and substantively, with tragic consequences.

Tactically, the Jubilee coalition, which played a lead role in drafting the Leach legislation, erred by including so many compromises in the original bill, rather than sticking closer to what they actually wanted, and waiting to see if opponents would water it down.

Strategically, the Jubilee coalition failed to see the possibility of aligning with numerous Republican factions that dislike the IMF to advance a program that would have granted much more far-reaching debt relief in combination with a major scale-back of IMF authority and including an end to structural adjustment conditions. If Jubilee 2000 USA had supported this program, there is a better than even chance it would have been able to pass at least the House of Representatives. Failing to stake out this position has left Republicans (along with a relative handful of progressive Democrats) as the leading Congressional critics of the IMF.

Substantively, Jubilee 2000 USA lost sight of the fundamental importance of shrinking the IMF's power and ending its ability to impose structural adjustment on the developing world.

At a time when the IMF has been politically vulnerable as never before, IMF realism has enabled the IMF to maintain its power and authority, and its ability to decree that millions should suffer the entirely preventable pain of structural adjustment.