Jakarta MUN

Peculiar Council

From the beginning of my MUN journey, I have always been curious with council relating to economic matters because I've always had an interest on the subject. This was the reason I chose to join PresMUN, because it had WTO. Continuing that, I really wanted to join World Bank in this MUN because of the same reason. I would say that this council definitely have a very different dynamics that I don't particularly find enjoyable because of its comparatively different ROP compared to other councils. It might have been more fun had this been an offline council but sadly that wasn't the case.

First, I had to submit a loan proposal and not a position paper. The nature of the document is pretty different, because it basically requested money from the WB for a specific set of proposed programs to be conducted. But other than making it hard for me to win Best Loan Proposal, I was able to cope with this just fine. Second, the first 1.5 committee sessions were spent presenting the loan proposal that each delegates have been sent. It took that long because there were 25 or so delegates in the council. When the first delegate who presented their loan proposal pulled up a PowerPoint I immediately panicked because I, and presumably the other delegates, had written our loan proposals in the typical position paper format. So I rushed to port the loan proposal I had to a PPT format. I did this while the other delegates were presenting their loan proposals.

But the most impactful difference in the ROP that I had experienced was the lack of draft resolution, instead the council voted upon multiple loan proposals that was proposed by each of the delegates. The thing is though, there weren't really any disincentive to vote on a loan proposal, even if it was bad because there weren't any explicit limit of the number of loan proposal that can be passed nor a maximum amount of money that can be loaned out in the council, so the delegates just mindlessly voted upon each of the loan proposal that came into voting. It was honestly really anticlimactic (considering the quite intense debate that were had during the committee sessions) and took the fun out of the council.

I do believe though had there been an incentive to not pass every loan proposal by imposing some limitations that I've mentioned and if this council had been offline, it'd have been an incredibly fun council to be in. Cycling through all of the other delegates in an unmoderated caucus to beg for money would've been a unique experience.

Online But Offline

The World Bank council was decided to not be offline going into the MUN's late registration, which was pretty disappointing because after PresMUN I really wanted to go back to doing offline MUN (also because for the reasons I've stated above in hindsight). Nonetheless, I bought the social night package that enabled me to go to the offline social night event. This means that even though it's offline, I had to still go to Jakarta to attend the event. Because the social night took place right in the middle of the event, on the night of the second day, I practically had to be in Jakarta throughout the entire event. So I decided to stay at one of my friend's house (he was a fellow member of GMUNC who also attended the online council but bought the social night package). The coolest part of staying in his house was that I got to use a 21:9 monitor in one of my friend's room, which definitely aided me immensely on the conference.

The social night was hella fun though, it was definitely worth the money I spent for the package. I got to see people I had met previously in Singapore MUN in a elegant and cool venue. The food was delicious and unique as well, though I wished there were more of it since the portion given was quite small.

Mind the Inflation

The angle that I took throughout the conference was mainly centered around the high inflation rate that occurred in the aftermath of the pandemic. Departing from that, I argued that measures such as direct loans or even capital injection was not in order because that would exacerbate the aforementioned inflation and would be antithetical to the raising of interest rate by central banks around the world, especially Uganda who raised their interest rate to 10% and kept it there for a long time. Instead, the measures taken should've been in the form of human training and capacity building. In that case, once inflation is kept at bay at some point in the future and thus capital can flow again to the MSMEs, they would be able to optimally take advantage of them through the improved competence.

Takeaways

It certainly wasn't enough to solely take the angle of minding the inflation. I definitely felt like a one trick pony after bringing up my argument above in a Consultation of the Whole because I practically had nothing more to say.

Nonetheless, the point I made about inflation was definitely important to bring up during the debate, but the fact that I had basically told someone else of this substance in an attempt to convince them of it prior to me actually being vocal about it in the council made it seems that they came up with it first and I was just echoing them. It's definitely something that I'll have to keep in mind in the next conferences, to keep my substance close and not give it away that easily.

After PresMUN (arguably after SMUN actually) I was determined to get out of the VC "trap" that I had fallen into in the past few MUNs, but it's evident that my effort here was not enough and I was quite disappointed of that. This was despite the fact that I've implemented all of the previous takeaways I had got in PresMUN (see the previous page talking about that), resulting in a very meticulous plan that to this day I'm still proud to have made.