Ann Danaiya Usher - DAMS AS AID A political anatomy of Nordic development thinking

ABBREVIATIONS

ABB Asea Brown Boveri

ADB Asian Development Bank

BITS Swedish Board for Industrial and Technical Cooperation

BOOT Build, Own, Operate and Transfer

CNE National Energy Commission, Chile

CODEPU Committee for the Defence of Peoples Rights, Chile

CONADI National Corporation of Indigenous Development, Chile

CONAMA National Environment Commission, Chile

DN Directorate for Nature Management, Norway

EDL Electricit du Laos

EGAT Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand

EIA environmental impact assessment

ENDESA National Electricity Enterprise Company Limited, Chile

EULA Euro-Latin Research in Environmental Sciences, Chile

FINNIDA Department for International Development Cooperation,

Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland; formerly Finnish International Development Agency FIVAS Association for International Water and Forest Studies,

Norway

GABB Action Group for the Biobo, Chile

ICOLD International Commission on Large Dams

IFC International Finance Corporation

IVO Imatran Voima, Finland

JICA Japanese International Cooperation Agency

MAJI Ministry of Water, Tanzania

NGO non-governmental organization

NINA Norwegian Institute for Nature Research

NIVA Norwegian Institute for Water Research

NORAD Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation

NVE Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Administration

OECD Organization for Economic and Development Cooperation

PER Project for Ecological Recovery, Thailand

Sida Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency;

formerly, Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA)

TANESCO Tanzanian Electricity Supply Company

Terra Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance, Thailand

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In February 1988, having recently started working on The Nation newspaper in Bangkok, I visited a part of the vast Thung Yai Naresuan forest in western Thailand that was to be inundated by a hydro-electric dam, the Nam Choan. The environmental impact assessment for the project claimed that the forest was already largely degraded by local Karen farmers, and that the area had no special characteristics. It therefore predicted no negative impacts, but concluded that the project would generate income from logging in the flood zone. Nam Choan was stopped because of massive public opposition. The folly of the project was underlined when, three years later, that same area was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site on account of its spectacular biological diversity.

Innumerable people have made this book possible. I am grateful to the late Seub Nakhasathien, to Weerawat Dheeraprasart and to Witoon Permpongsacharoen, who first brought me into Thung Yai, and introduced me to the dams debate. Six years later, in Stockholm, Gudrun Hubendick of the North South Programme of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (Naturskyddsfreningen) supported the idea of writing this book, and provided a grant that enabled us to put it together. My thanks go to colleagues at The Nation in Bangkok and at Development Today in Oslo, to Matthew Smith at Routledge for his patience and encouragement, to Lillian Belander, Johan Niss and Marie Bystrm for assistance with translation, to Karin Lindahl for taking me to see the Power statue, to Per Ola Utsi for the photograph, to Heffa Schticking and Nicolas Hildyard for their helpful comments on the typescript, and to Sven Hamrell for his guidance over the years. It was an honour to work with the other contributors to this volume; their input goes far beyond the chapters that bear their names. I would like to thank also the many people inside the Nordic aid agencies and companies who helped with advice and information, without which our task would have been much more difficult.

Finally, thanks to my family for their constant support.

A.D.U. Stockholm June 1996

ABOUT THE BOOK, THE CONTRIBUTORS AND WHAT THIS BOOK IS NOT ABOUT

Ann Danaiya Usher

THREE PREMISES

This collection of essays starts from three premises: that large dams cause serious environmental and social impacts; that public opposition to dams exists in virtually every country where there is the democratic space to express dissent; and that because the negative effects of dams are borne disproportionately by the poor, Western donors face an intractable dilemma when they give dams as aid. This book is about how aid agencies handle that dilemma.

A dam is a cement wall that blocks the natural flow of a river. With hydro dams, which are discussed in this volume, the water is directed through turbines to produce electricity. Hydro power is said to be renewable because rivers run for ever, and cheap because once the structure is in place, rain falls freely from the heavens. This assessment is valid only when the impacts and hidden costs of dams are ignored. All dams age and reservoirs fill up with silt; a process that is much accelerated in the tropics, where river sediment loads tend to be higher than in temperate climates. Decommissioning can be even more expensive than construction. Yet the eventual problems of how to remove dams and restore riverbeds and what to do with vast, mud-filled reservoirs are almost never discussed by builders or aid financiers. Taking into account the finite life span of power dams, which can be as short as a few decades in the tropics, would increase their cost significantly. With a handful of exceptions among the thousands of dams world-wide, this inevitable cost has been left, vaguely, for the next generation to deal with.

As a result of the overwhelming resistance to dams, however, both in the industrialized countries and in the South, the environmental and social impacts have started to be more widely recognized. Dams cause ecological disruption and reduction in biological diversity both up and downstream. Farming systems, pasture lands and forests are flooded, affecting communities that depend on these ecosystems. The obstruction in the movement of water and organisms affects water quality and habitats in the river, floodplain, estuary and coasts below the dam. Peasants and indigenous people who benefited from the freeflowing stream do not, as a rule, benefit from power dams. Electricity tends to go to urban and

industrial centres, while the oustees, as they are called in India, lose land and homes, as well as the fishing, transportation, irrigation and other services that the river once provided, and rarely receive fair compensation. As the rivers flow is transformed into electrical energy, it also concentrates the political power of already powerful groups, while further disempowering the marginalized and the poor.

This book does not review the uncounted costs of dams. These have been extensively documented elsewhere. Notably, in 1984, Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard published their monumental three-volume study, The Environmental and Social Impacts of Large Dams (The Ecologist, 1984), which includes a review of the main arguments against large dams, numerous case studies from around the world, and an annotated bibliography of the dams literature. Fred Pearces The Damned (Bodley Head, 1991) provides an overview of the dams debate in the context of the global water crisis. Mortgaging the Earth by Bruce Rich (Beacon Press, 1994) discusses the ecological and political implications of World Bank lending for several large dam projects. Most recently, Silenced Rivers (Zed Books, 1997) by Patrick McCully is an update of the Goldsmith book that describes the issues, and the growing international resistance against dams during the past decade.

The dam-building era for most of the rich world peaked during the middle decades of this century. By the 1970s, public opposition to dams was such that the relevant industries in countries like the United States, Norway, Sweden, Canada, Australia, France and Austria found themselves forced to look for new markets. Their building spree in the Third World began at this time, aided in no small measure by the development aid institutions, in particular the World Bank, and the bilateral aid agencies. With their mandate to alleviate poverty, Western donors began to give dams as aid, in the name of bringing development and progress to the South. The bilateral agencies tended to channel this aid through their national dam-building companies, for which aid subsidies created competitive advantage in international bids.