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Opinion: Why we cannot celebrate the World Bank’s 80-year anniversary

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This July, the World Bank Group celebrates its 80th anniversary. But for women and communities across the Global South there is nothing to celebrate. In this op-ed originally published by Devex on 19 July 2024, three close partners of the Coalition (Titi Soentoro from Aksi!, gender, social and ecological justice” – Indonesia; Verónica Gostissa from Asamblea Pucara – Argentina; and Mbole Veronique from Green Development Advocates – Cameroon) share stories from their countries showing how the World Bank is exacerbating the exact problems it claims to solve.

This July, the World Bank Group celebrates its 80th anniversary. But for us — women rights defenders from Asia, Africa, and Latin America — there is nothing to celebrate.

While the World Bank is proudly presenting its successes in fighting poverty and building a greener future, the stories of communities in our countries paint a very different picture. From recent controversial projects to old ones where communities never found justice, the World Bank has a 80-year legacy of harm and impoverishment.

The negative impact of development projects can be long lasting. In 1985, the World Bank funded the Kedung Ombo Dam in Indonesia. Over 27,000 people were forcibly and violently evicted, with the military threatening those trying to resist. Forty years later, the harm inflicted remains unaddressed. Resettled women don’t have close access to water sources, health facilities, and a market. Pregnant women have failed to get checkups, while children have often dropped out of school and are being forced into early marriages. Yet, despite acknowledging the harm it caused, the World Bank keeps replicating old mistakes.

 

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Nachtigal hydropower project. Photo: World Bank Group

 

In 2022, a community in Cameroon filed a complaint raising serious concerns about the World Bank-funded Nachtigal hydroelectric project, one of the largest dams in Central Africa. Imposed without people’s participation, the project is destroying livelihoods, taking lands, causingdeforestation, and destroying sacred sites. Our Cameroonian sisters are particularly affected: They have lost access to the forests where they used to pick medicinal herbs and other key natural resources. The complaint process has come to an end, but the hopes for justice are extremely limited. The investigations conducted by the bank’s accountability mechanisms are known to be extremely lengthy — and only rarely lead to some remedy.

Civil society has been calling on the World Bank Group to strengthen its safeguards and accountability mechanisms, which are currently falling short of a human rights-based approach. But for every step forward, there has been a step back. Moreover, safeguards have often been used as a pretext to protect the institution from the international human rights legal system and to avoid applying more stringent standards.

Under its new president, Ajay Banga, the World Bank has been undertaking a series of reforms, to become bigger and bolder in its response to climate change. But the bank’s actions appear to indicate more of the same. Beyond the catchy slogans, the World Bank is still replicating a top-down and neocolonial development model that ends up exacerbating the exact problems the bank claims to solve. For example, in Indonesia the World Bank Group — despite its pledges to address climate change — is funding the expansion of the Java 9 and 10 plants, considered the largest and dirtiest coal plants in Southeast Asia.

In its 80 years of existence, it is our view, as shared with other civil society groups, that the World Bank has fueled the spiraling debt crisis, growing inequality, and climate change, with a disproportionate impact on women and children. Some stories — like the scandal of the child sex abuse case in Kenyan schools funded by the World Bank — have hit the headlines. Others, unfortunately, have remained largely unreported.

 

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Indigenous activists in the Salar del Hombre Morto. Credit: Susi Maresca

 

Last year, the International Finance Corporation — the World Bank’s private arm — approved a  $180 million loan to Allkem, for its Sal de Vida lithium mining project in Argentina’s Salar del Hombre Muerto. On paper, this investment falls under the bank’s green portfolio, because lithium is needed for the electric car batteries. In reality, this project has a catastrophic environmental impact, dried up one of the most important rivers in the area,, and violates the rights of the local Indigenous communities.

Before the project was approved, local communities and civil society organizations had sounded the alarm bell. They had prepared briefings on the project’s impacts and engaged with IFC to raise their concerns. But despite being recognized as “beneficiaries,” local communities say they are routinely ignored or silenced. The bank approved the loan without the community’s consent and did not take any action when local activists were threatened and criminalized.

As women defenders and caregivers, for generations we have been protecting our ecosystems sacrificed in the name of development and cared for our communities harmed under the pretext of economic growth. For generations, we have stood in solidarity with our sisters and brothers across the world who have been demanding a different type of development.

The World Bank cannot get it right by putting blinders on the past. The evicted Indonesian communities will not get their flooded land back. The women in Cameroon will not be able to access their precious medicinal herbs, as their forests have been cleared. And the Indigenous people in the Salar del Hombre Muerto lost their meadow near the river Trapiche, which dried up because of the huge volumes of fresh water used to extract lithium. But the World Bank is still on time to withdraw from controversial new projects, to provide remedy to the harmed communities, to speed up the investigation processes, and to seek meaningful consent before building something. Eighty years are enough. If bank President Banga wants the institution to grow bigger, it should learn from the past as it looks forward.

Original Source: Coalition for Human Rights In Development.

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New publication: Promise, divide, intimidate, and coerce: Tactics palm oil companies use to grab community lands. Summary Edition

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Recently, the Informal Alliance against industrial oil palm plantations in West and Central Africa has launched a new summary edition of the booklet “Promise, divide, intimidate, and coerce: Tactics palm oil companies use to grab community lands”.

Recently, the Informal Alliance against industrial oil palm plantations in West and Central Africa has launched a new summary edition of the booklet “Promise, divide, intimidate, and coerce: Tactics palm oil companies use to grab community lands”.

This new edition consists of a collection of more than 20 tactics that oil palm companies use to grab people’s land for plantation expansion. It is the result of many years of experience of community activists and grassroots groups who have been struggling to resist the corporate takeover of community lands.
Although the focus is on the tactics of oil palm corporations, many similarities exist with other industries and sectors involved in land grabs and extractivism. The booklet is available in French here, and in English here. If you think the booklet would be useful in other languages too, do not hesitate to let us know!

The the long version, from 2018, is available here: French / English.

Source: World RainForest Movement.

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Global Witness condemns escalating arrests of climate campaigners in Uganda

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A total of 96 cases of people being detained or arrested for opposing the controversial East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) have been reported in the past nine months, with the number of arrests skyrocketing in recent months.

In December, Global Witness released a report ‘Climate of Fear’ documenting reprisals against land and environmental defenders challenging plans to build the world’s longest heated crude oil pipeline through both Uganda and Tanzania. At the time, 47 people had been arrested for challenging the pipeline in Uganda between September 2020 and November 2023. Double the number of incidents have since been reported in less than a year.

Reports of attacks and threats have continued despite the French oil major behind the project TotalEnergies “expressing concern” to the Ugandan government over arrests in May 2024. Since then, the state crackdown has stepped up against a civil society mobilising to protest the pipeline.

Global Witness is calling on TotalEnergies to meet prior public commitments to respect the rights of human rights defenders and to take immediate action to end the violent crackdown on climate campaigners in Uganda.

Hanna Hindstrom, Senior Investigator at Global Witness’s Land and Environmental Defenders campaign, said:

“The tsunami of arrests of peaceful demonstrators fighting EACOP has exposed the limits of TotalEnergies’ commitment to human rights.

“The company cannot in good conscience press ahead with the pipeline while peaceful protesters are being attacked for exercising their right to free speech. It must adopt a zero-tolerance approach to reprisals.”

On 9 August, 47 students and three drivers were intercepted on their way to protest the pipeline and diverted to a police station. Just six weeks earlier, 30 people were arrested outside the Chinese embassy. In early June, environmental campaigner Stephen Kwikiriza was abducted and detained by the army, who reportedly beat him and dumped him on the side of a road a week later.

NGOs working on environmental conservation and oil extraction have also reported that their offices have been raided, and their staff intimidated and harassed, which has deterred many from speaking out about the pipeline.

Hindstrom added:

“Climate activism is under threat around the world, while fossil fuel companies quietly benefit. European oil companies cannot absolve themselves from responsibility while their investments fuel climate destruction, reprisals and violence overseas.”

Original Source: globalwitness.org

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‘Land grabbing is rolling along as we speak and in fact intensifying’

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Members of the Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil (MST) march for agrarian reform. [Image for illustrative purposes only] Credit: MST BA

The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems recently released a report highlighting escalating pressures on farmland. It identified four primary drivers: deregulation and financialisation, which treat land as a speculative asset; expanding conservation and carbon offset projects competing for land; mining, urban sprawl, and infrastructure developments encroaching on agricultural areas; and industrialised food systems favouring corporate chains over smallholders. These factors threaten equitable land access for farmers. Nettie Wiebe, a founding member of La Via Campesina and report co-author, emphasized these challenges in an interview with Think Ink, stressing the urgent need for policy reforms to protect agricultural lands and support small-scale farmers.

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Land is just such an enormously important component of food systems, food security, food sovereignty. It’s also a key component of climate action and biodiversity. So who owns the land and what we do with the land on which we all depend are key components of our possible futures.

[The report] tries to clarify some trends, expose some assumptions, and come up with leverage points where we could make changes that would bring us to a place of greater equality, better protection of environments, and greater food security and sovereignty. […]

Land inequality is an old topic. It’s linked to colonialism, racism, patriarchy: I mean, it’s only relatively recently, in my generation, that women got equal access to land in the Prairies. These are deep seated issues that have troubled rural communities for a long time.

But there are some new trends. Land grabbing is one of those, which became pretty intense in the 2008 crisis and seemed to taper off. But it is rolling along as we speak and in fact intensifying. We looked not just at traditional land grabbing but there are new things like the deregulation of financial markets and the increasing financialisation of land transfers and land accumulation.

Green Grabbing is a relatively new trend that is perversely labelled as environmentally better and hence very difficult for environmentalists and those of us who care about climate change to push against. But for the most part, it is a pernicious diversion from real solutions.

Then there’s the increasing encroachment of urbanisation and mining. Here in Canada, the mining is in the north for the most part, which is not agricultural land. But elsewhere in the world, particularly in South and Central America and in Africa, extractive industries are a real assault on many communities, including small scale farming.

Then, of course, we talked about the assumptions around agriculture as just a productive asset, the bias towards productivism and maximising the production of very few major crops, very few species of animals, and the push to expand those everywhere, at the expense of biodiversity and diverse diets for people.

[…] Everywhere in the world, the increased pressure on the price of land spells displacement for small scale farming. That’s here in Saskatchewan, as well as in Honduras, Brazil, or Zimbabwe. Wherever we look, there’s pressure on land prices from the intrusion of major investors with deep pockets, sometimes governments, often agribusiness.

The report details that there’s a huge expansion in funds that are specifically allocated to grabbing land because it’s a physical asset, a capital asset, which is deemed to be more secure than bonds and other financial instruments.

And the deregulation of the financial market has encouraged, or at least permitted, a lot more of this to go on. That’s a policy issue. A governance issue.

It’s also a values issue. If we see land as just a productive asset to extract value from rather than seeing it as part of our identity, the place where we live, our source of culture and food, our web of life… Land isn’t just bushels per acre and the more you confine it to that domain, the more open it is to financial exploitation. This is a dangerous trend on many levels.

When we say that 70% of farmland is controlled by 1% of the world’s largest farms, that’s a dangerous trend because they don’t love the land. Land is like family: if you don’t love it, you will exploit it and destroy it. That’s what we’re seeing around us.

Source: viacampesina.org

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