• ADB’s draft forest policy: The politics of participation
• Cambodia: Rubber plantation, deforestation and corruption
• Laos: Vietnamese consortium plans to build six dams
• Thailand: Assassinated Village Conservationist

 

Tadao Chino, the President of the Asian Development Bank knows what civil society wants from his Bank. During the ADB’s 2001 Annual General Meeting in Hawai’i, President Chino accepted a statement, "People’s Challenge to the ADB", signed by 68 NGOs. The statement included the demand that "Directions for future policies and practices must emerge from public debates and discussions, and not through closed-door negotiations among elite groups of ADB management, national and government elites and technical ‘experts’."

President Chino promised that the views of the NGOs "would be taken into account". Unfortunately, in its preparation of its proposed new forest policy, the Bank seems to have forgotten the President’s promise.

The Bank claims that it consulted with more than 500 people during workshops in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines and Sri Lanka. In February 2002, when the Bank produced a draft of its new forest policy, 140 people attended a workshop at Bank headquarters in Manila. Before the Manila workshop, the Bank sent its "draft strategic framework" to "about 12 forestry experts . . . for review and comment".

These "experts", of course, were selected by the Bank. Once the Bank’s draft forest policy appeared, any pretence of public debate disappeared. "Formal external consultation process was concluded with the February 2002 Regional Consultation," explained Jan P.M. van Heeswijk, Director General of the Regional and Sustainable Development Department at the ADB. "The internal review process is still underway," van Heeswijk added.

This internal review process is precisely the type of elite, closed-door negotiations that the NGOs in Hawai’i were keen to avoid.

The shortcomings of the Bank’s latest draft forest policy, dated June 2003, are illustrated by its uncritical support of industrial tree plantations. Indeed, one of the objectives of the Bank’s new policy is to "increase the extent and productivity of plantations".

A monoculture eucalyptus plantation, consisting of vast blocks of same-aged trees which are clearcut every five years, has more in common with an agricultural crop than with a forest. Yet the Bank defines a plantation as a "forest established by planting and/or seeding in the process of afforestation or reforestation".

A forest is defined in the draft as "an ecosystem with a minimum of 10% crown cover of trees and/or other wooded land/bamboos generally associated with wild flora, fauna, and natural soil conditions and not subject to agriculture." But when it comes to protecting forests from conversion to plantations, the draft states, "ADB will not provide assistance for plantations in natural forest areas with more than 40% crown density."

Thus a forest with 39% crown density is afforded no protection. No explanation is given for the sudden increase in the minimum crown cover from 10% to 40%, although this is a significant weakening of the protection afforded by the policy.

Even worse, the draft policy gives a green light to all forest-destroying projects, by allowing Bank consultants and staff to decide that deforestation or forest degradation cannot be avoided. The draft policy states: "Where environmental assessment indicates that the proposed investment will contribute significantly to natural forest degradation or conversion to nonforest land use, and change in forest land use becomes inevitable, ADB will require rehabilitating or reforesting an equal area as appropriate in consultation with affected communities."

The Bank fails to explain what the word "inevitable" means in this context. Nor does it explain how the decision is to be reached that damage to forests is inevitable. A forestry consultant hired by the ADB may decide that replacing large areas of forest, fields, grazing lands and swiddens with monoculture plantations is inevitable. To villagers, whose livelihoods depend on this land, such a decision would be far from inevitable.

Because the Bank defines plantations as forests, it fails to provide any protection to forests. If an ADB-funded industrial plantation project planned to replace, say, 50,000 hectares of forest, to comply with the Bank’s policy, the project developers could suggest that they would "reforest" a further 50,000 hectares with industrial plantations. Whether the Bank will also fund this "reforestation" is not clear from the draft policy.

The ADB has made its June 2003 draft policy available on its web-site. The Bank "welcomes comments", which, it assures us, will be given "serious consideration". The Bank "reserves the right to use the comments" in writing its forest policy and "may publish a list of contributors who have provided comments".

What the web-site does not mention is that the ADB’s Board has already discussed and rejected the June 2003 draft.

At a board meeting on 22 July 2003, several of the Bank’s Executive Directors requested revisions to the June 2003 draft policy, according to Uschi Eid, state parliamentary secretary at Germany’s Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Eid described the draft policy as "unfortunately behind our principles and minimum standards for this sector; it does not reach the quality of the ‘Operational Standards’ of the World Bank."

The problem with the Bank’s internal review process is that it is internal. It is not public. It does not allow participation. The Bank will not make public all the comments it receives. It will not respond to comments. How the Bank will decide which comments are to be included and which are to be ignored is unknown. None of the Bank’s alleged experts will have to face questions in public about the forest policy. In asking for comments, the Bank is doing no more than attempting to legitimise an autocratic process.

By: Chris Lang, e-mail: chrislang@t-online.de

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- Cambodia: Rubber plantation, deforestation and corruption

Since the 1960s, Cambodia has been promoting the rehabilitation of rubber plantations as well as the development of new ones. As long as rubber plantations involve using large areas of land, many people have been evicted from their traditional lands and many more have lost their livelihoods, to make way for the plantations (See WRM Bulletin Nº 59).

The Chhup Rubber Plantation Company at Tumring Commune, Sandan District, Kompong Thom Province, launched on August 2001, will cover 6,200 hectares of rich red soil, "courtesy of the Colexim and Mieng Ly Heng logging companies", said In Horn, vice chief of the company.

However, the plantation has encroached deep into the neighbouring forest. Indeed, clear-cutting outside the plantation's boundaries was noticed by Marcus Hardtke, a logging monitor, and Eva Galabru, former country director of Cambodia’s former official logging monitor, London- based Global Witness. They had seen a resin tree stump at five-hundred-fifty meters distance from the plantation, so they decided to survey the area. They walked a long distance, continuing on from the clear cut, down muddy oxcart trails and even some heavy machinery tread tracks until night fell, and found fresh logging sites, one after another, with nearly 20 remaining stumps, most of them blackened by fire and sticky with sap. Many of the resin stumps were found in the Tum Ar Spirit Forest and the villagers believed that people were getting sick and some dying because of the logging in the spirit forest. They stopped reporting the illegal logging to the forestry office as they said they believed that the forestry officials were part of the business network.

The trees felled had been producing resin, once a primary source of revenue for local people. In Chhan, a resident of Ronteah village in Tumring commune said he was angry about resin trees being cut. His family relied on the resin trees for living up until four or five years ago, when they disappeared, he said. Resin collectors play an active role in protecting the forest keeping their trees safe for a production which is environmentally sustainable (see WRM Bulletin Nº 54 and 48). But now resin trees are cut, or else villagers are coerced into selling their resin trees.

Hardtke and Galabru estimated that logging companies have clear cut at least 15 to 20 hectares of the forest outside the boundaries of the rubber plantation. The area was cut in the last two months. Though Cambodia's forest legislation prohibit the cutting of trees villagers have tapped to collect resin, a popular loophole is to call the area being logged a land concession, something a rubber plantation qualifies for. Thus, both business complement each other; they have found a way to legalise the conversion of a portion of the richest lowland evergreen forest in Indochina into rubber.

A letter dated June 30 from the Working Group on Natural Resources Management --donor representatives who have pushed for logging reform-- to the Minister of Agriculture addressed developments at Tumring it classified as "troubling." Due to no prior analysis, "land clearance has run ahead of replanting, leaving large areas bare and exposed to erosion, communities have been displaced and lost their established livelihoods...and there are other problems...that we believe threaten the viability of the entire endeavor," the letter stated. "We are aware that illegal and uncontrolled log shipment is taking place, including from in and around the Tumring area", the letter added.

Forestry Department Director Ty Sokhun denied that there is log transportation and tried to blame farmers for the clearing. Asked about the clear-cutting, In Horn explained that the vast size of the operation prevented him from staying abreast of everything happening at Tumring. "On the other hand, I'm not supposed to know too many things," he said.

However, it seems that there’s more than ignorance in the business. Family links with the Prime Minister suggest a case of corruption. Local sources have reported that a Mrs Seng Keang is listed on a Department of Forestry and Wildlife document dated Feb 19, 2003, as the owner of illegally cut logs to be confiscated from Tumring. Seng Keang is the wife of Dy Choch, also better known as Hun Choch, who is the cousin of Prime Minister Hun Sen, and also the brother of Dy Phen, the military police commander of Kompong Thom province. Also, a brother of Seng Keang, Kok Heang known as Mr 95, --who was previously sub-contractor for Mieng Ly Heng Concession-- has been reported to be an influential man who has threatened people in the area.

There are indications that the Royal Government of Cambodia intends to develop similar rubber plantations in three other provinces.

The contribution of this kind of business to the "development" of the Tumring community or to Cambodia is seriously questionable. The strong vested interests linked to it no doubt obtain money from timber, but no environmental study was conducted, no consultation or delineation of the forest estate has been undertaken. Logging, guns and corruption go hand in hand in many places, and now in Cambodia it seems that rubber plantations have joined the crew.

Article based on information from: "Borders Unclear at K Thom Rubber Plantation", by Porter Barron, The Cambodia Daily, September 2, 2003.

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- Laos: Vietnamese consortium plans to build six dams in Laos

In July, the Vietnam Laos Investment and Development Company signed a $232 million deal with the Lao Government to build and operate the 210 MW Sekaman 3 dam. This month the Lao Government announced its approval for the consortium to build five more dams: Se Kong 4 (310 MW), Se Kong 5 (200 MW), Se Pian-Se Nam Noi (340 MW), the Sekaman 1 (300 MW) and Sekaman 4 (55 MW).

The consortium consists of six state-run power and construction firms including Electricity of Vietnam, Vietnam’s state-run electricity utility and the Song Da Construction Corporation. Last year Hanoi signed an agreement with the Lao government to import 1,000 MW each year between 2006 and 2010.

The planned dams are all in the Se Kong River basin. The Se Kong flows from southern Laos into Cambodia and is a major tributary of the Mekong River.

In 1998, British engineering consulting firm Halcrow completed a $2.5 million study of potential dam sites in three river basins including the Se Kong. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of Halcrow’s study is the lack of information available about these rivers, their fisheries and watersheds and the people that live there.

Halcrow noted that: "the hydrology database needs to be improved"; "there is a need for the estimation of substantial amounts of missing data"; "fisheries information is extremely sporadic"; and "the current character of the project watersheds is unknown". On environmental and sociological impacts, Halcrow concluded that "the quality of available documentation is variable and generally inadequate to support the present study."

Yet there is little doubt that the impacts of the dams would be devastating.

The 190 square kilometre reservoir behind the proposed Sekaman 1 dam includes part of the Dong Ampham National Biodiversity Conservation Area. When confronted with estimates that logging the reservoir area would yield less timber than originally estimated, an employee with the then-developer, Austral Lao Power, is reported to have said, "In that case we’ll just keep logging until we reach the Vietnamese border." ALP has since pulled out of the project after its project manager Peter Martin was arrested in 2001, for not paying $240,000 in wages allegedly owed to his Lao employees.

The Sekaman 1 dam could take up to seven years to fill causing "permanent damage" to the downstream ecology, according to Halcrow. Fisheries would be wiped out, along with the livelihoods of communities dependent on the fisheries. The change in water flow would threaten the Se Kong Plains Wetlands. The only other example of this type of wetland in the Mekong Region is threatened by another proposed hydropower project: the Nam Theun 2 dam.

For several years, local authorities in southern Laos have been evicting people from their homes in anticipation of dam construction. The dam projects have been used as an excuse to clear people from upland watersheds, supposedly in an attempt to stop swidden agriculture. One upland community that was moved from the site of the Se Kong 5 saw one-third of its people die of malaria within a year of being evicted.

Construction of the Se Pian-Se Nam Noi dam has been stalled since the 1997 Asian economic crisis. At the end of 2000, the dam developer, South Korea’s Dong Ah Construction Industries, collapsed. The project was nevertheless used as an excuse to evict Nya Heun indigenous people from the reservoir area and surrounding forests.

In 1995, Swiss consulting firm Electrowatt (now 100% owned by Finnish consulting firm Jaakko Poyry) produced an environmental impact assessment for the project. Electrowatt hired a US NGO, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), to conduct fishery and wildlife surveys of the project area. WCS recommended the Se Pian River should not be dammed because of the damage this would cause to forests and fisheries. The recommendation was excluded from Electrowatt’s final report. None of the follow-up studies that WCS recommended were carried out.

In 2001, an Electrowatt consultant visited the resettlement site for the Nya Heun people evicted from the Se Pian-Se Nam Noi dam site. He reported that conditions were "far from being satisfactory" and in need of "urgent improvement". Villagers had been given poor quality land and not enough pasture. Many households suffered food shortages. Villagers were moved into houses without kitchens or toilets. Water quality was "rather bad" and "not sufficient" to meet villagers’ needs. There were not enough classrooms or teachers. Malaria was "a very serious problem". None of the villagers had electricity.

The impact of each of these dams is bad enough for the people and forests of Laos and Cambodia. Considered together the proposed dams spell a social and environmental disaster.

By: Chris Lang, e-mail: chrislang@t-online.de

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- Thailand: Assassinated Village Conservationist

Samnao Srisongkhram (1965-2003), who was shot in the head and killed by a hired gunman on 25 May, was a village leader praised for his work defending the interests of fellow farmers in an area of Thailand’s Northeast affected by pollution from a large pulp mill. He was 38.

Samnao, of Khambongpattana village in Khon Kaen province, was President of the local Phong River Conservation Club. He had played a part in monitoring and ensuring compensation for the effects of pollution from the Phoenix Pulp and Paper Company since 1996.

A member of a committee created by the Prime Minister’s Office to handle grievances against Phoenix and of a committee set up by the governor of Khon Kaen province to look into agricultural damage caused by Phoenix’s waste water disposal scheme, Samnao also worked on official plans for river conservation and was active in conservation camps for young people as well as regional environmental activities. The pollution monitoring and enforcement efforts of the local organizations he helped lead are widely credited with bringing about improvements in water and air quality around the Phoenix mill.

Samnao was killed while sitting and talking quietly with his assassin at his family’s rice-field hut following a villagers’ meeting to consider plans for a project to develop women’s leadership in his village. Samnao’s infant daughter was by his side and his wife nearby. The assassin, a stranger to the area, had approached Samnao posing as an NGO activist from North Thailand seeking information.

In July, police arrested a suspect in the murder in Southern Thailand. According to police sources, the suspect fingered the headman of Samnao’s own subdistrict, Khoke Soong, as the person who had hired him to carry out the killing. The headman, who has also been arrested, has longstanding ties with Phoenix, but local observers are skeptical about whether he and the gunman are the only people involved in the shooting.

Phoenix runs two kraft pulp lines producing about 200,000 tons of pulp per year from bamboo, kenaf and eucalyptus. One uses elemental chlorine to bleach its pulp, the other chlorine compounds. Although Thailand lacks the capacity to monitor dioxins, other pollutants associated with the pulp industry have been consistently found across the neighbouring area. Before 1993, the firm’s effluents were released directly into the Phong river, but, following a disastrous pollution incident, this was made illegal. Today, effluents from the two mills are treated together and then dumped in holding ponds before being released onto company eucalyptus plantations.

However, Phoenix has been hard put to find enough land to release the 25-28,000 cubic metres of effluent it needs to get rid of daily. Some waste water seeps into neighbouring farmers' fields and eventually into the Phong river, damaging soils, crops and fisheries. According to an agreement signed with the Ministry of Industry, the firm is obligated to acquire an additional tract of land to dump effluent on or have its permission to operate withdrawn by the end of this year. Phoenix has been trying to buy the new land from villagers.

Several villagers, however, especially those owning fertile bottom land at the mouth of a local tributary, had refused to sell. Backed by the Phong River Conservation Club, they also demanded proper compensation for land already spoiled by the factory’s releases and gathered evidence to present to concerned government agencies. Worried about the approaching government deadline, Phoenix had been in contact with Samnao as part of its campaign to buy land and to bargain over compensation. According to locals, prior to the assassination, Samnao had received calls from Phoenix both issuing threats and offering bribes, which he refused.

Araya Nanthaphotedet, director of the government’s 10th Regional Environment Office, expressed hope that all those behind the killing would be apprehended and convicted. She said Samnao had done very good work and was an admirable spokesperson for his fellow villagers.

"Just before he died, he had participated in a provincial-level meeting about solving the land problems of the factory that affected villagers," Araya said. "He was about to report back to the villagers. It’s such a shame."

Samnao is remembered by friends and co-workers as a reserved and humble leader without personal or political ambitions who had no conflicts other than with Phoenix.

He is survived by his wife Mayuree and two children, a son, 7, and a daughter, 7 months. His place in the local conservation group is being taken by, among several others, Chawang Buochan, himself the survivor of a 1996 shooting whose perpetrator was never found. Contributions to the collection being made for Samnao’s widow and children can be sent to the following account:

ACCOUNT NAME: Mrs Mayuree Srisongkram for Utain Srisongkram
BANK NAME: Krung Thai Bank
BRANCH: Ubonrat Branch, Khon Kaen province
SAVINGS ACCOUNT NUMBER: 4341298616

Article based on information from: Krungthep Thurakit newspaper, 22 July 2003; Khao Sot newspaper, 17 July 2003; Manager Online, 17 July 2003.