OPEN LETTER FROM CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANISATIONS MR RONALD ZWEIG, WORLD BANK

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Ronald D. Zweig
Senior Aquaculturist, EASRD
The World Bank
1818 H Street, NW
Washington, DC 20433 USA

11 May 2005

Dear Mr. Zweig,

RE: THE WORLD BANK'S “PRINCIPLES FOR A CODE OF CONDUCT FOR MANGROVE MANAGEMENT”

We just found out about the inclusion of the World Bank's "Principles for a Code of Conduct for Mangrove Management..." which you, or someone from your group, plans on presenting at the upcoming Ramsar regional meeting to be held this week in China. We are very disappointed that the agreed upon process which civil society had recommended, and which you had accepted in Washington, DC in 2003 was never initiated to ensure wider-scale involvement and comment by local and indigenous peoples who live and work in the mangrove zones.

You have missed an important opportunity in initiating what should have been an imperative from the beginning. The recommended workshops with the participation of indigenous peoples and local communities carried out at the local level in Asia, Africa and Latin America never were given a chance to happen, and so the chance for more inclusively representative comments and relevant inputs to the final draft has not been allowed to transpire.

We understand that the translation of the draft document into Spanish and French has finally been produced, but no information about it has been disseminated to NGOs and indigenous and local community organizations. There seems to be no process in place to gather informed input and to promote a wider involvement of local stakeholders, and that instead you are going to the Ramsar regional forum held in preparation for the 9th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Ramsar Convention (COP9) as the next step in your obviously top-down process.

We still will not accept your prior statement that the World Bank could not afford to support the workshops for local community involvement and input. This local and indigenous community input is vital for the "Principles...", otherwise the document is not representative of the vast majority of persons living in and utilizing the mangrove resources. And, if you maintain that the World Bank which has access to billions of dollars cannot afford the meager funds needed to implement a representative, bottom-up approach, then we again demand that the Bank undertake its own internal structural adjustment, as obviously there is need to better manage the available funds there!

We are cc'ng this letter to the Ramsar forum and others whom we feel need to hear this protest denouncement, hoping that there is still a chance to right this tragic short-coming via awakened "peer pressure."

Sincerely, For the Mangroves and the Mangrove Communities,

Alfredo Quarto
Mangrove Action Project
USA

Jorge Varela M.
Committee for the Defense of the Flora and Fauna of the Gulf of Fonseca
Honduras

Thomas Kocherry
World Forum of Fisher Peoples
Kerala, India

Maurizio Farhan Ferrari
Forest Peoples Programme
England, UK

Edem Edem
Abgremo
Nigeria

Ashraf-Ul-Alam Tutu
Coastal Development Partnership
Khulna, Bangladesh

Eliah Gowri
Coastal Community Development Programme,
Andhra Pradesh, India

Zakir Kibria
BanglaPraxis
Dhaka, Bangladesh

Sabbir Bin Shams
Advancing Public Interest Trust
Bangladesh

Soraya Vanini Tupinamba,
Instituto Terramar
Brazil

Andrianna Natsoulas
Public Citizen
Washington, D.C., USA

Juliette Williams
Environmental Justice Foundation
England, UK

Seak Sophat
Royal University of Phnom Penh
Cambodia

P Balan S/O S Palanisamy
Penang Inshore Fishermen Welfare Association
Malaysia

cc:
Dr Liz Ashton e.c.ashton@stir.ac.uk
Dr. D. J. Macintosh d.j.macintosh@stir.ac.uk
Thomas Nielsen thomas.nielsen@biology.au.dk
Ramsar Forum ramsar-forum@indaba.iucn.org
Dr. Peter Bridgewater pbwater@ramsar.org