Brazilian Forest People Lodge Complaint against World Bank
6/15/95
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
/** rainfor.genera: 159.0 **/
** Topic: amazonians file complaint against bank **
** Written 4:18 PM Jun 15, 1995 by pchatterjee in
cdp:rainfor.genera **
From: Pratap Chatterjee
Subject: amazonians file complaint against bank
please note this is a pre-edited version
ENVIRONMENT: Brazilian forest people lodge complaint against World
Bank
By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Jun 15 (IPS) - A 300 page package from forest
communities in the Brazilian Amazon was expected to arrive
Thursday at the World Bank's offices asking for a formal
investigation into the Bank's failure to set up protected reserves
for local communties.
The complaint to the Bank's newly created inspection panel, the
third compliant filed since it was set up last August, concerns
the three-year old 167 million dollar Rondonia Agricultural,
Livestock and Forestry (PLANOFLORO) project.
The object of PLANOFLORO is to set up ''extractive'' reserves
to help local people harvest native products such as rubber,
Brazil nuts and about 30 other products.
Twenty five groups representing small farmers, rubber tappers,
unions, environmental and indigenous peoples groups in Rondonia,
western Brazil, say that the project ''has been hindered by a
series of impediments, largely caused by omissions of the World
Bank ... failures in enforcing contractual obligations and
implementing its own policies and directives.''
PLANOFLORO was set up with much fanfare at the time of the Earth
Summit in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, in June 1992, to clean up the
mess created by a previous multi-million dollar Bank development
project.
In 1981 the Bank lent Brazil 445 million dollars for the Northwest
Brazil Integrated Development Programme (POLONORESTE) to pave 1500
kilometres of dirt tracks in the remote region of Rondonia which
borders Bolivia.
The newly modernised road allowed nearly half a million migrants
to invade the forests and clear them for cultivation. By 1991 the
destruction of Rondonia's forests had multiplied to ten times its
original rate. The burning of the forest became a major focus of
research as the single largest, most rapid human caused change on
earth visible from space.
Diseases spread rapidly. Malaria infection rates soared to 100
percent in some killed indigenous communities with over 250,000
people infected. Infant mortality rates reached 50 percent in some
communities.
In 1987 Barber Conable, the president of the Bank, said that
POLONORESTE was a ''sobering example of an environmentally sound
project gone wrong.'' The PLANOFLORO project was designed to try
and reverse some of these problems.
But PLANOFLORO has not worked so far. Activists say the National
Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) has
allegedly refused to sign land titles for local people and has
even brought in thousands of people to settle in lands that were
supposed to be off-limits for development.
The complaint to the panel is the latest in a series from local
groups to make the project work. Last May activists attempted to
draw attention to the lack of government cooperation by faxing a
message to the Bank when it convened a special meeting of
activists and industry groups in this city last May to review new
Bank forestry projects.
''No strategy has yet been defined for regulating land titles
and land use concessions. The first zoning map did not benefit
from field studies and consultations with the local population
involved in extractive activities,'' read the faxed message from
Luiz Rodrigues de Oliveira, the executive secretary of the non
governmental forum of Rondonia.
Instead, the result of the mistaken policies of other agencies
in the area financed by the Bank, has been ''the continual
invasion of areas ocupied by rubber tappers, facilitated by
government agencies themselves,'' it added.
Since then the groups have sifted through 14,000 pages of
documents to draft the new formal complaint. They have uncovered
confidential internal Bank documents that discuss how ''to avoid
embarassment'' to the Bank while allowing the former Rondonia
state governor ''to obtain political return before the
elections.''
Roberto Esmeraldi, from the Friends of the Earth Amazon programme,
told IPS from Sao Paulo in eastern Brazil, that he had forwarded
the complaint which he received from Rondonia on Wednesday to
Washington by Federal Express courier.
Dispatching the complaint has caused commotion in Brazil as well
as here in Washington. Emerson Teixeira, Rondonia's new planning
secretary told newspapers that INCRA would sign an agreement in
the next two weeks, blaming state bureaucracy in the previous
government for the delays.
''For example loans to small farmers are stuck in the state bank.
Project resources have been spent on bureaucracy and the civil
service, in areas like salaries and consultancies,'' he said.
Rondonian activists in Brazil told IPS that ever since they had
made news of the complaint public ''many organisations have been
inundated with calls day and night from the Bank and consultants
telling us to withdraw the complaint.''
Mark Wilson, the Bank's division chief for natural resources
management and rural poverty operations in Brazil, told IPS that
he was ''disappointed'' that the activists had not discussed their
plans to submit a complaint with him or his staff.
''This project has the highest supervision component of any
project in the Latin America division of the Bank. We have an
office in Mato Grosso, we have sent five missions to the field,''
he said.
''Local group representatives make up 50 percent of all the
technical committees we have for the project. We rely heavily on
the NGOs to bring us evidence of land invasions. It is a difficult
process that involves cajoling the government and we have been on
record of challenging the government ourselves,'' he added.
This weekend a team of Bank officials from Wilson's office will
fly down to Brazil to meet with the activists and undertake
another supervision mission. Meanwhile the activists are planning
to come to Washington on Jun 28 or 29 to meet with the inspection
panel.
The Brazilian complaint is the third to be submitted to the
independent three member panel that was set up last August by the
Bank to investigate complaints made by people affected by Bank
projects.
The first complaint to the panel was made last October by Nepali
groups who charged that Bank plans to lend money for a dam planned
for the remote Arun Valley in Nepal had violated Bank policies on
environmental assessment. A second complaint was filed earlier
this year by an ethnic Greek business family that lost its lands
in Ethiopia because of a Bank project.
The Bank's board of directors approved a partial investigation
into the first complaint which is expected to be wrapped up in the
next week or so. The panel has also almost finished preparing a
report on the second complaint which will not recommend an
investigation.