Big business fights back green activists

Big business fights green activists over big dams. Binod Bhattarai of Inter Press Service reports.

KATHMANDU, Nepal: Increasingly frustrated by the ability of activists around the world to block the construction of large dams, bridges or highways, big business is fighting back with the help of powerful governments.

And they are using the same argument the activists use to push for large infrastructure projects: the people want them.

The Japan-based Global Infrastructure Fund (GIF) research foundation has been organizing a series of meetings in South Asia to look at big construction projects in the next century, especially in harnessing the region's water resources.

The GIF has already identified "research priorities" which include the ecological rehabilitation of the Aral Sea region and the Middle East "peace water pipeline". In South Asia, the emphasis is on big dams on the rivers of the Eastern Himalaya.

The Japanese foundation has launched a public relation blitz, and says people in neglected rural areas want large projects because they would benefit from them.

Representatives of GIF and South Asian activists met in the Nepal capital Kathmandu in June -- the third of a series after similar recent get-togethers in New Delhi and Dhaka. But none of the NGOs involved in protests against the construction of large dams was invited for the meeting.

"The discussions were essentially project-centered. There was very little academic about it," says Ajay Dixit, an engineer working for the Nepal Water Conversations Foundation who was present at the meeting. "All they seemed to want was a project."

The GIF has identified the Ganga barrage project in Bangladesh, the Tipaimukh project in India's north-east that will dam the Barak River and the Kosi High Dam in Nepal as priority schemes.

But sharing of cost and benefits of water projects is a sensitive issue in South Asia, and all three schemes have implications that are trans-boundary in nature.

Hence the GIF's need to prepare the groundwork early thorough regional consultations. A fund publication admits: "The projects are to be built on international rivers and implies conflict of interest among riparian nations"

Yet the Kathmandu meeting hinted at the unspoken urgency to get these "21st century projects" ready for implementation.

South Asian activists are already arming up to counter this move, which they see as an alliance of big Japanese companies with donors and powerful governments to push through environmentally and socially unsound projects on the region's weaker communities.

"The GIF is working on a wrong institutional premise: it is effectively cloning the foreign aid machinery whose defects are well-known," says Dipak Gyawali, a water expert with the Royal Nepal Academy for Science and Technology.

"(The GIF) apparently assumes that the problem of development in the Third World is money," he adds. "That is not true. Money is necessary but is secondary. The trick is working through local institutions."

Other South Asian activists agree. They say large donor-driven projects are simply a ruse to give employment and business to recession-hit companies back home.

The GIF itself was conceived in 1990, just when the real estate bubble was bursting and Japan's economic growth was shrinking fast.

Top officials from major Japanese conglomerates were represented in the GIF, and experts say their strategy was to seek construction ventures overseas.

Seeing that environmental activism and green consciousness could pose an obstacle, analysts say the GIF is cleverly trying to co-opt larger regional powers like India to pressure smaller nations to agree to mega-projects.

But Japanese funds alone may not be enough to erase all the water-related animosity that has accumulated in Nepal and Bangladesh against India.

Bangladesh, located on the combined deltas of Himalayan rivers,has a water-sharing dispute over the Farakka barrage with upper-riparian India since 1975. And landlocked Nepal feels it has been historically cheated by lower-riparian India.

So far, India has been opposed to regional talks on water issues, preferring to deal with Nepal and Bangladesh separately.

The GIF's backing for the US$3 billion Kosi High Dam in Nepal to control floods in India's Bihar state and generate 3,400 megawatts of electricity will have to travel through a gauntlet of protests by local and international activists.

The World Bank has been nearly forced to cancel a much-smaller project on the Arun River in eastern Nepal because of protests.

The Kosi Dam will have to be a 240-meter high concrete structure on a seismically active fault zone upstream from one of the most-densely populated regions of India. The reservoir will inundate 200,000 hectares of fertile valley floor in Nepal.

"Ideally, there should have been more debate on the associated risks and risk sharing, the management issues relating to the Kosi River, including flood preparedness/management and the possible impacts of the development on the political economy of the Kosi basin," says Dixit.

The Kosi River originates in Tibet and drains 90,000 sq km of the eastern Himalaya, contributing 71 percent of the water flow into the Ganges in the dry season.