Abstract
The contrast between the official and nongovernmental meetings at Bangkok in October 1991 revealed the contradictions of a planetary social and ecological transformation that is without precedent. This transformation entails nothing less than the final physical occupation and domination of the entire surface of the earth. The processes that had transformed Thailand over the past decade were at work on a larger scale in much of the developing world. Massive internationally financed development schemes were unleashing ecological destruction and social upheaval in areas larger than many American states or European countries. Huge forests had been destroyed, gigantic river basins filled with dams, and vast agricultural expanses consolidated into larger holdings for export production at tremendous ecological cost. What was occurring was not a reasonable, measured process to increase economic welfare, but the destruction of natural and social systems whose endurance are the prerequisite, and the goal, of any sane project for longer term human development.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, in 1973 a study of twenty-four tropical agricultural colonization projects in Latin America noted that “few spheres of economic development have a history of, or a reputation for, fuilure to match that of government-sponsored colonization in humid tropical zones.… Horror stories abound about expensive ventures that resulted in colonies where few if any settlers remained after several years. The evidence is irrefutable” (Michael A. Nelson, The Development of Tropical Lands: Policy Issues in Latin America [Washington: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973], 265). The study urged a moratorium on new colonization schemes in tropical forests, and concluded that the support of international financing agencies for government-sponsored agricultural colonization made things worse, not better, by further complicating the “execution of [already] overly complex projects” (ibid., 287).
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Approximately $130 million of these loans were subsequently canceled, reducing total Bank funding to about $500 million.
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In subsequent years, $227 million of these loans were never disbursed or were canceled, reducing the total loan commitments for “nucleus estates” to about $507 million. Typically, these projects involved planting new areas with cash crops-most often oil palms or rubber-with the plan that the land (80 percent of the project area) surrounding a government or privately owned “nucleus” would eventually be transferred to small-scale farmers. In many cases farmers never got the land.
- 4.
Robert NcNamara was president of the World Bank when it began to support Transmigration. According to his biographer, Deborah Shapley, “McNamara knew that Suharto’s resettlement program was politically inspired and entailed some brutality, but the role McNamara had carved out … of making the Bank ‘of’ the Third World—and his everlasting zest for action—propelled him to buy the program. To influence it, he hoped. General Suharto needed the Bank’s Good Housekeeping seal of approval to win international respectability” (Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara [Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993], 537)
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The Bank argues that since the transmigrants are drawn from the poorer segments of the population, they are on the whole better off because 50 percent are now above the poverty line. (World Bank, Indonesia Transmigration Sector Review [see endnote 21], xiv-xv.)
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Nehru made this oft-cited observation first in 1954 at the inauguration of the Nangal canal in Punjab, part of the large Bhakra dam and irrigation project: “When I walked around the site, I thought that these days, the biggest temple and mosque and gurdwara is the place where man works for the good of mankind. What place can be greater than Bhakra Nangal, where thousands of men have worked or shed their blood and sweat and laid down their lives as well1 Where can be a holier place than this; which can we regard as higher?” (Quote from Darryl D’Monte, Temples or Tombs? Industry Versus Environment: Three Controversies [New Delhi: Center for Science and Environment, 1985], 1.)
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© 2013 Bruce Rich
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Rich, B. (2013). Decade of Debacles. In: Mortgaging the Earth. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-515-1_2
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