![[Lesotho] Mohale dam is one of the world's highest rockfill dams.](https://assets.thenewhumanitarian.org/s3fs-public/styles/responsive_large_2x/public/images/2006310.jpg.webp?itok=rkGDo9ex "Water mixes with politics")
"I was there, and they are now constructing an airport, a bridge, roads, everything. The whole area is moving now. About US$2 billion will be spent in that area, and it will bring it alive."
This is the optimistic view of Ibrahim Mahmud Hamid, Sudan's minister of humanitarian affairs, who spoke to IRIN about the anticipated social and economic benefits of the Merowe/Hamadad Dam, which is currently being built on the River Nile in northern Sudan. It is the largest hydropower project under construction in Africa.
According to the World Commission on Dams (WCD), an independent organisation set up in 1998 by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union, $2 trillion has been spent constructing 45,000 large dams around the globe since 1900. Such projects have blockaded 61 percent of the world's rivers and displaced more than 40 million people.
Today, large dams produce 20 percent of the world's electricity and 12 percent of its food, generating an income of $50 billion annually. There are currently 1,600 new, large dams planned or under construction in 46 river systems around the world, 40 of them in developing countries.
Although dams as an industry are a key ingredient to water-resource management, their construction and use have prompted fierce debate and controversy between government institutions and civil society movements the world over.
Opposing interests
Chaired by former South African Education Minister Kader Asmal, the WCD was set up in 1998 to look independently at "the increasingly confrontational debate about the role the world's 45,000 large dams have played in development."
Governments build dams as a strategy to deal with very specific issues, including the prevention of floods; the provision of water for drinking, sanitation and irrigation; and the generation of hydroelectricity.
"There is a lot of flooding in this area, but we need to work out how to keep the water. With these dams, you can solve most of these and other problems, not only in Nairobi, but in the whole country and the whole region. With demand rising, it will be difficult to get water to everybody, but there is lots of potential," said Gerald Rukunga, programme manager of water and sanitation for the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) in Kenya. AMREF works to alleviate poverty in Africa and supports proposals to build dams in Kenya.
Proponents of dams maintain that the industry brings about widespread improvement in income, welfare, food security and employment, both directly and indirectly, which in turn leads to a reduction in poverty. Detractors, however, blame dams for destroying ecosystems, reducing aquatic biodiversity and forcing the displacement of millions of people from their homes.
Aviva Imhof, South East Asia programme director of the International Rivers Network (IRN), said dams leave "a trail of devastation in their wake." IRN, a nongovernmental organisation that works to "protect rivers and defend the rights of communities that depend on them," opposes destructive dams and the development model they advance, campaigning instead for sustainable development practices and the conservation of rivers and their watersheds.
Two sides
"It means nothing to build billion-dollar dams if they alienate the weak," said WCD's Asmal. "It means nothing to stop dams if our protests only entrench poverty."
To more fully assess both sides of the issue, WCD published 'Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision Making' in 2000. The first comprehensive, global and independent research of its kind, the report drew attention to how dam-building impacts human rights, within the context of international agreements such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. These agreements include the right of future generations to inherit a sustainable planet, the right to be free from coercive or forced internal displacement, and the right to protect sights of natural heritage.
When it was first published, the report was seen as a victory by anti-dam interest groups, as it appeared to give weight to their assertions that dams have negative environmental impacts and do not produce the economic benefits that are promised.
"The WCD report largely vindicates what critics have been saying for years," said Patrick McCully, executive director of IRN.
Others, however, including the award-winning Indian novelist and anti-dam activist Arundhati Roy, who opposes the construction of the Narmada Dam in India, called the report a "compromise".
"The problem is that it can be used by funding agencies to pretend that they have an enlightened approach, while the reality remains completely different. The industry is learning our language and then carrying on just the same," she said.
The construction, operation and output of large dams have social, environmental and economic impacts that are both positive and negative, direct and indirect - and these are woven together in very intricate ways. In all cases, some parties gain, such as the urban dwellers that benefit from increased water and electricity supply, while others lose, such as the poor, rural people who are displaced from their homes when a dam is built.
For example, the soon-to-be-completed Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China's southwestern Sichuan Province, is being built to meet the country's growing energy demands. However, it will flood an area of more than 632sqkm and displace 1.4 million people from their homes.
Jan Selby, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex and author of several books on resource politics, sees dams as a tool of the prevailing economic system, which can lead to a number of negative side effects.
"For instance, the deepening of capitalist social relations requires the destruction of subsistence relations, with people being forced off their land, being forced to sell their labour and buy and sell on the 'market'. Dam building contributes to this process," he said.
The case for dams
Dam proponents maintain that once a dam is built, a region's food production increases, food-related infrastructure develops, floods are controlled and domestic and business consumers in urban areas have an enhanced supply of electricity and water. These elements combine, they say, to enrich the economy as a whole, encouraging foreign investment and leading to secondary economic gains in the service, health and education sectors.
According to the Asian Development Bank, secondary effects of dams can include "improved access to water for household needs, improved health conditions, reservoir fisheries, increased local economic activity, improved access to markets via roads, employment in construction and tourism, recession agriculture in the reservoir margins and recreation."
A loan from the Asian Development Bank will be used to construct the 144 megawatt Kali 'Gandaki A' plant in western Nepal. In terms of hydropower, Nepal - with water resources second only to Brazil - has great, albeit untapped, potential. According to the Independent Power Producers Association and a World Bank report in 2004, respectively, 60 percent of Nepal's population have no electricity, and 30 percent live below the poverty line of $1 per day.
When the plant becomes fully operational, it will supply power to 1.3 million people, according to the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA). With further development, the NEA plans to increase its electricity generating capacity by 30 per cent, producing 2,230 megawatts of electricity and exporting 400 megawatts to neighbouring India.
In Laos, the World Bank is helping fund the Nam Theun 2 dam project on the Xe Bang Fai River. The $1.3 billion project has been fiercely criticised by NGOs working in the region, because the dam will displace thousands of people. Government officials and the World Bank, however, said the project would stimulate economic and social development in a country with few natural resources. Laos has "few other options, apart from chopping down forests or gold mining," said Peter Stephens, the World Bank's chief external officer for South East Asia and the Pacific.
Laos plans to generate foreign currency by selling the power generated by the dam to Thailand. Speaking to Radio Free Asia's Lao service, Finance Minister Somdy Douangdy said, "The Lao government believes that the Nam Theun 2 is one of the projects with high potential for income generation. Therefore, we consider this project important for poverty eradication and for helping Laos remove itself from underdevelopment by 2020 as planned."
The case against dams
During construction, dams create a large number of jobs for both skilled and unskilled workers. The 60 megawatt, $138 million Khimti Khola plant in Nepal, for example, employed more than 3,000 people between 1996 and 2000, according to the NEA.
Once a dam is built, however, the highly sophisticated technology involved in its operation demands a relatively small number of employees, all of whom must have technical expertise. As a result, government agencies or private corporations usually take over the management of a dam, and the community loses control of its water resource.
Dams "increase state capacity to control and store water, especially for irrigation and flood control purposes and to generate electricity," said Jan Selby in interview. They also change social relations, because the local population loses control over their land as "localised agriculture is transformed into irrigated monoculture and agribusiness," he also said.
Dams flood vast tracts of land and create reservoirs in areas that were once river valleys. As a result, fragile river ecosystems and habitats are fragmented and ruined. Fisheries are destroyed, and the migration paths of animals and fish may be blocked. Dams have been linked to the extinction of several species of freshwater fish, according to Christer Nilsson of the Landscape Ecology Group at Umea University in Sweden.
"Flow manipulations hinder channel development […] and may cause extensive modification of aquatic communities. Dams obstruct the dispersal and migration of organisms, and these and other effects have been directly linked to loss of populations and entire species of freshwater fish," Nilsson said in a 2005 report for 'Science' journal.
Water quality downstream declines as submerged vegetation decomposes and deoxygenates the water, allowing mercury levels to rise. According to the WCD, a staggering 28 percent of all artificial greenhouse-gas emissions may be caused by rotting vegetation in dams.
Research has shown that river sediment becomes trapped behind dam walls, causing the retention of important nutrients and changing the downstream morphology of the riverbed, delta and coastline. This buildup of sediment also affects a dam's functionality. In the worst case, WCD said, a reservoir could lose more than 80 percent of its storage capacity to silt in less than 30 years.
Experts have also argued that downstream water-flow rates are disrupted and fluctuate due to changing demands for hydropower, thereby affecting the natural seasonal 'rhythm' of a river and the habitats that depend on it. Seasonal flood patterns are inevitably halted, disconnecting the river from its flood plain and eradicating the ecological gains provided by the flooding.
In addition to these grave environmental consequences, dam construction can devour villages, towns and heritage sites, in some cases displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Sudan's Merowe/Hamadad dam project, for example, will displace 9,500 families, or 50,000 people, from their homeland in the Nile Valley.
According to civil-society experts and World Bank researcher Anek Nakhabout, the Nam Theun 2 dam project in Laos will displace 6,200 people and adversely affect more than 100,000 villagers who depend on the Xe Bang River for their livelihoods.
Relocated communities often become fragmented as they are moved to other locations to make way for reservoirs. Livelihood patterns and resources are diminished; downstream wetlands can dry out; and floodplain fertility can decline. Those displaced by dam projects are often left without compensation or housing.
Global dam production has led to the "impoverishment of millions", according to WCD chairman Asmal. "The profitability of these schemes remains elusive."
"After we moved, we had trouble simply eating and clothing ourselves and our families. We also had no seeds or tools, and even now when it rains, we often sit in our houses with umbrellas over our heads since the roofs leak so badly. We don't yet have the means to fix them. We left land that was ours to come to a strange place where we have absolutely nothing," said Aissata Lamarana, a member of the women's agricultural cooperative of Falekalé village, one of the new settlements for people displaced by the Garafiri Dam, on the Konkoure River in Guinea. Civil-society and anti-dam groups said Lamarana's words typify the experience of many who are displaced by government-organised dam-building.
Politics
Water management and dam construction are highly politicised processes between regional states.
According to a report on the five central Asian countries of Kyrgystan, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan by the thinktank International Crisis Group, "The downstream countries require more water for their growing agricultural sectors and rising populations, while the economically weaker upstream countries are trying to win more control over their resources and want to use more water for electricity generation and farming. These disputes between countries often lead to a lack of drinking water for villagers."
Impact assessments have found that the costs and the benefits of dams do not balance out. "The poor, other vulnerable groups and future generations are likely to bear disproportionate share of the social and environmental costs of large dam projects without gaining a commensurate share of the economic benefits," said a WCD report. "Lack of equity in the distribution of benefits has called into question the value of many dams in meeting water and energy development needs."
Economic status and gender have a considerable role to play in whether a dam has a positive or negative impact. "There can be serious distribution problems between top-enders and tail-enders, between landlords and tenants, between farmers and labourers, and at the household level between men and women," the WCD report stated.
The advantages a dam provides - such as irrigation and electricity - disproportionately benefit the wealthier members of society. Larger landowners are better able to afford the machinery needed to make the best use of the irrigated land, whilst small landowners do not have the economic resources to use the irrigated water and are often forced off their land or priced out of the market.
Poor and marginalised people bear the brunt of the costs associated with involuntary resettlement caused by dam construction. A recent article in the journal 'Human Rights Brief' found that in India, between 40 percent and 50 percent of those displaced by dam projects were ethnic minorities, even though they account for only 8 percent of the population.
"Nobody has ever proven that the benefits of large dams go to the poor," said Carlos Linares, senior water-policy advisor at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) headquarters in New York. "They may reflect well on GNP and other macroeconomic indicators and increase production, but that doesn't really give us any idea of the equity aspects of large dams. Nobody has proven that yet."
Typically, the communities most affected by the construction of dams have been left out of the planning process. "I don't think villagers understand the long-term impact. It is something they can not even imagine," said Nakhabout of the World Bank.
Women also bear a disproportionate burden, such as "forced displacement and grievances arising from poorly handled resettlement and compensation programmes," said Selby.
According to a recent report by the Canada-based International Development Studies Network, "Compensation payments to those displaced by projects are most often made to men, converting the collective assets of families into disposable assets held by men. Women are also most dependent on the common resources that are eliminated by dam projects."
Broken promises
"Dams have made an important and significant contribution to human development," said a 2000 WCD report, but "the adverse impacts of dams have fallen disproportionately on rural dwellers, subsistence farmers, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities and women."
According to the report, construction costs overrun, on average, by 56 percent; one in four dams irrigates only one-third of the land it was supposed to; 25 percent of dams deliver less than half the promised water; and more than half the hydroelectric dams do not generate as much power as promised.
The arguments for and against dams continue to create controversy. Still, they continue to be built on an ever-larger scale, encouraged, endorsed and funded by international banks and financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Some experts who recognise the advantages that dams bring, like UNDP's Linares, felt that the answer to improving both livelihoods and access to water lies in small-scale, community-based dams. "Storing water, especially in light of climate variability and climate change, can be done at the community level to prevent and to prepare for the impacts of climate variability. I believe that communities can build small dams at the community level to control floods and to store water in times of drought," he said.
rvh/ch/le
This is the optimistic view of Ibrahim Mahmud Hamid, Sudan's minister of humanitarian affairs, who spoke to IRIN about the anticipated social and economic benefits of the Merowe/Hamadad Dam, which is currently being built on the River Nile in northern Sudan. It is the largest hydropower project under construction in Africa.
According to the World Commission on Dams (WCD), an independent organisation set up in 1998 by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union, $2 trillion has been spent constructing 45,000 large dams around the globe since 1900. Such projects have blockaded 61 percent of the world's rivers and displaced more than 40 million people.
Today, large dams produce 20 percent of the world's electricity and 12 percent of its food, generating an income of $50 billion annually. There are currently 1,600 new, large dams planned or under construction in 46 river systems around the world, 40 of them in developing countries.
Although dams as an industry are a key ingredient to water-resource management, their construction and use have prompted fierce debate and controversy between government institutions and civil society movements the world over.
Opposing interests
Chaired by former South African Education Minister Kader Asmal, the WCD was set up in 1998 to look independently at "the increasingly confrontational debate about the role the world's 45,000 large dams have played in development."
Governments build dams as a strategy to deal with very specific issues, including the prevention of floods; the provision of water for drinking, sanitation and irrigation; and the generation of hydroelectricity.
"There is a lot of flooding in this area, but we need to work out how to keep the water. With these dams, you can solve most of these and other problems, not only in Nairobi, but in the whole country and the whole region. With demand rising, it will be difficult to get water to everybody, but there is lots of potential," said Gerald Rukunga, programme manager of water and sanitation for the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) in Kenya. AMREF works to alleviate poverty in Africa and supports proposals to build dams in Kenya.
Proponents of dams maintain that the industry brings about widespread improvement in income, welfare, food security and employment, both directly and indirectly, which in turn leads to a reduction in poverty. Detractors, however, blame dams for destroying ecosystems, reducing aquatic biodiversity and forcing the displacement of millions of people from their homes.
Aviva Imhof, South East Asia programme director of the International Rivers Network (IRN), said dams leave "a trail of devastation in their wake." IRN, a nongovernmental organisation that works to "protect rivers and defend the rights of communities that depend on them," opposes destructive dams and the development model they advance, campaigning instead for sustainable development practices and the conservation of rivers and their watersheds.
Two sides
![[Uganda] The Owen Falls Dam is the world's largest storage dam.](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIABAP///wAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw== "The Owen Falls Dam is the world's largest storage dam")
Photo: T. de Salis/UNEP  |
| The Owen Falls Dam in Uganda, is one of the world's largest storage dam. Dams are built for very specific purposes, in this case Hydro-electricity generation |
To more fully assess both sides of the issue, WCD published 'Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision Making' in 2000. The first comprehensive, global and independent research of its kind, the report drew attention to how dam-building impacts human rights, within the context of international agreements such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. These agreements include the right of future generations to inherit a sustainable planet, the right to be free from coercive or forced internal displacement, and the right to protect sights of natural heritage.
When it was first published, the report was seen as a victory by anti-dam interest groups, as it appeared to give weight to their assertions that dams have negative environmental impacts and do not produce the economic benefits that are promised.
"The WCD report largely vindicates what critics have been saying for years," said Patrick McCully, executive director of IRN.
Others, however, including the award-winning Indian novelist and anti-dam activist Arundhati Roy, who opposes the construction of the Narmada Dam in India, called the report a "compromise".
"The problem is that it can be used by funding agencies to pretend that they have an enlightened approach, while the reality remains completely different. The industry is learning our language and then carrying on just the same," she said.
The construction, operation and output of large dams have social, environmental and economic impacts that are both positive and negative, direct and indirect - and these are woven together in very intricate ways. In all cases, some parties gain, such as the urban dwellers that benefit from increased water and electricity supply, while others lose, such as the poor, rural people who are displaced from their homes when a dam is built.
For example, the soon-to-be-completed Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China's southwestern Sichuan Province, is being built to meet the country's growing energy demands. However, it will flood an area of more than 632sqkm and displace 1.4 million people from their homes.
Jan Selby, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex and author of several books on resource politics, sees dams as a tool of the prevailing economic system, which can lead to a number of negative side effects.
"For instance, the deepening of capitalist social relations requires the destruction of subsistence relations, with people being forced off their land, being forced to sell their labour and buy and sell on the 'market'. Dam building contributes to this process," he said.
|
Photo: IRIN |
| Lesotho’s Katse Dam is the highest in Africa at 185m. The flooded valley covers an area of 35.8 square kilometres, and the valleys are flooded for over 45 kilometres from the dam wall |
Dam proponents maintain that once a dam is built, a region's food production increases, food-related infrastructure develops, floods are controlled and domestic and business consumers in urban areas have an enhanced supply of electricity and water. These elements combine, they say, to enrich the economy as a whole, encouraging foreign investment and leading to secondary economic gains in the service, health and education sectors.
According to the Asian Development Bank, secondary effects of dams can include "improved access to water for household needs, improved health conditions, reservoir fisheries, increased local economic activity, improved access to markets via roads, employment in construction and tourism, recession agriculture in the reservoir margins and recreation."
A loan from the Asian Development Bank will be used to construct the 144 megawatt Kali 'Gandaki A' plant in western Nepal. In terms of hydropower, Nepal - with water resources second only to Brazil - has great, albeit untapped, potential. According to the Independent Power Producers Association and a World Bank report in 2004, respectively, 60 percent of Nepal's population have no electricity, and 30 percent live below the poverty line of $1 per day.
When the plant becomes fully operational, it will supply power to 1.3 million people, according to the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA). With further development, the NEA plans to increase its electricity generating capacity by 30 per cent, producing 2,230 megawatts of electricity and exporting 400 megawatts to neighbouring India.
In Laos, the World Bank is helping fund the Nam Theun 2 dam project on the Xe Bang Fai River. The $1.3 billion project has been fiercely criticised by NGOs working in the region, because the dam will displace thousands of people. Government officials and the World Bank, however, said the project would stimulate economic and social development in a country with few natural resources. Laos has "few other options, apart from chopping down forests or gold mining," said Peter Stephens, the World Bank's chief external officer for South East Asia and the Pacific.
Laos plans to generate foreign currency by selling the power generated by the dam to Thailand. Speaking to Radio Free Asia's Lao service, Finance Minister Somdy Douangdy said, "The Lao government believes that the Nam Theun 2 is one of the projects with high potential for income generation. Therefore, we consider this project important for poverty eradication and for helping Laos remove itself from underdevelopment by 2020 as planned."
|
Photo: David Swanson/IRIN |
| Dam construction has lead to the displacement of hundreds of thousands across the world. Those displaced are often left without compensation or housing and are forced to live in temporary camps |
During construction, dams create a large number of jobs for both skilled and unskilled workers. The 60 megawatt, $138 million Khimti Khola plant in Nepal, for example, employed more than 3,000 people between 1996 and 2000, according to the NEA.
Once a dam is built, however, the highly sophisticated technology involved in its operation demands a relatively small number of employees, all of whom must have technical expertise. As a result, government agencies or private corporations usually take over the management of a dam, and the community loses control of its water resource.
Dams "increase state capacity to control and store water, especially for irrigation and flood control purposes and to generate electricity," said Jan Selby in interview. They also change social relations, because the local population loses control over their land as "localised agriculture is transformed into irrigated monoculture and agribusiness," he also said.
Dams flood vast tracts of land and create reservoirs in areas that were once river valleys. As a result, fragile river ecosystems and habitats are fragmented and ruined. Fisheries are destroyed, and the migration paths of animals and fish may be blocked. Dams have been linked to the extinction of several species of freshwater fish, according to Christer Nilsson of the Landscape Ecology Group at Umea University in Sweden.
"Flow manipulations hinder channel development […] and may cause extensive modification of aquatic communities. Dams obstruct the dispersal and migration of organisms, and these and other effects have been directly linked to loss of populations and entire species of freshwater fish," Nilsson said in a 2005 report for 'Science' journal.
Water quality downstream declines as submerged vegetation decomposes and deoxygenates the water, allowing mercury levels to rise. According to the WCD, a staggering 28 percent of all artificial greenhouse-gas emissions may be caused by rotting vegetation in dams.
Research has shown that river sediment becomes trapped behind dam walls, causing the retention of important nutrients and changing the downstream morphology of the riverbed, delta and coastline. This buildup of sediment also affects a dam's functionality. In the worst case, WCD said, a reservoir could lose more than 80 percent of its storage capacity to silt in less than 30 years.
Experts have also argued that downstream water-flow rates are disrupted and fluctuate due to changing demands for hydropower, thereby affecting the natural seasonal 'rhythm' of a river and the habitats that depend on it. Seasonal flood patterns are inevitably halted, disconnecting the river from its flood plain and eradicating the ecological gains provided by the flooding.
In addition to these grave environmental consequences, dam construction can devour villages, towns and heritage sites, in some cases displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Sudan's Merowe/Hamadad dam project, for example, will displace 9,500 families, or 50,000 people, from their homeland in the Nile Valley.
According to civil-society experts and World Bank researcher Anek Nakhabout, the Nam Theun 2 dam project in Laos will displace 6,200 people and adversely affect more than 100,000 villagers who depend on the Xe Bang River for their livelihoods.
Relocated communities often become fragmented as they are moved to other locations to make way for reservoirs. Livelihood patterns and resources are diminished; downstream wetlands can dry out; and floodplain fertility can decline. Those displaced by dam projects are often left without compensation or housing.
Global dam production has led to the "impoverishment of millions", according to WCD chairman Asmal. "The profitability of these schemes remains elusive."
"After we moved, we had trouble simply eating and clothing ourselves and our families. We also had no seeds or tools, and even now when it rains, we often sit in our houses with umbrellas over our heads since the roofs leak so badly. We don't yet have the means to fix them. We left land that was ours to come to a strange place where we have absolutely nothing," said Aissata Lamarana, a member of the women's agricultural cooperative of Falekalé village, one of the new settlements for people displaced by the Garafiri Dam, on the Konkoure River in Guinea. Civil-society and anti-dam groups said Lamarana's words typify the experience of many who are displaced by government-organised dam-building.
Politics
Water management and dam construction are highly politicised processes between regional states.
According to a report on the five central Asian countries of Kyrgystan, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan by the thinktank International Crisis Group, "The downstream countries require more water for their growing agricultural sectors and rising populations, while the economically weaker upstream countries are trying to win more control over their resources and want to use more water for electricity generation and farming. These disputes between countries often lead to a lack of drinking water for villagers."
|
Photo: Danish Society for a Living Sea |
| Dams "have been directly linked to loss of populations and entire species of freshwater fish," |
Economic status and gender have a considerable role to play in whether a dam has a positive or negative impact. "There can be serious distribution problems between top-enders and tail-enders, between landlords and tenants, between farmers and labourers, and at the household level between men and women," the WCD report stated.
The advantages a dam provides - such as irrigation and electricity - disproportionately benefit the wealthier members of society. Larger landowners are better able to afford the machinery needed to make the best use of the irrigated land, whilst small landowners do not have the economic resources to use the irrigated water and are often forced off their land or priced out of the market.
Poor and marginalised people bear the brunt of the costs associated with involuntary resettlement caused by dam construction. A recent article in the journal 'Human Rights Brief' found that in India, between 40 percent and 50 percent of those displaced by dam projects were ethnic minorities, even though they account for only 8 percent of the population.
"Nobody has ever proven that the benefits of large dams go to the poor," said Carlos Linares, senior water-policy advisor at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) headquarters in New York. "They may reflect well on GNP and other macroeconomic indicators and increase production, but that doesn't really give us any idea of the equity aspects of large dams. Nobody has proven that yet."
Typically, the communities most affected by the construction of dams have been left out of the planning process. "I don't think villagers understand the long-term impact. It is something they can not even imagine," said Nakhabout of the World Bank.
Women also bear a disproportionate burden, such as "forced displacement and grievances arising from poorly handled resettlement and compensation programmes," said Selby.
According to a recent report by the Canada-based International Development Studies Network, "Compensation payments to those displaced by projects are most often made to men, converting the collective assets of families into disposable assets held by men. Women are also most dependent on the common resources that are eliminated by dam projects."
Broken promises
"Dams have made an important and significant contribution to human development," said a 2000 WCD report, but "the adverse impacts of dams have fallen disproportionately on rural dwellers, subsistence farmers, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities and women."
According to the report, construction costs overrun, on average, by 56 percent; one in four dams irrigates only one-third of the land it was supposed to; 25 percent of dams deliver less than half the promised water; and more than half the hydroelectric dams do not generate as much power as promised.
The arguments for and against dams continue to create controversy. Still, they continue to be built on an ever-larger scale, encouraged, endorsed and funded by international banks and financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Some experts who recognise the advantages that dams bring, like UNDP's Linares, felt that the answer to improving both livelihoods and access to water lies in small-scale, community-based dams. "Storing water, especially in light of climate variability and climate change, can be done at the community level to prevent and to prepare for the impacts of climate variability. I believe that communities can build small dams at the community level to control floods and to store water in times of drought," he said.
rvh/ch/le
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions
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