March 14^th is the International Day Against Dams as declared in Curitiba, Brazil in 1997.  Since then the struggles throughout the world against dams have strengthened.  In Mexico, the movement against dams has achieved overwhelming victories and has managed to stop some of these projects.  At risk are thousands of indigenous communities threatened with displacement and millions of hectares of forests, jungles and biodiversity that some would have disappear from the planet.  In the framework of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, of the international instruments for Forests and Human Rights, today more than ever we must found another model of development.  The present neoliberal model is in crisis having proven itself fractured and unsustainable. 

WHAT IS “DEVELOPMENT”? …:  Since the thirties and up until 1970, the building of large dams was seen as development and economic progress.  According to the World Commission on Development and the Environment in 1987, “development” is that “which satisfies the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations”.  But who has developed more and who has developed less?  Have dams have benefited the world’s population in a just and equitable manner without compromising future generations?  According to the World Dams Commission (WDC), “an equitable and sustainable direction with respect to development demands that deciding to build a dam or any other action should not, in principle, sacrifice the rights of any citizen or group of affected peoples.” [1]

The WDC evaluated large dams using the following 5 “central values”:  Equality; Efficiency; Participatory Decision-Making Processes; Sustainability; Rendering of Financial Accounts.  According to the WDC, ecosystem impacts can be classified as: ‘First-order’ Impacts which imply physical, chemical and geomorphological changes of blocking a river and altering its distribution and the natural periodicity of its flow; ‘Second-order’ impacts implying changes in the primary biological productivity of ecosystems including effects on fluvial and riverbank life as well as down river habitat such as wetlands; ‘Third-order’ impacts implying alterations in fauna (such as fish) due to a first-order effect (such as blocking migration) or a second-order effect (such as reduced plankton availability). [2]   Nonetheless, the world’s dams do not meet this criteria and they don’t want to admit who the defenders of the dams are.  Dams affect relations inside and outside countries;  between rural populations and urban populations; between the interests of those upriver and those down river of the dam; among agricultural, industrial and domestic sectors; and between human needs and a healthy environment.  But how to balance these when there are 261 bodies of water crossing the political borders of two or more countries?  These watersheds make up 45% of the terrestrial surface and contain 80% of the global water flow affecting 40% of the world’s population.

THE RIGHT TO LAND AND ARTIFICIAL FLOODS…:  Today the large dams of the world cover more than one million square kilometers, slightly less than 1% of the lands surface.  This is equivalent to flooding half of Mexico; two time the territory of Central America (Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama); or all of the territory covered by Plan Puebla-Panama (Central America and South-Southeastern Mexico).  In Brazil in 1987 there were 859 million hectares flooded by dams.  And in the Parana river dams flooded the impressive waterfalls of Guaira.  The Tucurui and Balbina dams in the Amazon jungles flooded 6 400 square kilometers.  In India, the Bargi dam, built between 1974 and 1990 flooded 162 villages and filled the hold without prior notice.

THE RIGHT TO LIVING RIVERS AND PLANETARY GANGRENE…:  Rivers recycle nutrients, purify water, refill soils, control flooding and are the habitat for 40% of the world’s fish species.  Nonetheless, large dams have fragmented and transformed 60% of the world’s rivers!  Natural habitats that took millions of years to form are eliminated forever from moment to moment and irreversibly by dams that last 50 years.  The United States and the European Union regulate the flow of 60-65% of their rivers!

“With respect to the deterioration of flowing ecosystems, dams constitute the principal physical threat” [3]   At least 20% of the more than 9 000 species of fresh water fish in the world have disappeared in recent years or are threatened with extinction.  Although rivers provide 6% of the fish protein consumed by humans, they often make up 100% in riverside and interior campesino and indigenous communities.  For example: “(…) the coasts of Toga and Benin are eroding at a rate of 10-15 metres per year due to the Akosombo dam on the Volta river, in Ghana, it has detained the supply of sediment to the sea.” [4]   The Aral Sea was forth largest inland body of water in the world.  It had 24 species of fish and a fishing population of 10 000 persons.  But dams were built on the rivers that feed it reducing its volume to the sea by 25%, quadrupling its salinity, eliminating fishing and contaminating the water. [5]

The natural sediments such as rocks and gravel help to form the canal and the riverbed and it provides a place for fish spawning.  The organic material that the river drags is also food for fish, turtles, birds and other aquatic and terrestrial animals.  Dams, which detain the sediments result in the erasing of the river canal (fluvial canal) facilitating flooding.  Freeing the water without sediment further erodes the riverbed or results in small straight streams down river.  As the water does not reach its point of flow into the sea (delta or estuaries), marine fishing production is extinguished due to lack of fresh water in which the fish spawn.  An internal inquest in 1990 by the World Bank showed that 58% of dam projects were done without taking into account the effects down river, even when erosion, contamination and habitat destruction – among other effects – were predicted.

Dams also negatively impact the life of the river due to salt intrusion; industrial pollution; changes in land use; agri-chemicals used on nearby crops; the destruction of mangroves and the loss of wetlands of which 50% were destroyed during the 20^th century.  Owing to its storage, the temperature, chemistry, distribution, quantity and cycling of water and aquatic ecosystems were altered.  The problems on a river accumulate as more dams detain it given that it is not possible to recuperate oxygen levels nor adequate temperatures in the presence of other dissolved gases.  In the Colorado river in the United States, so many dams have been built on it that its water no longer reaches the sea.  Now fewer than 40 indigenous Cucap families – who have depended on fish from the river for the past 2000 years – remain.  The Tarbela dam in Pakistan stops 80% of the water that should reach the sea!  In Costa Rica, dams in the Rio Reventazon watershed have dried up the rivers 10 km downstream.

THE RIGHT TO SHELTER AND FORCED DISPLACEMENT…:  “Displacement is here defined as including such ‘physical displacement’ as in the displacement (deprivation) of ‘the means of subsistence’. [6] The definition of those affected has been limited and the totality of groups affected including those without land, downstream groups and indigenous groups has not always been determined”. [7]

Dams have displaced between 40 and 80 million people throughout the world, the majority indigenous and campesino.  If we take into account those affected directly and indirectly, upstream and downstream, the figure would be between 60 and 100 million people.  This is equivalent to all of the population falling under the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP) which is calculated at 68 million inhabitants.  “In too many cases an unacceptably high price has been paid and often unnecessarily, in order to get said benefits, particularly in social and  environmental terms, displaced peoples, down river communities, the constituents and the natural environment.” [8]   The two most highly populated countries in the world, China and India, have built approximately 57% of the world’s large dams and they have the highest number of displaced peoples.  At the end of the eighties, China had some 10.2 million relocated peoples owing to dams.  In the Yangtze River watershed alone, at least 10 million people were displaced.  In India the figure is between 16 and 38 million. [9]

Among the projects financed by the World Bank (WB) which resulted in displaced populations from their place of origin, dams were the cause of 65% of the displacements and this does not include those displaced by the construction of canals, electricity plants, infrastructure or the creation of ecological reserves as compensation for damages.  The WB has supported the construction of 538 large dams that have displaced 10 million people – 47% more displaced peoples than initially estimated even as the world average is 35% more.  The WB calculated that between 1986 and 1993, and without taking into account those affected downstream from the dam, around 4 million people were forced to leave their home each year owing to the 300 large dams built annually.  On the other hand, relocations due to dams tend to be at a higher scale than those due to other types of physical infrastructure projects.  Highways and thermal plants can be constructed on marginal lands while dams generally flood rich, fertile agricultural lands. [10]

In Brazil, large dams have displaced one million people.  In Nigeria, the Kainji dam displaced 50 000 people.  In China, they have displaced 34% of all the people there displaced by development projects including bridges, highways, urban expansion, etc..  In India the statistic is 77%.  In the Philippines, almost all of the large dams have been built on lands where the approximately 7 million indigenous peoples live.  In India, between 40 and 50% of those displaced by dams are tribal groups.  The Waimiri-Atroari indigenous people of Brazil numbered 6 000 in 1905 while in 1985 only 374 were left of whom, 107 were displaced by the Balbina dam.  In the case of the Bargi dam in India, only 10% of those who were physically affected were relocated.  The Yacyreta dam in Argentina and Paraguay flooded 110 000 hectares and only 30% of the people were relocated – after 20 years!  And, as if that weren’t enough, after 10 years, the dam reservoir had only been filled to half its capacity.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND HOW THEY ARE ALWAYS AFFECTED…:  Among the communities affected by dams, the difference between the sexes has grown and women have disproportionately bore the social, economic, political and cultural cost.  Speaking about displaced populations, we should not forget that the majority of the population is female and that they have been continuously discriminated against when it comes to compensation or their rights.  In many societies, women do not have access to the law as landowners or the government takes the land from them or it is left to the sons and they are not compensated.  The WB accepts that many aspects of gender have not been included in the dam projects nor have women been taken into account.  “Gender relations and power structure are, with excessive frequency, detrimental to women”. [11]   “The difficulties for women are immense.  We suffer from depression.  The relation that we  women have with our home, the trees, the river, this is something very important to all of us”, testified Margaret Nunes of the Regional Commission of Those Affected by Dams in the Iguassu watershed of Brazil.  Meanwhile, in Zambia, the British government took away the traditional right of women to land and only recognized men when building the Kariba dam. [12]

Many of the displaced have not been recognized (or registered as such) and therefore they have not been relocated or compensated.  They are rarely given restitution for their means of subsistence given that relocation only takes into account the physical transfer and not the economic and social development of women.  When governments carry out land census for tax purposes, given that many campesinos understate their holding, the government use this information as the basis for compensation, as happened in Turkey.  The Chittagong dam in Bangladesh displaced 40 000 members of the Chakma group and some of them found refuge with their children in India.  Given the scarcity of land, they did not attain citizenship and conflicts with other groups have cost the lives of 10 000 persons.  In South Africa, the Gariep dam and the Vanerkloof dam forced the 75% of  displaced women acting as heads of the family to live for more than a year without lands along the sides of highways. [13]   The local women contracted more sexually transmitted diseases at sites of dam construction owing to the outsiders who arrived in the region.  Bars and cantinas infested the area and along with them, alcoholism, prostitution, drug addiction and family violence rose.  Basic products became more expensive and the temporary jobs mostly benefited the men who in addition to abandoning their lands, migrate easily to other places leaving the women and children alone and without land.

In the Brazilian Amazon, “The women painted for war agilely lowered her machete.  The curved blade was held millimetres from the man, Jose Antonio Muniz Lopes, the chief engineer of the Brazilian electricity company, Electronorte.  Muniz was quiet while Tuira, the Kayapo woman, supported the front of the machete against his face.   ‘You are a liar’ – she said to the point of spitting it.  ‘We do not need electricity.  Electricity is not going to give us our food.  We need our rivers to flow freely:  our future depends on it.  We need our jungles for hunting and gathering.  We do not need your dam’.  On the Xingu river, one of the dams would flood 7 200 square kilometers making it the second largest dam reservoir in the world. 

CULTURAL RIGHTS AND THE LOSS OF OUR CULTURAL PATRIMONY…:  The submission of a people begins with the loss of its culture.  In the planning of dams, the loss of cultural patrimony is never taken into consideration.  The social, spiritual and psychological impacts have been tragic for them.  When dry spells have lowered reservoir levels, the historic memory is resuscitated and all is left uncovered as with the Madden dam in Panama or the Benito Juarez dam in Mexico.  What was once their temples, their alters, the places of sacrifice, buildings of great archeological significance, important physical regions and locations, sepulchers and cemeteries complete with the remains of their ancestors; schools, clinics, parks and what were their forests, large waterfalls, canyons, rivers and valleys, all these come to light.  “(…) the social and cultural implications of building a dam in a given countryside are especially significant, locally obstructing, lasting and often irreversible”. [14]  

The cultural and archeological resources are very valuable as it is in the valleys and where important rivers converge that civilizations have developed.  The Benito Juarez dam in Oaxaca, Mexico, flooded the convergence of two rivers and the town of Jalapa del Marques which was called “the Babylon of the Isthmus”.  The Pangue and Ralco dams in Chile have displaced and ended the ancestral land of the Pehuanches indigenous people.  In order to build the Ananda dam in South Africa, human bodies were exhumed and all were put in the same grave affecting the inhabitants.  In other regions of the world, prayers are said for the dead on rafts over the site where the community’s cemetery lies flooded.  The dams in Honduras have flooded archeological remains in 200 Lenca cities.

THE RIGHT TO FOOD, DAM OF THE POOR…:  Dams displace communities living on productive lands, rivers, fish, livestock, the collection of firewood and the harvest of forest products and other means of subsistence, displacing them toward greater poverty, malnutrition, marginalization and the breaking of social and family ties with relocations resulting in socio-cultural dislocation.  Dams cut access to healthcare, potable water and education as well as passage to other regions and villages where people do business or have other lands.  The people lose their jobs and food becomes scarce.  This food insecurity lasts for many years as do hunger and malnutrition.  This has occurred in Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil and elsewhere.

Of the Sardar Sarovar dam in India it has been recorded that 39 700 people were displaced; the WB reported it as 60 000; but the reality is that there were 205 000 people displaced. [15]   While governments, companies and banks apply pressure to build dams, those affected must spend time and energy defending their interests.  They ask for resources, work and they reject the projects since nobody puts money into something in which they see no future.  The people are left poorer and live with significant stress and psychological costs which result in bodily illnesses, headaches, crying and insomnia on top of hunger.  For the people, poverty worsens many years before construction of a dam and lasts for years after it is built with years passing without basic services.

“The impacts of dam construction for people and for their means of sustenance above and below the dam have been particularly devastating in Asia, Africa and Latin America where the existing river systems sustain local economies and the cultural life of the vast peoples made up of different communities”. [16] Compensation has generally been in the form of money and they have been insufficient, not covering what has been lost and, moreover, it is used to buy the leaders, pay greater sums to the rich inhabitants or to provoke an avalanche of land sales but at low prices.  Communities up and down river receive less compensation now that they have nothing to eat.  Relocations are frequently done around the reservoir in ecologically deteriorated zones and the relocation site is imposed without the people’s consent or participation.

The Embera and Kuna indigenous peoples of Panama displaced by the Bayano dam were relocated to less fertile lands.  The indigenous of the Missouri river watershed in the United States lost 142 000 hectares their poverty was outlined with cultural and emotional traumas.  With the Pak Mun dam in Thailand, 6 000 agricultural and fishing families suffered losses; with the Tucuri dam, in addition to the 35 000 displaced persons, more than 100 000 farmers suffered from fish and water losses.  The Tarbela dam displaced 100 000 people and 20 years later they still haven’t been relocated.  The Bargi dam in India gave the dam contractor the rights to fish in the reservoir and so the displaced people could not fish there.  There are even stories of people literally dying of hunger with fish and water in front of them.

In China, the Liu-Yan-Ba dam on the Yellow river displaced 40 000 people in the fertile valleys and they were relocated to dry lands resulting in extreme poverty.  This also happened to the Chinantecos and the Mazatecos indigenous peoples of Mexico, the Kuna in Panama, the Parakana, Asurini and Gabio in Brazil, the Tonga in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and in many other cases.  The Urra dam in Colombia displaced 12 000 people and affected 60 000 downstream fishing persons.  In the Aral Lake of old Russia, more than 60 000 people who used to fish can no longer do so.  After the relocation from the Kariba dam built to provide electrical energy to the cooper industry of transnational corporations, 50 people of the Tonga community suddenly died; in 1957 it was said that, “the people fed on bones” and died of hunger.  In order to build the Miguel Aleman dam in Mexico, 500 square kilometers of Mazateco territory was used, expulsing 20 000 campesinos with the relocation occurring many years later.  Twenty years later, in order to build the Cerro de Oro dam near the first, the principally Chinanteco peoples were displaced with violence.  With a 50 million dollar loan authorized by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), they were relocated to degraded cattle lands with government promises unfulfilled and without public services.

Another world is possible!

(Note:  The information in this bulletin is taken from the booklet, “Don’t be a prisoner of the Dams”, by Ciepac, March 2005.  Said booklet used as its fundamental reference information contained in the World Dams Commission Report for the year 2000.  www.dams.org)

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