Aid can kill with kindness, say Thai mussel farmers
Date: 13-May-02
Country: CHINA
Author: Erin Prelypchan
But a waste-water treatment plant in Samut Prakarn province has turned into a public relations nightmare for the Asian Development Bank, which came under fire from both its biggest shareholders and the people it says it is trying to help.
Finance ministers from the developed world and Thai villagers on Saturday spoke with one voice in slamming the ADB-funded water treatment plant, saying it dumps toxins on mussel farms, making the seafood dangerous to eat and near impossible to sell.
The ADB, after some soul-searching, says it needs to make itself more responsive - and accountable - to the people who get its aid.
"A deplorable experience," Austrian Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Gasser said of the plant in his speech to the ADB's annual meeting in Shanghai.
Delegates from Canada, Australia and Britain - key contributors to the bank's funds - all mentioned the waste-water project in speeches to the ADB's annual meeting that typically give a bland economic overview.
"TWO DIFFERENT PROJECTS"
Activists say the plant removes many pollutants from the mouth of the Chao Phraya River but not dangerous heavy metals, which are dumped on nearby mussel farms.
The Manila-based lender changed the location and budget of the plant without asking residents how they would be affected, they say.
But the ADB says it funded $230 million of the plant on the belief that it would help improve the lives of 600,000 people nearby.
"You'd think we were talking about two different projects," said Rajat Nag, director of the ADB's Mekong Department.
Residents of Klong Dan, the most affected village, complained that the project had been originally meant to be for two treatment plants and the environmental impact had only been studied with the two plants in mind.
They asked for an internal review - a first for the Manila-based bank - that took two years to complete and found that the ADB had been at fault on several counts.
Klong Dan residents say even the review process was opaque, with documents in English and obscured with so much jargon that they didn't know what was going on.
"The ADB doesn't listen to us," Dawan Chantarahussadee, a resident of Klong Dan, said in Shanghai on Saturday. "The ADB should visit sites. Talk and listen to people. But nothing happened."
VILLAGER VS ECONOMIST
Although the plant will go ahead in its current location, the ADB's contributors and its staff say the project taught them some painful lessons.
"We took too technical a view... We should have taken a broader view of who is affected," Nag said.
Even normally reserved ADB president Tadao Chino called Samut Prakarn a "learning experience" in a veiled reference to the project in his speech at the meeting's opening ceremony.
"I hope that one of the lessons is the importance of listening to people who are affected by projects," Kenneth Dam, U.S. assistant treasury secretary, told reporters on the sidelines of the ADB meeting.
The bank has suggested setting up an ombudsman-type office, allowing outsiders a chance to complain or ask for a review of lending practices. No changes to policy have yet been made.
But activists say development projects need to be started with input from villagers, not just economists.
"Whose reality prevails, the technical expert or the villager?" said Maetet Pascual of the NGO Forum on ADB, a bank watchdog.
"If the Bank doesn't recognise the validity of the (villagers') truth, this issue will come up again and again."