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dam-l Asmal Addresses Southern African NGOs/LS
from WCD web site www.dams.org:
WCD Chair Addresses Southern African NGOs
Waterfront, Cape Town
Thursday 11 November 1999
Speech by Professor Kader Asmal - Chairperson, World
Commission on Dams, and Minister of Education in South
Africa (previously Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry
1994-99) - at a Reception for the Southern African NGO
Meeting on Dams
Thank you for this opportunity to address you tonight. Before I begin I
would like to welcome all those who have travelled from outside of Cape
Town to our beautiful city. I also want to thank the Environmental
Monitoring Group for organising this most useful workshop, and also Joji
Cariาo, one of our World Commission on Dams Commissioners, for making
it a priority in her busy schedule.
I'm sorry I could not attend more of your meetings today - my more
recent
obligations as South Africa's Minister of Education have kept me
very busy
- however the Commission secretariat has kept me informed and I am
encouraged by the calibre of discussion here. We consider this meeting
sufficiently important that we're taping all these proceedings, for
immediate reference by those who could not attend and for our
video/audio archive, as part of the WCD's legacy to the global
community.
One of the major benefits of consultations such as these together
with the
work style of the Commission is that we are doing things about the South
in the South. To our knowledge the World Commission on Dams is the
only international organisation with headquarters in Southern
Africa. For
once we do not to have to fly away from this continent, to Geneva or to
New York, to discuss the challenges in Africa.
As many of you know I'm very familiar with the dilemmas posed by dams
and other water resource management issues, having been Water Affairs
and Forestry Minister in South Africa's first post-apartheid government.
We have made the issues of human rights and safeguarding the
environment the cornerstones of our new water legislation in this
country.
I appreciate the degree to which those concerns have informed your
discussions here today.
The World Commission on Dams has a important two-year mandate, a long
road to travel in a relatively short time. We will complete our
global review of
dams by March 2000, then write our final report by August 2000. We want
to know how effective large dams have been in delivering a range of
development benefits including:
the benefits anticipated when a
project
was conceived 10, 20, even 50 years ago; and
the benefits one would
expect of a dam built today, with an emphasis on the need for those
benefits to be economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable
over the long term, and equitably shared.
We can only assess those benefits through in-depth consultation with
people and organisations such as those that you represent. It is the
degree to which the WCD consults with the various interests in the dams
debate that sets it apart from other world commissions which have cost a
great deal but often have left barely a ripple in their wake.
People often ask me, "If the WCD is not part of the UN, and it's not
part of
the World Bank, then who gave you your mandate and who will listen to
you?" This again is what sets us apart. Our mandate is based in the
changing global context in which governments no longer make public
policy single-handedly, be it in national parliament or at the
United Nations.
It recognises that civil society and the private sector also play a
vital role
and thus must also be part of the process.
Our mandate comes from the recognised leaders in the dams debate.
That means, governments; anti-dam campaigners active on social and
environmental issues; financiers and donors; academics, utilities,
engineering firms, and irrigation interests. Those most closely
involved are
listed as WCD Forum members in our brochure, which is available here.
The fact that the WCD engages with all these sides, at all levels,
and not
just with the 'usual suspects' in the elite of the international
development
sector, has encouraged widespread 'buy in' to the WCD process.
Consultation is a key element of our work programme and lends to the
WCD process a high degree of legitimacy with stakeholders. We anticipate
that the inclusiveness of our process also will encourage serious
consideration and acceptance of our final report and therefore
widespread
adoption of our recommendations. So there is method to what some
consider the 'madness' of the WCD's exhaustive global consultation
programme. Let me describe how progress in terms of our four-part work
programme.
We embarked on 10 WCD sponsored case studies of individual dams and
their respective river basins across the globe. In Africa we've
studied the
Gariep and Van der Kloof Dams on the Orange River, as a pilot study to
establish methodology for the rest of our case studies. Our main African
study is of the Kariba Dam and the Zambezi river basin. The dam
straddles
Zambia and Zimbabwe and its history offers unique lessons regarding
transnational water-sharing and water resource development; in
environmental and ecological impacts; and in resettlement issues. The
scope of the Kariba study, like all case studies, was developed
through a
stakeholder meeting in the immediate vicinity of the dam, to ensure
grassroots participation. The consultants, who are Zambian and
Zimbabwean nationals, are conducting the study through broad-based
consultation in the field. Their draft report will be submitted to
the original
stakeholder group for discussion in January.
Secondly there are 17 thematic review studies involving over 500 people
grouped under five themes: social, environmental, economic, and
institutional issues related to dams and an assessment of options in
delivering services usually provided by dams. Each review is being
systematically developed by a group of experts from across the globe and
from across the spectrum of opinion, and then will be subjected to peer
review by a similarly representative group of experts and
stakeholders. In
the case of displacement and resettlement issues a workshop was
convened so that indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities gathered in
Geneva in July for a major UN meeting could contribute directly to
our draft
paper on those issues.
Thirdly, we have a submissions and consultation process. We accept
submissions from anyone, on any topic related to dams, although we
would prefer submissions that were geared toward the various aspects of
our work programme. So far we have received over 400 submissions from
across the globe. The single most dominant theme is the environmental
impact of dams. Overall, most submissions have been made in relation to
our regional consultations, held thus far in South Asia and Latin
America.
Our Africa/Middle East consultation will be held in Cairo December 8 and
9. For that meeting we've received or been promised over 60 submissions
from across the two regions. Some of the emergent themes are: food
security and social impacts of irrigation; shared river basin
management;
ecosystem impacts of dams; and demand management as a water
conservation approach.
Out of this huge body of research will come our final report. Of
course, I
can't pre-judge or pre-empt that final report by telling you what
we'll say. I
don't know as yet what we'll say. But everywhere we go, with everyone we
meet, we are hearing a few messages, themes, principles repeated.
One is that there is a place for dams in development, particularly
in Africa
[referring here to the WWF paper, Maurice Strong's statement & Orange
River stakeholder meeting]. They just have to be conceived of and
developed in the right way. What's the right way?
Firstly, the debate should not begin with a politician or engineer
saying,
"We need a dam and it will deliver the following services: flood
control,
irrigation, hydropower, urban water supply." Instead, the discussion
should start with the statement, "We need XYZ services, now what is the
best means of realising those needs?" Often a dam is only one of the
options. Others may include effective management of water demand, an
issue close to my own heart. One of the roles of interested
organisations
is to make sure that governments first decide on the desired ends,
rather
than the means.
Secondly, the errors of the past must be acknowledged so they are not
repeated. In South Africa, forced removals to make way for the
Gariep and
Vanderkloof dams were just another aspect of apartheid. When we held
our final stakeholder meeting in relation to our Orange River pilot
study,
displaced black and coloured farmworkers remembered how they were
told, at very short notice, to pack up and leave farms, many having
to live
by the roadside for weeks. They lost their livestock, sold for
nothing when
grazing became unavailable. Some displaced people recognised the
value of the dams to the regional economy, while pointing out how much
they suffered so that part of society could enjoy the benefits from the
dam.
The benefits must be shared more equitably and dams must be designed
to reduce negative impacts to the greatest extent possible. Displacement
and resettlement must be viewed as a development opportunity,
improving the lives of those who have had to make way for a dam.
This can
only be done effectively if those negatively affected by dams have a
strong say in resettlement/development programmes organised in their
name. You may be surprised to hear that dam developers and planners
increasingly recognise the logic of these objectives. The financial
cost of
coping with negative social and environmental impacts of dams has
become a branch of dam economics, a make-or-break factor for many
projects.
Inherent in all the above is the need for broad-based consultation
on dam
projects. This is where many of you come in. Civil society must be
involved
in and monitor every level of a proposed dam project, or any major
development project for that matter:
to be sure all options are
assessed,
not just the dam option;
to ensure the economics of a project are
solid
and that the country is not saddled with unsustainable debt loads or
water
tariffs to pay for a dam;
to ensure that costs to cover dam operation,
monitoring, and, ultimately, decommissioning are factored into initial
decision-making;
to ensure the benefits from a dam are shared
equitably;
and to ensure the whole process is transparent, particularly the
bidding
and contracting process.
On that last point I'd like mention that we are in a partnership with
Transparency International, an anti-corruption NGO that just held
its global
congress in Durban. We have invited their help in addressing
corruption in
large infrastructure projects such as dams. Transparency
International is
eager that its ideas on eliminating corruption be given life through
WCD's
final report.
In conclusion our final report will offer the world the first set of
criteria,
guidelines, and standards against which dam projects, and their
alternatives, can be assessed. With little modification they should
be able
to do the same for other major development projects.
As a former Water Affairs Minister, I can assure you that this is
what we
need because we have no standard against which to judge hugely
expensive dam proposals. All we have had is the clamouring of those who
wanted to build dams and those who wanted to stop them. Most parties in
the dams debate, from the World Bank to NGOs to national governments
to private sector financiers, want a level playing field on which
the quality of
a project, rather than the influence of those for it or against it,
becomes the
basis of its acceptance or rejection.
The challenge for civil society is to be both a watchdog on
projects, and
also to propose solutions with regard to the difficult choices we
face in the
very arid southern African region. Water is precious, scarce, and in
many
countries, inequitably divided. It is a potential source of
conflict. The WCD
is an example of how, working together, we can develop better local and
regional approaches to water management, be it via dams or other
options.
I invite you to stay tuned to the WCD. Watch out for our final
report. And
we hope you will be among those who make it a 'living document' that
will
influence policy-making and delivery on this essential aspect of water
resource management, for years to come.
Thank you.
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Lori Pottinger, Director, Southern Africa Program,
and Editor, World Rivers Review
International Rivers Network
1847 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California 94703, USA
Tel. (510) 848 1155 Fax (510) 848 1008
http://www.irn.org
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