Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (24 page)
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Authors: Kerryn Higgs
Tags: #Environmental Economics, #Econometrics, #Environmental Science, #Environmental Policy
Though still ruled by the Communist Party, China’s development path involves an urbanization parallel to that which characterized industrialization in Britain. Much of the recent confiscation of land has been along the eastern coast, where the great new industrial cities are swallowing adjacent villages and fields. By late 2004 the state-run Xinhua News Agency was reporting that 20 million of China’s 900 million farmers had been displaced from their land by commercial projects. Developers allied with government officials were “gobbling up” the land of powerless farmers.
2
More recent reports suggest far greater numbers. In 2011 the Landesa Rural Development Institute conducted a survey in seventeen provinces where some three quarters of China’s rural population live. The study found that 43 percent of villages surveyed had lost land to compulsory acquisition for nonagricultural purposes since the late 1990s. The number of “takings” rose steadily through the current century, and the median compensation for the farmer was a tiny fraction (less than 2.5 percent) of the proceeds for the officials.
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Though unevenly reported—the government is reluctant to have unrest publicized—millions of Chinese peasants have resisted the appropriation of their land, especially during the twenty-first century, when the scale of Chinese economic growth has ballooned. The Communist Party magazine
Outlook
reported 58,000 major incidents of social unrest in 2003, an average of 160 per day and an increase of 15 percent over the year before. About half the unrest at that time was related to land disputes, but demonstrators also opposed chemical plants, power plants, and the pollution of their rivers and fields.
4
According to the US online magazine
Grist
, China’s public security minister Zhou Yongkang “told a closed meeting that 3.76 million Chinese took part in 74,000 mass protests last year [2004] alone.”
5
In 2011 the official paper,
China Daily
, reported on research into forced demolitions and relocations; conducted by the Research Center for Social Contradiction in Beijing, the study showed that nearly 70 percent of the respondents were dissatisfied with the outcome.
6
The
Global Post
correspondent Kathleen McLaughlin reported in 2012 that over half of the tens of thousands of protests each year are directly related to land loss and forced resettlement. People particularly objected to lack of notification and poor compensation, with nearly one quarter receiving no compensation at all.
7
Though one might imagine that a democratic system such as India’s would allow farmers a greater say in the disposition of their lands, the path of development has been no happier for India’s peasant farmers, Dalits (also known as untouchables) and
Adivasis
(indigenous or tribal people). As anthropologist Felix Padel and political ecologist Samarendra Das have reported,
In India, industrialisation has already displaced an estimated 60 million villagers in the past 60 years.… A shocking 75 percent comprised
Adivasis
and Dalits. Very few of them have been adequately compensated; most report no improvement in their standard of living though such displacement is unabashedly presented as a precursor to development. The poverty that they have been reduced to is just as painful as the erosion of their cultural values and traditions, which invariably accompanies the forced separation from the land that they and their forefathers cultivated.
8
Displacement on behalf of miners is prevalent in the mineral-rich states of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Orissa. In the northwestern Niyamgiri hills of Orissa state, Vedanta Resources built an aluminum smelter and planned open-cut mining of bauxite in 600 hectares of mountain forest where springs and the headwaters of two rivers sustain the local Dongria Kondh people and the forest they live in. Local people claim that when Vedanta built its smelter at Lanjigarh, some one hundred indigenous families were evicted and their villages razed. Caustic runoff from the refinery has contaminated their crops and livestock and made them sick.
9
In April 2013, after years of litigation, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that Vedanta must consult the Dongria before mining. In an August 2013 referendum, all twelve village communities voted unanimously against the mine and in January 2014 the Indian federal government ruled that mining would not proceed. This is an isolated victory, but mining has been halted and, for once, an indigenous people’s land and way of life has been protected.
Indigenous people have always resisted being removed from the lands to which they are culturally and historically connected, so compensation is rarely satisfactory. When Indian tribals
are
forced off their land, suitable resettlement is rare and compensation is minimal. Common property, analogous to the commons of medieval Europe and making up at least half the commandeered land, is simply excluded from compensation calculations, while payouts for
patta
land, acknowledged as tribal property, are minimized.
10
Growth and the “Greater Good”
At Kalinga Nagar, also in Orissa, twelve rice farmers of the Ho tribe were killed while demonstrating against being deprived of their lands for Tata Steel’s new plant in 2006. Tata is the Indian TNC famous for the Nano, India’s very small car. Tata spokesman Sanjay Chowdry told SBS
Dateline
that “there’s a lot to say about a person wanting to till his land and not move.… But the greater good is what is important.”
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This interpretation of the greater good—that it flows from rapid industrial development and justifies the government in sacrificing individuals or groups who are in the way—is the ruling concept. It echoes Indira Ghandi’s 1984 reply to a social worker concerned about displacement and the drowning of 200,000 acres of dense forest by two new dams. Ghandi wrote that although she was “most unhappy that development projects displace tribal people from their habitat … sometimes there is no alternative and we have to go ahead in the larger interest.”
12
Growth through industrial expansion is an objective frequently repeated by India’s top officials. In 2006, Orissa’s governor, Rameswar Thakur, told India’s
Business Standard
that “Orissa is committed to create an industry-enabling and investor-friendly climate in the state with a view to accelerating industrial development, employment opportunity and economic growth.”
13
In an extensive interview in 2008, India’s then finance minister, P. Chidambaram, also stressed “the imperative need of growth over a long period of time.… We must develop those iron ore mines, we must mine that coal, we must build industries.” When asked for his ideas on eliminating poverty, he outlined a vision in which the vast majority of Indians (85 percent) would live in cities.
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Chidambaram did not explain how this move from country to city would address India’s widespread poverty.
There are serious doubts as to whether the pursuit of the “greater good” along these lines has led to actual improvements in the lives of the Indian population. Sociologist Michael Goldman, who studied the inner workings of the World Bank, found that the poorest people did not necessarily benefit from the mines, industries, dams, and irrigation projects that have characterized much development since World War II. When, for example, the World Bank planned and financed irrigation canals in the Thar Desert in 1958, the project was hailed as a great development success in official bank reports, but the reality was more ambiguous. Wealthy landowners did indeed produce high yields of export crops, but smallholders got neither water nor government help, and fell into debt. Many of the herders, weavers, traders, and rain-fed farmers who had managed their communal village lands for centuries became landless laborers working for the rich. Some, no doubt, were bound for the slums of the cities.
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The history of big dams also shows how the large-scale development approach has favored corporate interests and agribusiness ventures and directed much of the water and electricity the dams produced to industry, while neglecting and displacing the poorest, least powerful people and rarely, if ever, compensating them properly (box 9.1).
Box 9.1
Big Dams
After fifty years of frantic dam building—during the 1970s two or three large dams were being commissioned somewhere in the world
every day
—the World Commission on Dams (WCD) delivered a report that echoed the criticisms of the opposition to big dams that had been growing throughout the period.
a
Among their case studies, the WCD examined the Tucurui Dam in Brazil, where the aluminum industry draws more than half the electricity generated, and the Kariba Dam in Zimbabwe, which was built to serve foreign copper miners’ requirements for water and power.
b
Job creation, often claimed as one of the positive effects, was found to be largely confined to the construction phase, and thus ephemeral.
c
While suggesting that dams have sometimes offered significant benefits, the report also stressed endemic failure to consult the affected, endemic failure to compensate them, and endemic failure to share much of the benefit with those who had given their land, their homes, and their livelihoods for the cause. At the same time, 60 percent of the world’s rivers have been greatly modified, many of the world’s wetlands have been destroyed, and numerous species and ecosystems have been irreversibly lost.
d
The commission was composed of a cross section of diverse interests, from dam proponents representing business and government to an Oxfam representative and the Indian activist Medha Patkar, who led the decades-long resistance to the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmarda River in Gujarat. They were nonetheless able to produce a consensus report that made several recommendations for future dam projects. Perhaps the most radical of these were the policies of “free, prior and informed consent” from affected peoples and, at the outset, a “comprehensive and participatory assessment of the full range of policy, institutional, and technical options [in which] … social and environmental aspects have the same significance as economic and financial factors.”
e
Under such planning constraints, many of the 42,000 dams the commission scrutinized would never have been built.
In 2014, notwithstanding these findings, dams continued to be built, and many more are planned. For example, India and China have plans to dam most of the rivers flowing out of the Himalayas and Tibet. India plans 292 Himalayan dams, affecting twenty-eight of the thirty-two river basins in India’s control; 80 percent of these are in dense, undisturbed forests. The government has not reviewed future water and energy needs systematically or strengthened public participation in decision-making processes, and resettlement compensation is still not guaranteed. Other countries, including China, have at least 129 additional projects planned, many affecting downstream nations such as those dependent on the Mekong. There has been little consultation between nations as each hurries for “prior appropriation.” The melting of glaciers and snowfields, accelerating with global warming, is likely to jeopardize the future viability of Himalayan hydropower, but its effect has not been assessed.
f
Notes
a
World Commission on Dams (WCD) 2000, xxix.
b
WCD 2000, 170, 173.
c
WCD 2000, 133.
d
WCD 2000, xxx–xxi.
e
WCD 2000, 112, 221.
f
Grumbine and Panjit 2013; Vidal 2013.
In 2010, Binayak Sen, a pediatrician who serves the poor of the state of Chhattisgarh, pointed to the findings of India’s own National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau: 33 percent of Indians have a body mass index of less than 18.5, meaning they are underweight, below the normal range; more than half of all Dalits and
Adivasis
were in this malnourished category.
16
In her recent research, the economist Utsa Patnaik looked into what food is actually eaten by the average family and what caloric intake is being achieved. While official government poverty statistics, based on a monetary poverty line similar to the World Bank’s benchmark, claim a substantial reduction in poverty since India adopted neoliberal economic policies in the early 1990s, Patnaik found that actual nutritional intake had declined drastically. Indeed, the level of food grains available per capita of total population had fallen by 2005 to levels not seen since the early 1950s: “Forty years of successful effort to raise availability has been wiped out in a mere dozen years of economic reforms.”
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Furthermore: “In actuality, the average Indian family of five in 2005 was consuming a staggering 110 kg less grain per year compared to 1991.… Not only has calorie intake per capita fallen, there is also a steep decline in protein intake for four-fifths of the rural population over the period 1993–94 to 2004–05.”
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These figures are all the more shocking, Patnaik points out, when it is recognized that the average encompasses “a sharp rise in intake for the wealthy minority,” indicating a catastrophic decline for the poor majority.
A survey conducted by the Indian Health Ministry and UNICEF in 2006 confirmed that malnutrition was widespread among India’s small children, with some 43 percent of them undernourished (figure 9.1).
19
Commenting on that survey, the London
Times Online
noted that the average rate of malnutrition in sub-Saharan Africa was about 35 percent, significantly less than the figure for India, even though India’s economic growth had exceeded 8 percent in the previous three years, “a shocking illustration of how India’s recent economic gains, while enriching the social elite and middle classes, have failed to benefit almost half of its 1.1 billion people.”
20
So widespread is malnourishment in India that the Indian government legislated in September 2013 to deliver a feeding program to 800 million Indians—two-thirds of the population—in an attempt to improve their situation. The initiative may be politically motivated, coming soon before an election, but the severity of the hunger it purports to address is uncontested.
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