Editor Hari Mohan has assembled a great issue including:

• The Editor’s interview with Michael Cernea
• Susanna Price “15 years of Asian Development Bank Resettlement Policy”
• India’s New Land Acquisition and Resettlement Policy
• Beyond Compensation: Sharing profits with affected peoples
• And more! Resettlement News Issue 23-24

Can Compensation Prevent Impoverishment?, has been printed and will be in bookstores next week. We attach to this announcement a flier printed by the Oxford UP advertising the volume, with the book’s attractive cover and endorsements. View the brochure

BY: JOE McDONALD and CHARLES J. HANLEY, Associated Press Writers Joe Mcdonald And Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press Writers – Sun Jan 25, 2:11 pm ET

XIAOXI, China – The hydroelectric dam, a low wall of concrete slicing across an old farming valley, is supposed to help a power company in distant Germany contribute to saving the climate — while putting lucrative “carbon credits” into the pockets of Chinese developers.  But in the end the new Xiaoxi dam may do nothing to lower global-warming emissions as advertised….

…..And many of the 7,500 people displaced by the project still seethe over losing their homes and farmland.

“Nobody asked if we wanted to move,” said a 38-year-old man whose family lost a small brick house. “The government just posted a notice that said, ‘Your home will be demolished.’”

The dam will shortchange German consumers, Chinese villagers and the climate itself, if critics are right. And Xiaoxi is not alone.

Similar stories are repeated across China and elsewhere around the world, as hundreds of hydro projects line up for carbon credits, at a potential cost of billions to Europeans, Japanese and soon perhaps Americans, in a trading system a new U.S. government review concludes has “uncertain effects” on greenhouse-gas emissions.

One American expert is more blunt.

“The CDM” — the 4-year-old, U.N.-managed Clean Development Mechanism — “is an excessive subsidy that represents a massive waste of developed world resources,” says Stanford University’s Michael Wara.

Forced relocations have become common in China as people in hundreds of communities are moved to clear land for factories and other projects, provoking anger and occasionally violent protests. But what happened here is unusual in highlighting not just the human costs, but also the awkward fit between China’s authoritarian system, in which complaints of official abuse abound, and Western environmental ideals.

Those ideals produced the Clean Development Mechanism as a market-based tool under the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement to combat climate change. The CDM allows industrial nations, required by Kyoto to reduce emissions of gases blamed for global warming, to comply by paying developing nations to cut their emissions instead.

Companies thousands of miles away, such as Germany’s coal-burning, carbon dioxide-spewing RWE electric utility, accomplish this by buying carbon credits the U.N. issues to clean-energy projects like Xiaoxi’s. The proceeds are meant to make such projects more financially feasible.

As critics point out, however, if those projects were going to be built anyway, the climate doesn’t gain, but loses.

Such projects “may allow covered entities” — such as RWE — “to increase their emissions without a corresponding reduction in a developing country,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its December review.

The system’s defenders call it essential for hard-pressed industrialized nations to meet their Kyoto quotas, and say the CDM’s standards are being tightened.

“It’s not as if we’re printing money in a garage,” Yvo de Boer, U.N. climate chief, said of the credits. “Lots of legitimate questions are being asked,” he acknowledged to The Associated Press, but “that’s why I’m happy we have a transparent process.”

That transparency — online project documents and a U.N. database — allowed the AP to analyze in detail this exploding market, which attracts projects ranging from small solar-power efforts in Africa, to emissions controls on giant chemical plants in India and China.

The AP has found that hydroelectric projects, whose climate impact is most widely questioned, have quickly become the No. 1 technology in the CDM, and China in particular is rushing in to capitalize.

The Chinese now have at least 763 hydro projects in the CDM approval pipeline and are adding an average of 25 a month. By 2012, those projects alone are expected to generate more than 300 million “certified emission reductions,” each supposedly representing reduction of one ton of carbon dioxide. Even at recent depressed market prices, those credits would be worth $4 billion.

If the United States enters the Kyoto system, as proposed by President-elect Barack Obama, it would be the biggest player in a market expected to be worth hundreds of billions a year by 2030.

Here in central China’s mist-shrouded Zishui River valley, evicted farmers worry not about carbon-market billions, but about the thousands of Chinese yuan doled out to compensate them for lost homes and farmland.

Xiaoxi residents said that when they were evicted in 2005 to make way for the dam and its 4-square-mile reservoir, officials paid too little for condemned homes and forcibly removed owners who held out for more.

They said payments for losing their rights to state-owned land, where they grew beans and squash, were far below China’s legally required minimum, which they said requires payment of the value of at least five years’ harvests.

Residents spoke with the AP on condition their names not be used, to avoid trouble with authorities.

The dam’s state-owned builder, Hunan Xinshao Xiaoxi Hydropower Development Co., defended its dealings with the people of Xiaoxi.

“The compensation standard we adopted was relatively high compared with similar projects and was in accord with government regulations,” said Wang Yi, assistant to the company’s general manager.

For their homes, people said they were paid government-set prices of $4.60 to $5.70 per square foot. But such payments didn’t go far, even in this remote town surrounded by small tin mines and steep, wooded hills.

“What I got certainly was not enough to buy a new place. We had to borrow more,” said a man who stood holding his 1-year-old grandson in a street lined with new apartment buildings where some relocated families have moved.

He said officials refused to discuss compensation for thousands of yuan he had spent to fix up his family’s house. “I refused their offer, but they forced us out and demolished it,” he said.

The dam company says local surveys found overwhelming support for the project, with 97 percent of 212 respondents saying they were satisfied with their compensation. But people interviewed in Xiaoxi said they were not contacted for such surveys.

The CDM money has spawned an industry of consultants who help Chinese companies assemble bids for emissions credits, and of U.N.-certified “validators,” firms that then attest that projects meet U.N. standards.

For Xiaoxi, the developer hired Germany’s TUEV-SUED as validator, and then commissioned it again later to confirm that the project complied with European Union and German government requirements on “stakeholder consultation” — that local people approve of the project beforehand.

The TUEV-SUED report acknowledged that “the concerned villagers and their leaders were not involved in the decision process.” But it contended the guidelines’ “essence” was fulfilled because those affected “have improved their living environment.”

The German Emissions Trading Authority approved Xiaoxi credits early last year, but that government agency’s Wolfgang Seidel now tells the AP it is investigating questions newly raised about Xiaoxi. Julia Scharlemann, spokeswoman for beneficiary utility RWE, said it also was “making our own inquiries” regarding Xiaoxi.

A key question from environmentalists, led by the U.S.-based group International Rivers, is whether projects meet the CDM test of “additionality” — that they contribute to making real reductions of greenhouses gases rather than be business-as-usual projects capitalizing belatedly on the CDM bonanza.

At Xiaoxi, where the dam should be operating by 2010, construction began in 2004, two years before the developers applied for CDM credits, suggesting it would have been built without CDM money.

Company official Wang counters that CDM money will help pay retroactively for expensive Italian technology needed to cope with the site’s complex geology. “Without the money from trading emissions credits, the project would be unprofitable,” he said.

Environmentalists also point out that hydro power has long been a national priority in China. Since the 1990s — long before the CDM — the Chinese have added an average 7.7 gigawatts a year of hydro power, equivalent to six Hoover Dams annually, International Rivers reports.

In other words, Chinese planners aren’t suddenly replacing emissions-heavy coal-fired power plants with emissions-free dams.

The Xiaoxi project design document, in fact, says Chinese regulations would block the building of such a relatively low-output coal plant here. But that’s how planners determined the “emissions reductions” from the $183-million, 135-megawatt dam — by calculating how much carbon dioxide a 135-megawatt conventional power plant would produce instead.

That bottom line — some 450,000 tons of global-warming gases each year — would be added to RWE’s permitted emissions if it buys the Xiaoxi credits, at a current annual cost of $8 million. And such calculations will be repeated at 37 other Chinese hydro projects where RWE will buy credits.

All told, the 38 are expected to produce more than 16 million CDM credits by 2012, legitimizing 16 million tons of emissions in Germany, equivalent to more than 1 percent of annual German emissions.

At today’s low market prices, those credits would be worth some $300 million, paid to Chinese developers and presumably billed to German electricity customers, who by 2007 were already paying more than double the U.S. average rate per kilowatt-hour.

Utilities from Italy’s Edison to Tokyo Electric are making similar deals for hydro-project credits in a dozen other countries, from Peru to India to Vietnam.

Rather than reduce their own emissions, “firms in developed countries are buying offsets that don’t represent real behavioral change, real reductions in emissions,” said Wara, the environmental law professor.

The U.S. GAO investigators said they learned that middlemen sometimes manipulate project paperwork to show a need for CDM financing, and they believe “a substantial number” of projects have undeservedly received credits.

The CDM system “can be ‘gamed’ fairly easily,” said German expert Axel Michaelowa, both a critic and a CDM insider, as a member of the U.N. team that registers CDM projects.

But Michaelowa said the CDM remains “a crucial bridge between industrialized and developing countries.” It has problems but they can be solved, he said.

Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican ex-member of the board overseeing the CDM, echoed Michaelowa’s view. She said it’s crucial to encourage China in particular, whose coal power plants make it the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, to build clean-energy facilities. And she counters critics who oppose dams in general because of their environmental impact.

“We cannot continue to demonize hydro,” Figueres told the AP.

She and R.K. Sethi, the CDM Executive Board’s Indian chairman, both pointed to reforms since 2007: A reinforced U.N. oversight staff, a validators’ manual with stringent standards, and a growing number of board reappraisals of validator findings.

In two recent dramatic steps, the board suspended the CDM’s most active validator, the Norwegian firm DNV, questioning its project assessments, and it rejected its first Chinese hydro project — after registering 139 others for credits. The project wasn’t “additional,” the board said, rejecting DNV’s validation that it was.

But environmentalists say a total overhaul is needed, shifting from project-by-project assessments that invite “gaming,” to a negotiated regime whereby the developed world, through aid funds, subsidizes emissions cuts in the developing world more broadly, industrial sector by sector.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to reach record levels, threatening disruptive warming this century, the CDM pipeline continues to swell, with 4,364 projects worldwide approved or awaiting approval, one-quarter of them hydroelectric.

Here in Xiaoxi, meanwhile, where project credits await U.N. approval, dam construction jobs have produced an economic boomlet, but it’s only temporary and people’s grievances are not.

One group, hopeful still for a hearing, has written to authorities with their plea for more yuan for farmers’ lost way of life.

“We strongly request that they give us an explanation and a satisfactory resolution,” they wrote.

___

Joe McDonald reported from China, and Charles J. Hanley from New York. Associated Press Writer Patrick McGroarty in Berlin contributed. Last Updated ( Friday, 06 February 2009 )

IN a report of the Social Impact Assessment Programme on the Alutrint smelter project in La Brea there is a series of statements about losses to the residents.

This document was prepared by a company called Foster Solutions for Sustainable Ecosystem Development Ltd…..

A large group of West Africa, Europe, and North American academics and social scientists, many of whom are students of population displacement, have signed onto an editorial written and circulated by a group of West African academics and social scientists.  They argue that the former President of Cote d’Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo, is abusively clinging to power after having blatantly tried to falsifiy the recent elections. The point out that international bodies have confirmed that the opposition candidate, Alassane Ouattara, has defeated Gbagbo. Nonetheless, the Gbagbo and his military supporters prevent the access to power of the newly-elected President. The likelihood of renewed violent conflict, civil war, and bloodshed in Cote d’Ivoire is high and increasing, involving obvious risks of renewed massive uprooting and population displacement.  Côte d’Ivoire: the war against civilians – an Editorial “The Gbagbo mafia is struggling first and foremost for power,” affirms a group of experts on West Africa, who are concerned about the “risk that the situation will escalate into a civil war” Laurent Gbagbo is clinging to power after rejecting the results of the presidential elections, as declared by the Independent Electoral Commission, certified by the UN, and recognized by the international community, designating Alassane Ouattara as the clear winner. There is now a real risk that the situation will escalate into civil war. In pro-opposition neighborhoods of Abidjan, numerous individuals have disappeared in the wake of operations by security forces loyal to Laurent Gbagbo. News reports have shown corpses lying in the streets, while morgues have refused to release the bodies of those killed to their families. Converging accounts have led the UN to suspect the existence of mass graves and the incineration of bodies, but Gbabgo’s security forces have prevented investigations of the alleged sites. Outside Abidjan, particularly in the western region, NGOs are reporting incidents of serious violence against the civilian population. As scholars professionally committed to a rigorous analysis of the situation, we must insist that there is no evidence for any primal hatred between supposedly rival ethnic groups, nor for that matter between local populations and foreigners, between northerners and southerners, much less between Muslims and Christians. This is not to deny the existence of sharp, long-lasting tensions, particularly over access to land. However, the interplay of intersecting interests has generally allowed Ivoirians to implement negotiated solutions to such recurrent disputes. Moreover, Côte d’Ivoire, a country with a long history of mixing, remains a trans-ethnic, cosmopolitan, multi-religious “melting pot.” In any “civil” war, who would fight against whom? The answer is anything but obvious. In the past few weeks, accumulated fears, resentment, and greed have fuelled violent clashes among different segments of the population in the west of the country. However, it is essential to stress the resilience of the overwhelming majority of Ivoirians on all sides of the political spectrum who are confronting the crisis without resorting to violence. On the national scale, Laurent Gbagbo’s supporters are just a vociferous and agitated minority who monopolize the state media they have hijacked. We should not overestimate their numbers. Laurent Gbagbo has justified his actions in terms of the defense of national sovereignty, brandishing the specter of the country falling prey to foreign influences. This is a diversionary tactic. His political opponents are just as patriotic and just as concerned with developing the national economy in a more equal partnership with Western (or other) powers. Whatever its claims, the Gbagbo regime has hardly turned its back on the “predatory foreigners” it purports to ward off. Over the past ten years, it has depended on extensive politico-commercial networks in France and elsewhere. Not to mention the recourse to Liberian and other international mercenaries for controlling the Ivorian population. To the extent that there is any real ideological difference between the two camps, it centers on their conception of citizenship. The Gbagbo regime promotes an ethno-nationalist vision: only members of indigenous ethnic groups from the south of Côte d’Ivoire may claim a fully legitimate, or ‘natural’, right to civic participation – a citizenship ‘by blood’. In this conception, electors from the northern regions, assimilated to ‘foreigners’, are relegated to the status of second-class citizens. Annulling the votes of districts in the north and the center of the country is thus consistent with this logic. The opposition claims a republican conception of citizenship, founded on the principal of equality and according civic rights to all those born in the Côte d’Ivoire, a far remove from the ‘divine right’ claimed by Gbagbo. But ideology is undoubtedly not the key to understanding the ongoing crisis. The Gbagbo mafia is struggling first and foremost for power; for an exclusive hold on power, for the very enjoyment of power, with all its attendant material benefits. How, one might ask, can civilians freely and openly express dissent when the thugs of the outgoing regime exact merciless reprisals against anyone expressing overt opposition or who is even suspected of voting for the wrong candidate? A group of scientists and researchers of Cote d’Ivoire and West Africa: Michel Agier (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales or EHESS, Paris), Emmanuel Akyeampong (Harvard), Jean Allman (Washington University in St. Louis), Jean-Loup Amselle (EHESS), Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton), Karel Arnaut (Ghent University, Belgium), Ralph Austen (University of Chicago), Cheikh Anta Babou (University of Pennsylvania), Georges Balandier (EHESS), Issaka Bagayogo (ISFRA- Université de Bamako), Richard Banégas (Université de Paris 1), Thomas Bassett (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Jean-François Bayart (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique or CNRS, France), Laurent Bazin (CNRS), Laurence Becker (Oregon State University), Sara Berry (Johns Hopkins University), Chantal Blanc-Pamard (CNRS), Pierre Boilley (Université de Paris 1), Catherine Boone (University of Texas at Austin), Christian Bouquet (Université de Bordeaux, France), Sylvie Bredeloup (Institut Recherche Développement or IRD, France), William Gervase Clarence-Smith (School of Oriental and African Studies or SOAS, University of London), Jean-Paul Colleyn (EHESS), Barbara Cooper (Rutgers University), Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia University), Mamadou Diouf (Columbia University), Jean-Pierre Dozon (EHESS), Stephen Ellis (Afrika-Studiecentrum, Leiden), Sandra Fancello (CNRS), Boris Gobille (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France), Alma Gottlieb (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Sean Hanretta (The University of Florida), Joseph Hellweg (Florida State University), Gilles Holder (CNRS), Paulin Hountondji (Université d’Abomey-Calavi, Benin), Anne Hugon (Université de Paris 1), Sharon Hutchinson (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Biodun Jeyifo (Harvard), Bennetta Jules-Rosette (University of California San Diego), Ousmane Kane (Columbia), Ousman Kobo (Ohio State University), Eric Lanoue (ARES, France), Robert Launay (Northwestern University), Marie Nathalie Le Blanc (Université du Québec à Montréal), Marc Le Pape (CNRS), Barbara Lewis (Rutgers University), Bruno Losch (Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement ou CIRAD, France), Ruth Marshall (University of Toronto), André Mary (CNRS), Achille Mbembe (University of Wittwatersrand, South Africa), Elikia M’Bokolo (EHESS), Michael McGovern (Yale), Marie Miran-Guyon (EHESS), Richard Moncrieff, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (EHESS), Jacob Olupona (Harvard University), J.D.Y. Peel (SOAS, University of London), Claude-Hélène Perrot (Université de Paris 1), Ato Quayson (University of Toronto), David Robinson (Michigan State University), Ruediger Seesemann (Northwestern University), Benjamin Soares (Afrika-Studiecentrum, Leiden), Emmanuel Terray (EHESS), Jean-Louis Triaud (Université de Provence, France), Claudine Vidal (CNRS), Laurent Vidal (IRD), Leonardo Villalon (The University of Florida). N.B. Colleagues living or having family in Côte d’Ivoire have not been included for reasons of security.