BRAZIL: Forest people lodge complaint against World Bank

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Jun 17 1995 (IPS) - A package from forest communities in the Brazilian Amazon is expected to arrive at the World Bank’s offices here at any moment.

But it’s not a present or token of appreciation. Instead, the package consists of a 300-page complaint and appeal for a formal investigation into the Bank’s alleged failure to set up protected reserves for local communties.

The complaint, directed to the Bank’s ten-month-old inspection panel, concerns the three-year old 167 million dollar Rondonia Agricultural, Livestock and Forestry (PLANOFLORO) project. It is the third complaint received by the panel, whose criticism of a Bank-backed dam project in Nepal established its independence from Bank management.

The object of PLANOFLORO is to set up “extractive” reserves to help local people harvest native products, such as rubber, Brazil nuts and about 30 other products.

Twenty-five groups representing small farmers, rubber tappers, unions, environmental and indigenous peoples groups in Rondonia, in western Brazil, say that the project “has been hindered by a series of impediments, largely caused by omissions of the World Bank … failures in enforcing contractual obligations and (in) implementing its own policies and directives.”

PLANOFLORO was set up with much fanfare at the time of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, in June 1992, to clean up the mess created by a previous multi-million dollar Bank development project.

In 1981 the Bank lent Brazil 445 million dollars for the Northwest Brazil Integrated Development Programme (POLONORESTE) to pave 1500 kilometres of dirt tracks in the remote region of Rondonia, which borders Bolivia.

The newly modernised road spurred the migration of nearly half a million people who invaded the forests and cleared them for cultivation. By 1991, the destruction of Rondonia’s forests had multiplied to ten times its original rate. The burning of the forest became a major focus of research as the single largest, most rapid human-caused change on earth visible from space.

It has not only been the forests which have suffered. Diseases spread rapidly. Malaria infection rates soared to 100 percent in some killed indigenous communities with over 250,000 people infected. Infant mortality rates reached 50 percent in some communities.

In 1987 Barber Conable, then president of the Bank, said that POLONORESTE was a “sobering example of an environmentally sound project gone wrong.” The PLANOFLORO project was designed to undo some of the damage.