On the rise: construction of
a dam as part of the giant Three Gorges project on China’s Yangtze River.
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Growing debate about
the rights and wrongs of large-scale dam construction focuses on the very meaning
of development
 At the last count, there were
around 40,000 large dams on the world’s rivers, according to the International Commission
on Large Dams (ICOLD).1 Most of them were built in the
last 35 years. A further 1,600 are under construction in over 40 countries. But is
the era of building very large dams coming to an end? Pressure groups of displaced
rural communities and ecology organizations have already disrupted dam building in
the United States and India.
This coming August the independent World Commission on Dams (WCD), set up in 1998
by the World Bank and IUCN (the World Conservation Union) to look at the long term
developmental effectiveness of dams, will publish its conclusions after two years
of fact-finding. Preliminary reports to the Commission, whose 12 commissioners span
most groups of stakeholders, are already suggesting that the development benefits
may not be all they promised. And that the people who gain least from dams are those
already at the bottom of the socio-economic pile.
“Dams are both a technology option and a development choice,” said South African
Minister of Education and WCD Chair Professor Kader Asmal last December. By focusing
on dams as a reflection of societal needs, he said, WCD is inevitably confronting
the very meaning of “development”. “We are tackling the question of how knowledge,
interests, and values determine the context within which dams are either chosen or
rejected as the preferred option, and how such decisions can best be negotiated between
competing interests.” Part of WCD’s remit is to find out what these interests are.
They might, for example, include the needs of industry and urban residents versus
agriculture and rural populations, or, more cynically, the dam industry versus those
interested in intermediate technology or traditional solutions to development challenges.
For ICOLD, the links between dam building and development are obvious. Two prerequisites
for the development of a nation are energy and water, says one ICOLD paper. But since
these resources are most scarce precisely where demand is rising most rapidly, dams
have become almost synonymous with development. So, while dam building in developed
countries has slowed to a trickle in the last decade, major constructions are underway
in industrializing countries, like China’s massive Three Gorges project and India’s
Narmada Valley Development project (see article below). Over half of all large dams
(more than 22,000) are in China, while India has become the third largest dam constructor
in the world, with over 3,000 large dams.
Smoothing the
flood-and-drought cycle
Although dams
produce power without contributing to the greenhouse effect—about 20 per cent of
world electricity and seven per cent of all energy, according to ICOLD—their primary
purpose is water control. Reservoirs can provide drinking water, while smoothing
out the “boom and bust” cycles of flooding and drought brought about by monsoons.
They do this by storing excess water in reservoirs during the rainy season and releasing
it in times of scarcity. But by far the greatest use of dams is to supply irrigation
water for agriculture. In developing countries, according to the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP), irrigation accounts for over 75 per cent of water consumption.
In some countries, the figure is over 90 per cent.
At present, according to ICOLD, one third of all food produced already comes from
irrigated land. And the organization sees irrigation as the only way to meet the
future increase in demand, expecting 80 per cent of food production to come from
irrigated land by 2025.
But the case for irrigation is far from clear-cut. According to the International
Rivers Network (IRN), a non-governmental organization, irrigation canals cause eutrophication2. Meanwhile, the crops produced
are often for export and do not feed the sectors of the population that are expanding
most rapidly—the poor. And ironically, these are the very people who lose their homes,
farms and livelihoods when river valleys are flooded by dams.
Even before a dam has produced a single watt of power, or litre of irrigation water,
tens of thousands of people may need to be evacuated from the river valleys to make
way for the reservoir. World-wide, the flooded valleys that accompany large dams
have forced at least 30 million people to abandon their homes since the 1930s, according
to IRN. In the past, governments have seen the human cost of displacement as an inevitable
“side effect” of development. Now these displaced people are fighting to be heard.
“Past experiences,” says one report to the Commission, “show that typical resettlement
programmes are: often prepared late in the project cycle; under financed; devised
using insufficient understanding of people’s social, cultural, economic, psychological
conditions and environment in which they were located; implemented with a very short
time frame, with limited objective of restoring previous income levels, and too often
terminated even before all displaced people were resettled and rehabilitated.” One
question that WCD will be trying to answer in its final report is whether the loss
of an ancient rural lifestyle is the inevitable price a nation has to pay to achieve
security for the majority.
Some of those opposed to large-scale dam construction, like IRN, see the development
that dams supposedly promote as spurious in any case, even for the largely urban
communities who benefit. In its publicity for Silent Rivers, a book by Patrick McCully
that IRN co-published, the NGO says that “massive dams are much more than simply
machines to generate electricity and store water. They are concrete, rock and earth
expressions of the dominant ideology of the technological age: icons of economic
development and scientific progress to match nuclear bombs and motor cars.”
Other critics suggest that the dam industry simply turned to developing countries
because the market in developed countries had almost dried up. In the past, loans
from the World Bank and international aid programmes indirectly kept the multi-billion
dollar industry afloat, while scoring lucrative trade and technology transfer deals
for the lending nations. But now, under mounting opposition from pressure groups,
the U.S. and many European governments have declined to become involved in projects
like the Three Gorges and Narmada dams.
With power still mainly in the hands of the dam builders, the coming WCD report might
at least provide guidelines on how to include the dispossessed among those who benefit,
while minimizing the extent of irreversible damage.
1. ICOLD, founded in 1928, seeks
to advance the art and science of dams. It has some 6,000 individual members and
National Committees in 80 countries. ICOLD defines a large dam as one that is over
15 metres high.
2. Eutrophication is a phenomenon occurring in stagnant water, whereby vegetation
proliferates and the water’s oxygen content is reduced.
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