IN JULY AND AUGUST OF 1988, Bangladesh was hit with the flood of the century. Rainfall ponding on lowland fields combined with water spilling over the banks of the country's huge rivers to cover nearly half the nation, killing 2,500 people and forcing millions to temporarily abandon their homes. For the first time in memory, floodwaters reached the diplomatic quarter of the capital city Dhaka, helping to capture the attention of the world's media. As the floodwaters receded and a new flood of emergency supplies poured into Bangladesh, the possibility of a bonanza of development aid contracts attracted the interest of engineers and consultants from Paris to Tokyo. Within a year, the mega-project now known as the Bangladesh Flood Action Plan (FAP) was born at a meeting of the Group of Seven country leaders in July 1989. The World Bank was given responsibility for coordinating the 15 donor countries and multilateral agencies that were involved.
Now, almost four years later, the growing movement in opposition to the controversial scheme to construct up to 8,000 kilometers of embankments along Bangladesh's three major rivers is challenging many of the assumptions underlying the international aid business, and forcing several wealthy governments to reconsider their participation in the multi-billion dollar project. In a victory for Green Party activists from France. Germany and the Netherlands, the European Parliament will host an unprecedented open debate of the merits of the FAP May 26 and 27, 1993, where project opponents will have an opportunity to present their case directly to many of the governments funding the scheme.
They will argue that the Flood Action Plan embankments will force as many as eight million people from their homes, greatly damage the valuable inland fisheries and ultimately fail to deal with the threat of coastal cyclones, the most pressing flood hazard. Moreover, say critics of the scheme, the true beneficiaries of the plan will be foreign consultants and contractors who will collect hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, the cost of which will be added to Bangladesh's already crushing foreign debt.
Birth of a mega-project
Among those trapped by the rising waters of the 1988 flood was Danielle Mitterand, whose husband happened to be president of France. After hearing her vivid account of the experience, François Mitterand commissioned the French Engineering Consortium to draw up a plan for controlling future floods in Bangladesh. Wary of letting the French get the inside track on the inevitable contracts to implement whatever plan emerged, the Japanese and U.S. governments commissioned separate studies, as did the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
The French plan called for a massive program of embankment construction to channel all the major rivers of Bangladesh, and for the building of a giant honeycomb of compartments behind the embankments. Within these compartments, surrounded by embankments on all sides, flood-sensitive, high-yield varieties of rice could be cultivated and shrimp farms established to boost the country's exports. The full scheme would take up to 20 years to implement at a cost of $10.2 billion. While the UNDP's experts also called for an ambitious embankment building program, they said it could be done for a mere $4 billion. The U.S. and Japanese studies, on the other hand, concluded that embankments were unlikely to effectively control the major once-in-a-century floods and recommended focusing on less costly flood management measures such as flood preparedness, forecasting and warning systems.
Despite these conflicting recommendations, the World Bank's comprehensive Plan for Action, published in 1990, declared that "the country cannot be at the mercy of floods forever and all the major rivers must be contained so that the floods are safely passed through Bangladesh to the ocean." The plan called for an initial investment over five years of $150 million for a series of 15 additional studies, and $500 million for the first phase of 11 "pilot" embankment construction projects. The various donors - which include several Northern countries and multilateral lending agencies - each fund one or two components, with the World Bank playing the role of coordinator. Most of the studies are now nearing completion, and with new funds becoming available, construction could begin before the end of 1993.
A flood of refugees?
As the FAP has gained momentum, so has an increasingly vocal movement opposing the project. Among the first to speak out against the plan were leaders of the people who live on the shifting sand bar islands known as chars. "The embankments will destroy the life of the char people" says Mujibul Huq Dulu, director of the Jamuna Char Integrated Development Project. "How is the FAP going to compensate for this tragedy?" The FAP calls for the 15-kilometer-wide Jamuna reach of the Brahmaputra River in west central Bangladesh to be embanked first, with the French- funded FAP component embanking 70 kilometers of the left bank and the World Bank- funded FAP component rebuilding much of the 240-kilometer right-bank levee, first constructed in the 1960s with World Bank funding, but now nearly destroyed by erosion and lack of maintenance. Project engineers predict that the embankments will raise river levels as much as several meters, making the land between the embankments uninhabitable for the 2.1 million people who now live there.
In addition, embankment construction along the Jamuna will displace tens of thousands more from the lands where the new embankments are sited. Those whose land is confiscated can expect little or no compensation. According to Farhad Mazhar, managing director of the development organization UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternatives), "The procedures of land acquisition and resettlement are highly bureaucratic and inherently based on state violence and denial of citizens' rights. The people almost invariably are not compensated. The poor and the powerless are obviously the main victims." Hashem Ali, who lives in the district of Sirajganj, lost most of his land during a previous rebuilding of the right bank embankment in 1972. "We could not stop the government from taking our land because if they select the land and put a flag on it, we already lose it. We become beggars. I am always scared of the possibility of seeing another flag on my small piece of land," says Ali. "Where will I go?"
Although World Bank guidelines require consultation with the people who will be impacted by the plan, residents of the Sirajganj district have had little contact with project authorities. "Nobody ever asked us how we will be affected, nobody wants to listen to us," complains 70-year-old village elder Mohammad Sekander. "If we were asked, we would never have let them carry on the plan of making embankments. Our opinion is not taken but we are the ones to be affected badly."
Walling off the rivers
The strong popular sentiment against flood control embankments is based on bitter experience. Bangladesh is located on one of the largest and most active river deltas in the world, formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna Rivers; 80 percent of the country's 144,000 square-kilometer area is floodplain. While Bangladesh is vulnerable to infrequent extreme floods, the traditional agricultural system depends on the milder annual monsoon floods to moisten and fertilize the fields of rice and jute. In fact, the Bengali language has two words for flood, barsha, used for the normal beneficial floods, and bona, the infrequent and destructive large floods. "We are the people belonging to the land of rivers," says Sekander. "We have learned that floods bring more fertility to our land. One can compare the lands which are within the embankments with those which are outside. We need to apply 50 kilograms of fertilizer to the same amount of land inside the embankment whereas outside we apply only 15 kilograms. Yet the crop yield inside is not any better."
Past flood control embankment projects have had devastating impacts on the inland fisheries. Twenty years ago the fisheries supplied 80 percent of the protein consumed in Bangladesh, but the supply has dwindled as embankments increasingly block migration pathways for riverine fish. The majority of fresh water fish species in Bangladesh depend on access to the floodplain during the annual monsoon barsha flood for spawning and rearing habitat. The largely landless or land-poor rural population would be particularly hard hit by the further declines in the inland fisheries caused by the FAP embankments. However, Liaquat Hossain of the Bangladesh Water Development Board asserts that "it is not correct that fishery resources will be reduced" by the FAP. "By construction of hatcheries, fishery resources can be increased tremendously," he says. Many experts disagree. Dr. Chu Fa Tsai, professor of fisheries biology at the University of Maryland, describes the potential impact in apocalyptic terms. "What a cyclone is to the coastal areas of Bangladesh, FAP is so to the fisheries of the country." Either way, a shift from open water fish capture to closed water aquaculture would in effect involve a massive transfer of common resources into private hands. Moreover, the loss of normal flooding may lower groundwater levels, drying up important wetlands and lakes, and further reducing habitat for fish and already threatened migratory birds, amphibians and reptiles.
Beyond the severe social and environmental impacts of the scheme, critics also point to the plan's technical deficiencies. Dr. Philip Williams, president of the Berkeley, California-based International Rivers Network (IRN) and a noted hydrologist, claims that "the plan is likely to fail even in its narrow technical goal of reducing damages from extreme river floods. Flood control embankments in Bangladesh have been spectacularly unsuccessful in the past, and there is no indication that the World Bank has learned anything from its past failures."
The FAP must overcome tremendous technical obstacles to achieve the World Bank's stated goal of "eliminating the flood problem." The rivers of Bangladesh are among the most powerful and sediment-laden on earth. Even the most heavily fortified embankments, such as the one at the city of Chandpur which was destroyed in the 1988 flood, have proven ineffective in stopping the natural migration of Bangladesh's river channels across the delta.
Embankments built on smaller rivers in Bangladesh have resulted in rapid accumulation of sediment within the river bed - sediment which otherwise would be spread across the floodplain. This process is likely to be repeated on a much larger scale if the FAP embankments are built. As river beds rise higher, the rivers will become perched above the surrounding land, and embankments will need to be continually raised to maintain flood capacity. In this unstable situation, "any embankment failure could lead to a catastrophic flood as the confined river permanently abandons its former path and cuts a new channel across the �protected' former floodplain, leaving the expensive embankments high and dry," warns Williams.
One critical problem in past embankment projects in Bangladesh has been the lack of careful and regular maintenance. The UNDP, in its 1989 study, blames the "total disinterest often demonstrated by the population to maintain the structures and works that are to protect their life and property." However, most rural Bangladeshis do not consider the embankments in any way beneficial. In fact, it is often the people living directly behind embankments who intentionally create breaches known as "public cuts" in order to allow water into their fields or to drain ponded rainwater trapped behind the embankments.
Neglected alternatives
Perhaps of greatest concern is the charge that the FAP neglects Bangladesh's most pressing flood danger, posed not by rivers but by cyclones which sweep out of the Bay of Bengal and regularly devastate the densely populated coastline. According to Williams, "The real flood risk is from cyclone-driven coastal floods which have killed more than a million people in the past two decades." The most recent cyclone killed at least 150,000 people in April 1991.
Bangladeshi non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have put forward numerous flood management alternatives which are intended to assist Bangladeshis in their traditional adaptations to living on the flood-prone delta. This approach is based on the view that coastal dwellers threatened by cyclone-driven floods need high-ground refuges and effective warning systems so they can evacuate low-lying areas in time. The NGOs also assert that long-term protection could be provided by replanting the extensive coastal mangrove forests, cleared in part for commercial shrimp cultivation in previous World Bank-funded projects. Coastal mangrove forests are capable of absorbing much of the energy in the cyclone-driven storm surge, sheltering lands directly inland. Similar flood- preparedness programs could protect upstream populations threatened by river flooding, by providing rural community centers placed on high ground where tents, food, water and medicines would be available during an extreme flood event. An accurate flood forecasting and warning system could provide people with adequate time to harvest crops and move themselves and their livestock to refuge areas.
The direct economic benefit of reducing damages from extreme river floods is too small to justify the great expense of the FAP, so the World Bank bases its justification on the indirect benefits of projected increases in wet season agricultural yields. However, the greatest potential for growth in agricultural production lies in the dry season through the expansion of so-called "minor irrigation" technology, tubewells and low lift pumps, which do not require any structural flood-control investment. According to U.S. Agency for International Development reports, Bangladesh currently utilizes only 25 percent of its dry season irrigation potential. The primary constraint to the growth of small scale irrigation has been difficulty in obtaining credit, a problem likely to be exacerbated by the huge expenditures of the FAP.
Greedy donors
Many critics of the FAP believe the plan is really more about providing contracts to donor country businesses than it is about saving the lives of Bangladeshis who live along the rivers. One consultant to the U.S.-funded component, who requested anonymity, told Multinational Monitor that "the FAP has been driven by the donor countries from the beginning. Even if the studies show that building embankments is just throwing money in the river, there is tremendous pressure from outside Bangladesh to see some earth moved." Khorshed Ahmed of the Bangladesh People's Solidarity Center is equally blunt. "The primary beneficiaries of the FAP will be the consultants and construction companies from industrialized countries who will be employed to build the embankments."
Bruce Rich, attorney for the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Defense Fund and a long-time critic of World Bank lending for destructive mega-projects, asserts that funneling money to donor country businesses has always been a top priority for the World Bank. "Most World Bank disbursements flow right back again out of borrower countries in the form of procurement contracts, and the lion's share of these contracts go to the 10 richest industrialized nations."
Recently, the campaign against the FAP has put the World Bank on the defensive. When Bank President Lewis Preston visited Bangladesh in November 1992, he was greeted by nearly 1,000 demonstrators in the first public anti-FAP protest. Student organizers were joined by women's organizations protesting World Bank-funded population control programs and trade unionists denouncing Bank-supported structural adjustment policies. Confronted at a reception by NGO representatives who told him of the millions of char people potentially affected by the project, Preston "seemed shocked," according to one eyewitness who added that the Bank president said, "The last thing we need is another Narmada." This was a reference to the resistance campaign of tens of thousands of villagers in India fighting the World Bank-funded Sardar Sarovar Dam [see Cracks in the Dam: The World Bank in India," Multinational Monitor, December 1992 ]. The World Bank announced in March that it is ending its involvement with the Narmada project.
The Bank is sending a delegation to the European Parliament debate in May to attempt to reassure European governments that the problems with the FAP are not grounds for withdrawing from the project. But several governments are reportedly considering doing just that. A high-level mission from the Dutch government has just returned from Bangladesh with a highly critical report. Bangladeshi NGOs are now calling for a suspension of work on studies and "pilot" construction projects until certain minimum conditions are met. "The legal basis for public consultation and people's participation must be ensured first," says Mazhar. "Access to information must be ensured," and comprehensive social and environmental assessments should be done, "given the enormous impact the project will have on ecology and environment and the displacement of people. This is the least one can expect [in order] to have a meaningful dialogue with the World Bank."
Meanwhile, the French Government has just approved a loan of 20 million francs to finance its component, and the World Bank's executive directors are scheduled to vote in July on $163 million more in loans for the FAP. IRN's Williams stresses the importance of immediate action to resist the project. "The time to act is now if we're going to stop the FAP," he says. "This project is not for the benefit of the people of Bangladesh; it is for the benefit of the same international consultants and contractors who profit from other World Bank-sponsored mega-projects, who build engineering monuments to the Bank's technocratic development ideology and then walk away to leave the local people to clean up the environmental and social mess they created."