Sunday, May 4, 2014

Democratic Voice of Burma

Democratic Voice of Burma

World Bank Blundering through Burma

Posted: 03 May 2014 10:14 PM PDT

How is the World Bank achieving its goal to alleviate poverty in Burma? The April 2014 World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington revealed the answer: nobody knows.

At the Spring Meetings, World Bank representatives touted the success of projects like the Community Driven Development (CDD) and Telecom Sector Reform projects. But Bank representatives clearly have no knowledge of how these projects are being implemented on the ground. If they knew, they might not be so keen to mention them.

Take the CDD, which is intended to empower local villagers to design their own infrastructure projects. Hyped as a model program, the CDD has been a remarkable failure. The Bank and government delayed the project for months, failed to hire and train competent project facilitators, crammed the months-long project consultation and selection process into mere hours due to cost and convenience, and didn't provide communities with any basic information—unless you count a single poster stuck onto a community bulletin board.

As a result, many facilitators hastily submitted improvised project proposals that villagers had never even approved. Now, villagers are being pressured to implement these projects in a matter of several weeks over the labor-intensive harvest season. This has led to a lack of community participation and a major breach of trust in the World Bank.

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World Bank representatives, who have not monitored CDD implementation, expressed surprise when civil society representatives presented these flaws at the Spring Meetings. But these flaws are not surprising; to people following the Bank's activities in Burma, incompetence is the status quo.

Burma is universally recognized as one of the most corrupt and unstable political and economic contexts in the world, yet the World Bank irresponsibly forgoes comprehensive risk assessments, due diligence, and safeguards. At the Spring Meetings, Bank representatives tactlessly stated that they are not considering Burma through a conflict or fragility lens. To compound matters, the World Bank's lazy approach to civil society consultations in Burma violates the Bank's own guidelines. The Bank habitually announces civil society consultations mere days in advance, doesn't take notes at the consultations or integrate civil society recommendations into project plans, and even lies about the frequency and outcomes of these consultations.

Now the World Bank and International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Bank's private lending arm, are taking their bumbling, oblivious "development support" to Burma's agriculture sector. It is of utmost importance that this support does not exacerbate widespread land, social, and environmental problems by intensifying inequality between smallholder farms and government-connected agribusiness.

But the starry-eyed IFC eagerly looks to invest in agribusiness in Burma. It has already contracted with Yoma Strategic Holdings Ltd – a Burmese company that US officials have recommended for sanctions – to be involved in high-risk plantation agriculture. Globally, IFC agriculture investments are notorious for contributing to impoverishment, land confiscation, forced displacement, and other human rights abuses.

In Burma, military regime-imposed agricultural restrictions almost guarantee that agribusiness and plantation-style investments will exacerbate poverty and lead to human rights violations. These restrictions deny farmers production rights and access to credit, forcing them into the hands of moneylenders at soaring interest rates. Restrictions on internal trade and the country's export licensing regime limit farmers' sale options and artificially keep prices down. On top of this, Burma's horrendous new land laws were seemingly drafted with the express purpose of enabling large-scale land expropriations.

In this environment, empowering smallholder farmers over agribusiness is not only ethical, it's also good economics. Agriculture employs more than 70 percent of Burma's population and is the largest contributor to GDP by sector. Building up the production of smallholder farmers is the key to lifting the rural population out of poverty and stimulating economic growth. Economists—like former Chief Economist of the World Bank Justin Lin and renowned Burmese economist Hla Myint—widely confirm this development approach.

But the World Bank is revealing how little it knows—or is willing to admit—about Burma's agricultural sector. During the Spring Meetings, Bank representatives highlighted how its global agriculture strategy focuses on microfinance and women entrepreneurs. These are important factors, but they are merely supplemental to the alleviation of poverty among farmers.

Perhaps the main barrier to poverty alleviation in Burma is the government-constructed credit crisis. The Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation staunchly resists establishing a formal financial system and access to credit in rural areas, and therefore effectively inhibits access to affordable fertilizer and seeds, hard infrastructure and market information. Despised by reformers, Minister of Agriculture Myint Hlaing keeps smallholder farmers impoverished while he and cronies control the means of production. Burma civil society groups question how the Bank, which has already begun working with the Ministry, plans to exact reforms from the Ministry's crooked leadership.

The World Bank has a role to play in agriculture only if it builds up smallholder farmers and uses its financial leverage to attain meaningful reforms, including allowing commercial banks to lend to farmers and radically reforming the Myanmar Agricultural Development Bank. The Bank must also undertake serious sector analyses that address Burma's horrific land and conflict problems. Even allegedly low-risk investments like the Bank's upcoming irrigation project have the potential to increase land value and thereby lead to land confiscation.

The Bank's financial commitment to Burma has so far outpaced its commitment to caution and poverty alleviation. Bank headquarters has no clue what happens on the ground; Bank staff on the ground have displayed negligible interest in Burma's political, legal and economic situation. This is a recipe for disaster for any investments in Burma's agricultural sector, which could exacerbate socioeconomic inequality in ways not easily reparable.

 

Rachel Wagley is a recent graduate of Harvard University, and a former Fulbright grantee to Thailand. She is policy director of US Campaign for Burma, an advocacy group based in Washington, DC.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not reflect DVB editorial policy.

 

Burma’s mangroves in danger of extinction

Posted: 03 May 2014 10:05 PM PDT

Thick mangrove forests once lined Burma's coastline, but in the past 30 years over half of the country's mangrove forests have been destroyed.

Mangrove trees are an essential part of river ecosystems. They protect the riverbanks from soil erosion by acting as a buffer between the land and sea.

The long roots provide shelter for breeding fish, shrimp and crabs.

Mangroves are also an important natural barrier against floods and storm surges.

Aung Win earns his living by cutting down trees in Irrawaddy Division's Ni Thaung mangrove forest to sell as firewood.

He used to be a fisherman but, ironically, due to the destruction of the mangroves, fish levels dropped in the estuary.

"In the past we could live by catching fish or frogs. Now, we don’t have enough food in the village so we have to sell firewood to survive," he said.

More than 80 percent of residents in Rangoon use firewood and charcoal for cooking. Up until 1993 most of the city's charcoal came from Bokalay mangrove forest. Due to severe deforestation the government banned felling of the mangroves in the area.

Farmer Hla Htay knows mangrove conservation is important, but said local communities rely on the mangroves for firewood and income.

"The main thing to do to preserve these mangrove forests is to find a different energy source. If we get electricity we would all be very happy," he said.

"Without any alternative energy, how can the villagers live without firewood?"

Maung Maung Than, programme coordinator for the Centre for People and Forests, said efforts to conserve mangroves will be impossible unless the government supplies an alternative energy source.

"The forests are depleting. Poverty is very much related to environment. To conserve the environment, people should have another form of income. If we can use an alternative energy, deforestation would be reduced," he said.

The biggest threat to the mangroves is from large-scale coastal development, an increase in silt from upstream deforestation, and clearing huge areas for rice-production.

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Forty years ago, there were 1.7 million acres of mangrove in Burma; now only 700,000 acres remain.

And the result of mangroves being destroyed has been disastrous. On 2 May 2008, Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma's Irrawaddy delta region. 140,000 people died and over 2 million were made homeless.

Experts say if the mangrove forests hadn't been destroyed, the damage caused by Cyclone Nargis, wouldn't have been as great.

"If there were dense mangrove forests, the number of deaths would not have been so high," said Maung Maung Than.

As climate change forces sea levels to rise, coastal communities will be at greater risk from flooding and storms. Wide-scale conservation efforts backed by the government, such as setting up protected mangrove areas and re-planting zones, could turn things around.

 

Organic farming offers Kachin IDPs vital health options

Posted: 03 May 2014 09:23 PM PDT

NHKAWNG PA, KACHIN STATE — It has been nearly three years since fighting between Burma’s military and the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) forced Lazing Lu to flee her home in Kachin State’s Mahtang village. Refugee life hasn’t been easy for the 58-year-old widow and her 90-year-old mother, who share a cramped shelter in the Nhkawng Pa internally displaced persons (IDP) camp, one of more than a dozen such camps located in KIO-controlled territory along the Burma-China border.

For Lazing Lu, who has been a farmer since she was a child, losing her land was a serious blow. Even though she never had much money before the war, she didn’t consider herself poor, "we had our farm, we could support our ourselves" she explained. Today she relies on a monthly supply of rice, cooking oil and dried beans provided by aid groups. Importantly for Lu, she has been able to continue to grow some of her own fresh vegetables thanks to an organic farming programme run by a small Kachin community-based organisation, Bridging Rural Integrated Development and Grassroots Efforts (BRIDGE).

As part of the programme, Lazing Lu and her neighbours volunteer a few times a month on a small farm located next to the IDP camp. At harvest time they receive fresh vegetables, which are also distributed among the entire camp’s population of 1,600. The vegetables go a long way to supplement the basic staples they receive as part of their rations.

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"Because of the farm we can get vegetables without having to buy them from the market" says Lazing Lu.

While nearly everyone taking part in the programme is already an experienced farmer, many are using organic practices for the first time. In the not so distant past, all Kachin farming was done without the use of pesticides and fertilisers, however the rapid modernisation that has taken place in neighbouring China over the past three decades has dramatically altered farming practices across much of northern Burma and here in particular, the half way point on the lengthy but narrow strip of KIO territory that runs along the Burma-China border.

Costly pesticides and fertilisers don’t necessarily translate into increased crop yields, explains BRIDGE coordinator Hkaw Lwi, a long-time Kachin environmentalist, but they are commonly used in these parts even though most of the farmers can’t read the Chinese-language instructions printed on the labels. The overuse of pesticides and fertilisers is a real problem that impacts the health of not just those who directly spray the pesticides, but their family members who live on or very near to the farms, says Hkaw Lwi.

In addition to rice, a staple of the local diet, much of the chemical-intensive farming found across Kachin State is geared towards cash crops, mainly corn and sugar cane. While both of these crops may be worth a fair amount of money, neither have much nutritional value. The BRIDGE farm project focuses on growing crops that will improve the nutrition of the camp’s residents, a majority of whom are women and children. At both Nhkawng Pa and at another IDP camp located near the government-controlled town of Loi Je, participants are growing more than a dozen kinds vegetables including radish, cabbage, cucumber, onion, ginger and two varieties of beans.

BRIDGE also operates a community seed bank, with an eye to a conflict-free future. Plans are in place to give each refugee family their own supply of locally sourced seeds to use when they return to their land or wherever the farmers deem fit.

Last year the programme produced more than 34,000 kilograms of food from a little bit more than four acres of terraced land at Nhkawng Pa. "We can grow more", explained one of the participants from Prang Hku Dung, another village affected by the fighting. The 35-year-old mother of three wants to see the programme obtain more growing space so that she and neighbours can increase the harvest, a sentiment shared by Lazing Lu. Whether the programme is expanded this year, however, depends on how successful BRIDGE is at securing more funding. All that’s needed is a relatively small amount in order to rent out a few more fields, but getting this funding has proven difficult.

Over the past two years, international funding for development and relief projects across Burma have shot up significantly, though donors tend to focus on giving out big sums of money for projects run by larger organisations. "Most donors don’t even want to look at small projects", explained a Rangoon-based NGO veteran during a recent visit to the area. It’s an unfortunate reality that has made it difficult for smaller groups like BRIDGE to expand their programmes, even if they have proved to be very successful.

"When the fighting started, all the villagers phoned the BRIDGE office to ask ‘What can we do? Where can we go?’"

The organic farm project is the continuation of a previous one BRIDGE ran in KIO territory before the conflict erupted in June 2011. Shortly after a 17-year ceasefire between the KIO and the Burmese army collapsed, three quarters of the 36 villages where BRIDGE conducted sustainable agriculture and environmental awareness programmes were completely evacuated. The abandoned villages were quickly taken over by government forces who continue to control them.

"When the fighting started, all the villagers phoned the BRIDGE office to ask ‘What can we do? Where can we go?’", recalled Hkaw Lwi, who in 2011 played a leading role in organising humanitarian relief for displaced villagers when international NGOs and UN agencies were completely cut off from accessing the thousands of displaced sheltering in KIO territory.

Nearly three years since the onset of hostilities, peace talks between Burma’s central government and the KIO appear to have stalled, leaving more than 100,000 people displaced by the conflict in the balance.

Lu’s future, like that of everyone else in her camp, remains uncertain. Even if a lasting ceasefire were signed tomorrow between the KIO and the central government, it would still be a major struggle for Lu and her neighbours to get their farms back, which are now occupied by Burmese troops and covered in land mines.

For Lu’s mother, who came of age during the early 1940′s when fighting between the Japanese and the Allied forces scarred much of what is now Kachin State, war is nothing new. In addition to having survived World War II, she lived through the KIO’s first conflict with the military that ran from 1961 to 1994 — another difficult period when most internally displaced Kachin were completely cut off from any and all relief and medical assistance. A daily dose of organic vegetables has surely made surviving the latest upheaval a little bit easier for this strong-willed nonagenarian.

 
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