In the News

The World Bank, the Haitian government, and international mining company representatives walk into a hotel lobby to discuss the future of mining in Haiti. Guess who isn’t invited? Everyone else in Haiti. This isn’t a joke, but the premise of a crucial consultation offered to the public of an impoverished country that is poised to receive major foreign investment in a sector not known for its commitment to environmental or human rights standards.

WASHINGTON, Jan 13 2015 (IPS) – With Haiti’s Parliament having dissolved on Tuesday, civil society groups are worried that the Haitian president may move to unilaterally put in place a contentious revision to the country’s decades-old mining law. Starting in 2013, that draft was written with technical assistance from the World Bank. Last week, a half-dozen Haitian groups filed a formal appeal with the bank’s complaints office, expressing concern that the legislation had been crafted without the public consultation often required under the Washington-based development funder’s own policies.

A coalition of Haitian community leaders and organizations have filed a complaint with the World Bank’s independent inspection panel alleging the bank is backing controversial mining legislation pushed by the country’s parliament. The bill aims to increase foreign investment by expanding gold and mineral mining in the country.

The Program on Social Entrepreneurship is a joint program of the Haas Center for Public Service and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Each year the Haas Center welcomes a group of Social Entrepreneurs in Residence at Stanford (SEERS) Fellows, individuals working to advance social good in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Accountability Counsel’s director and founder Natalie Bridgeman Fields was awarded a SEERS Fellowship in Winter 2014. The program allowed her to spend a 10-week academic quarter in residence at Stanford to reflect on her own work, pursue research projects, broaden her professional networks, and co-teach a course on social entrepreneurship.

KHANBOGD, Mongolia – Ichinkhorloo Buya scooped fresh water into the camels’ trough and waited for them to return. The whooshing water always beckoned the animals, with their sharp sense of hearing, home. But this time, they were nowhere to be found. Her children raced off across the bumpy moonscape of the Gobi Desert on motorbikes in a frantic search. They eventually found the camels huddled around an old rusty well. There was no reason the camels should congregate there. But they heard something the men didn’t – an underground flow of fresh, cold water. That sound meant something had gone awfully wrong: The precious underground water that sustains the herders’ fragile existence was flowing down into the brackish aquifer controlled by a booming copper and gold mine that’s rapidly changing daily life in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert.

Water is already scarce in Ulan Bator. But with the mining industry competing with energy facilities, agriculture and urban residents for water resources, the problem will intensify, as analyst Qingfeng Zhang tells DW.

WASHINGTON — A bitter dispute has broken out in recent weeks following the release of proposed changes to World Bank policies aimed at safeguarding local communities and environments. A draft of the proposed reforms, released at the end of July, follows a half-year of consultations in some 40 countries. Yet civil society groups around the world have responded with concern and even indignation at many of the proposed changes, warning that the new proposal includes multiple loopholes that could hollow out what have long been seen as pioneering policies.

Traditional justice is expensive and difficult to attain. The cost of litigation in time and money, judicial corruption, fear of retribution, and other barriers push the most marginalized out of the sphere of national courts. Among the most marginalized are those harmed by internationally financed projects. From herders in Mongolia to farmers in Liberia, communities affected by projects financed by international financial institutions have little judicial recourse for violations of their environmental and human rights by large corporations; however, that does not necessarily mean that they have no recourse.

The IFC is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in huge mining projects despite their long track record of negative social and environment impact. In Mongolia, the giant Oyu Tolgoi mining project still causes controversy. In April civil society groups, including Mongolia-based Oyu Tolgoi Watch, wrote to the Bank’s board to express concerns that the “local herding community is now worse off in many ways” as a result of the Oyu Tolgoi mine causing “serious air pollution, pasture loss and loss of access to clean water, forcing herders to abandon their traditional livelihoods.”

Nepal’s highest capacity electricity transmission line, a 220 kV line extending 75 kilometres between Khimti and Dhalkebar substations, has faced numerous setbacks since the project commenced in 2002.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s new draft Environment and Social Policy weakens the Bank’s existing safeguards on human rights, according to a group of civil society organisations. The Bank and its member States must reconsider this backward step. They should use this opportunity to put in place policies and systems to ensure that the Bank takes all necessary steps to prevent it from causing, contributing to or exacerbating human rights violations.

The sight of foreign faces in Ulan Bator used to turn heads. Now they are two-a-penny as the once remote Mongolian capital fast becomes a hotspot for international investors. The main draw is the country’s rich mineral deposits, which, if successfully exploited, could see the national economy more than double over the next two decades. Impinging on that rosy picture, however, is the tricky question of water availability. The central Asian country suffers from extremes in seasonal runoff, local water stress and chronic deficits.

In February 2013, three grassroots organisations: Promotion and Advancement of Justice, Harmony and Rights of Adivasis (PAJHRA), People’s Action for Development and the Diocesan Board of Social Services filed a complaint on behalf of tea plantation workers in Assam to the World Bank’s accountability mechanism, the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO), alleging numerous violations of human and labour rights on three tea plantations owned by Amalgamated Plantations Private Limited (APPL). Assam, a state in northeast India, is the source of more than half of India’s and one sixth of the world’s tea. Such large-scale production and profit rely on thousands of workers belonging to adivasi (indigenous) communities, forcibly brought to Assam’s tea plantations from central India 150 years ago. Today their living and working conditions remain shockingly poor, with the plantations lacking adequate essential services, such as healthcare, education, and food, and workers paid only rupees 90 ($1.5) per day, far below the state’s minimum wage of rupees 169.

Nearly a year after human-rights groups complained about working and living conditions on tea plantations run by Amalgamated Plantations Private Ltd., the World Bank has ordered an inquiry. APPL, a joint venture of Tata Global Beverages and the International Finance Corp., the private-sector lending arm of the bank, employs around 30,000 people on 20 plantations in the northeastern state of Assam.

Indian tea plantation workers employed by a company that owns Tetley are paid less than £2 per day and live in inhumane conditions surrounded by cesspools, according to a report released Wednesday. The workers live in the north-east state of Assam on 24 plantations owned by a company controlled by Tata, the Indian conglomerate that also owns Jaguar Land Rover, and backed by the World Bank.

The World Bank is launching a formal investigation of its investment into a company set up by Tata Global Beverages, maker of Tetley tea, to own and operate 24 Indian tea plantations that the Mumbai conglomerate wanted to divest. In April 2009, the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s private lending arm, took a 19 per cent stake in Amalgamated Plantations Private Ltd, which now runs the plantations in Assam and West Bengal previously wholly-owned by the Tata group.

The World Bank is in the midst of an accountability crisis: over one billion people who live in poverty may lose their right to an independent hearing if they are harmed by a Bank-funded project. The Bank aims to serve the world’s poorest, but their projects can have negative consequences…

The U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) intends to review the outcome of an OPIC-funded renewable energy project in Liberia that has led to allegations that the project caused environmental, economic, and other harm to farmers, charcoal producers and workers, a spokesman for the agency told Bloomberg BNA.

On January 22, 2014, hundreds of Liberians filed a complaint with a U.S. federal agency demanding accountability for its funding of a biomass project that caused serious human rights, labor and environmental abuses, including sexual abuse by company employees of local women.  

Liberian farmers, charcoal producers and workers are seeking redress before the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) for the economic, social and environmental harms allegedly caused by a development project in which OPIC invested.