The dam building mafia.

"I came, I saw and I was conquered".

So said Franklin Roosevelt at the opening of the Hoover Dam, in 1935.

This iconic modern dam built across the Boulder Canyon on the Colorado River is taller than a 60-storey building and bigger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Its Lake Mead can store more than twice the river’s annual flow.  Francis Crowe, the surveyor on the project, later said:  “I was wild to build this dam – the biggest dam built by anyone anywhere”. 

How is it that these large dams have such a fascination with the general public?  

The Modern Age:  

Along with sky scrapers, suspension bridges, nuclear power stations, and mass air transport, large dams are symbols of this modern age.

Daniel Beard, a previous commissioner of the US Bureau of Reclamation, said of dams:  “There has been no more dramatic human alteration of the landscape in the last fifty years than (dams)”.  He should know.  His agency was responsible for building more large dams on more rivers than any other body in the world!

We all like dams. Journalists like them because they are big, brash, beautiful…..and sexy! Engineers like them because of the profits they offer. Corrupt officials like them because they can offer big payoffs! Manual workers like them because there is usually plenty of work. Governments like dams because they provide a cheap source of electricity.  To large cities they provide excellent storage for large supplies of water. They can prevent flooding in heavy storms.  And they even become tourist destinations!

Hydroelectric dams do generate an enormous amount of power – about a third of the world’s total.  There are now a huge number of dams in operation around the world: around 45,000 of them, the bulk of them in China and the US. 

The Itaipu Dam on the Parana River between Brazil and Paraguay, can generate 12,600 megawatts of power:  equal to twelve conventional power stations.  It keeps both Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro operating non stop. On rivers like the Colorado, the Volta in West Africa and the Nile, the big dams can store twice or three times the annual flow of the rivers.

Along with the nuclear power stations, and the jumbo jets, these large dams show what great achievements humans are capable of.  But all three also present enormous problems to the people affected and for the waste and destruction they cause!

That is the nub of many of the problems they pose.

For many of them, even those built up to the 1990s, were rarely properly appraised for their environmental impacts before they were built.  Few of them had the consent of the people they displaced.  As we shall see, they also carry within them huge problems that have never been resolved.  Equally serious:  it has only been since the 1990s that dams have been assessed to establish whether their benefits outweigh their environmental, economic and social costs.   

World Commission:  

During the second half of the 20th century, the World Bank had spent around $75 billions on building dams in 92 countries across the world.   

Because of the trouble some dams were causing, the World Bank and the World Conservation Union set up in 1998 a World Commission on Dams.  It was asked to evaluate what dams do to the rivers, to the settlements and people uprooted by them, and whether they are the best economic use of resources. The Commission was to assess the successes and failures of large dams and to come up with some ground rules for building successful dams.  It drew together all the interested parties and examined eight dams across the world in detail, drawing on data already available.  

The Commission’s Report was published in 2000.  Much of it was not new:  after all, many of the difficulties caused by large dams were already well known to those involved (if little talked about in public).  Such a report had not been done before and this Report turned out to be far more scathing than anyone imagined! 

Most dams, it said, don’t deliver what they promise.  On average, their cost over-runs are 56 percent. Half of the hydro-electric dams deliver less power than they promised; two thirds of those built to supply water to cities deliver less than promised,  A quarter of the dams built for farm land irrigated less than 35 percent of the land. Generally, the people uprooted are not engaged in the planning, are treated badly and often under-compensated or given substandard farming land in exchange.  And those dams built to protect against flooding often made the areas more vulnerable.

Some companies, governments and other organizations greeted the Report with cautious optimism.  But many of those present at the report launch were horrified.  To those stakeholders who had previously managed to get away with ignoring the effects of dams on local populations and their livelihoods, on the effects on the river itself – both of the fish stocks and  any possible pollution or silting created by the dam  - this was completely outrageous.  If this Report were to be accepted, it would ruin the prospects for profiteering from future dam building. In particular, the World Water Council was particularly incensed.

The water mafia:

The campaigning group International Rivers Network (www.internationalrivers.org) complains that the Council is a well organized mafia behind dam construction, of multinational water, engineering and construction companies. They say they are concerned for the poor and the planet. Yet, in reality, they are driven by their own interests. The World Water Council, describes itself as a water policy think tank “dedicated to strengthening the world water movement for an improved management of the world's water resources."  But the Network complains: “Affordable, small-scale and community-led solutions for (water resources) are of little benefit to the water mafia. These sustainable, equitable and efficient solutions …… get little or no promotion in the mafia's reports and proposals”.

The World Bank, having initiated and supported the Report, could hardly wriggle out of its commitment now.  But the World Water Council wanted blood!

According to Bretton Woods Project News (25 March 2002), it got it.  In the first test of the Report’s guidelines, the World Bank decided to back the Bujagali Dam even though it acknowledged that the project is "unacceptable from environmental and social perspectives."  

This was a virtual volte force of the Report, completely ignoring the Report’s recommendations, much to the disgust of those involved. All hell had broken out!  Engineering News Record (21 January) condemned the Bank's "deplorable hypocrisy" for approving the Bujagali dam in Uganda just months after the Report came out. The Record thought the Report was a bold attempt to "find a way through the conflict that has halted dam construction in many developed countries".  If the study's own sponsors refuse to be guided by them, "all we can anticipate is continued sclerosis in dam building."

International Rivers Network Campaigns Patrick McCully in World Rivers Review (December 2001) says that the new policy disadvantages indigenous peoples (and other) minorities who lack formal legal rights to land and had explicit protection under the Bank's previous policy. He commented: "the Bank has learned little if anything from its history of supporting destructive, white elephant water mega-projects".

Conclusion:

It is easy for us to assume naively that these great buildings are built after “the powers that be” have concluded it is the best option for the area.  That is rarely so!  These powerful construction interests are well organized. But that is not to say that all developers are motivated by personal greed:  there is a huge consensus that the only way to cater for growth is to build big (as well as to grow big).  That is not necessarily so but any alternatives get lost in the clamour for more dams.

Beware when developers build huge projects because that “is in the interests of local people”!

(In the second part, I shall look in more detail at the main disadvantages of dams)