Some projects are so destructive that no reputable actors want to get involved with them. Think of the oil wells in Sudan's conflict zones, China's Three Gorges Dam, and the gas pipelines in Burma. If the price is right, however, some will still be tempted to do business on such projects through the back door. The World Bank is currently taking such an approach with a big credit for Ethiopia's power sector.
The Gibe III Dam, now under construction in Southwest Ethiopia, will devastate ecosystems that support 500,000 indigenous people in the Lower Omo Valley and around Kenya's Lake Turkana. The U.N.'s World Heritage Committee called on the Ethiopian government to "immediately halt all construction" on the project, which will impact several sites of universal cultural and ecological value. In August 2011, the Kenyan parliament passed a resolution asking for the suspension of dam construction pending further studies.
Ethiopia is one of the world's highest recipients of foreign aid, and in spite of a poor record on human rights, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is one of the darlings of the international community. The World Bank, the African Development Bank and the European Investment Bank all considered funding for the Gibe III Dam in 2009-10. In the end, none of them got involved in a project that caused an international outcry and clearly violated their social and environmental safeguard policies.
The World Bank would like to turn Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo into regional hydropower "batteries" that can electrify large parts of Africa. Doing so would require the construction of large dam cascades and extensive transmission networks in Eastern and Central Africa. The record of dam building in Ethiopia and the Congo is such that the World Bank is not keen to get involved with these messy projects directly. Instead it plans to pour large amounts of foreign aid into the transmission lines on which the power projects depend.
On June 21, the World Bank is expected to submit to its Board of Directors a credit of $684 million for a 1,000-kilometer-long transmission line from Ethiopia to Kenya. Strong evidence links this transmission line to the Gibe III Dam. The Resettlement Action Plan, an official project document, states that the line "is planned to provide reliable power supply to Kenya by taking it from Ethiopia's Gilgel Gibe hydropower scheme." In a letter to Friends of Lake Turkana, an environmental group, the Bank confirmed in March 2010 that the Ethiopian government had "asked the World Bank to consider providing funding support to the Gibe III hydropower project and the associated transmission lines."
Now that the impacts of the Gibe III Dam have become so publicly apparent, the Bank no longer wants to be associated with it. In a meeting last month with environmental organizations, Bank managers claimed that the transmission line would not be used to export electricity from the mega-dam on the Omo River. The Bank even edited the Resettlement Action Plan and replaced the reference to Gibe by "from Ethiopia's power grid" in its version of the document.
Transmission lines and power projects depend on each other. If transmission lines become a focus of the World Bank's development aid for Africa, the institution needs to clarify where the electricity for these projects will come from. It needs to prove that the power for these systems can be generated without destroying critical ecosystems and violating human rights, in compliance with the Bank's own standards. Organizations such as Christian Aid and International Rivers have documented that Africa's power needs can be addressed without building destructive dams in Ethiopia and the Congo.
On May 21, a coalition of environmental organizations from Kenya, the U.S. and Europe raised these concerns with the World Bank. In a letter to Bank President Robert Zoellick, they argued that "the Bank should not fund a transmission line that would source its power from the Gibe III Dam or from any other project that massively violates its safeguard policies." The World Bank is supposed to reduce poverty, not maximize profits. If a project is so destructive that it cannot be funded directly, the Bank should not support it through the back door of a transmission line.
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Here are a few graphs showing the the importance of electricity. Each graph show a human condition by country by electricity usage per person.
Life expectancy:
www.bit.ly/KOkJ3W
Children Per woman.
www.bit.ly/KOl2vC
Child mortality:
www.bit.ly/KOl7Q9
Income per person:
www.bit.ly/JuDMMV
Female Literacy:
www.bit.ly/JuEaLB
Using Gapminder, you can set the horizontal access to a wide variety of human conditions. And they are almost all better were electricity is abundant.
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So, please stop presenting a lop-sided image and trying to play advocate for the people. What would you think hungry people would ULTIMATELY choose: the chance to be self sufficient, at any cost? Or to just let the waters flow letting the fish and plants live while they die or wait for handouts? Because, when it comes to the main issue...that is all that matters: To live or To die!
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Also, displacing people for the better of the country isn't something that was started in Ethiopia:
1 - Butler, TN - a whole city was flooded to build a dam.
2 - "... When New York City started running low on clean water in the early 1800s, for instance, the answer was to build the Croton Dam, which meant flooding hundreds of acres where people were living and working. A few decades later the reservoir needed an upgrade; this time four towns and 400 farms were condemned to make way, and as a bonus six cemeteries' worth of bodies had to be dug up and reburied. The same kind of thing happened all over: the former towns of Conowingo, Maryland, and Kensico, New York, now lie beneath reservoirs that share their names; what was once Oasis, Missouri, sits at the bottom of Table Rock Lake, and Shasta Lake contains what's left of Kennett, California. The inundation process is usually fairly gradual once the dam's in place - depending on geography it can take years or even decades for a doomed town to disappear entirely."
..."While Europe and the U.S. are using roughly three-quarters of their potential hydropower, Asia has exploited only about 25 percent, and Africa is at just 7 percent, meaning a lot more habitation is bound to get wet."
- Excerpted from http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2726/are-there-submerged-towns-under-lakes-created-by-dam-building
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What the writer is suggesting is that the people should be left alone, but who has asked them what they want? Would those people really prefer to live in the dark ages no matter what? Would they be unwilling to sacrifice their lifestyle so that their children can go to school? Would they rather sentence their kids to their on kind of sustenance instead of letting them work at modern jobs or at least do what their ancestors did in a modern way?
Besides, where are the studies that show that the dam will cause a disaster? The Christian Aid report says under number 1.1. Energy sources that "Hydropower is the most economically viable power generation resource for Ethiopia, but only five per cent of the available potential is now utilized." The same report is in the other site. So, all I can see is that it all goes against your theory.
Another angle that could have been taken instead of being indignant about the "500,000" people that will be displaced, is to think of what could be done to make the displacement for the better of the people.
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I think that there is always a pros and cons in any given situation. The wisest thing to do is to choose the lesser of two evils.
In this case it is suggested that people will be displaced. Well, they may or not be displaced, but the main consideration should be will they be displaced for the better or for worse. If these people have been living a hand-to-mouth existence fishing for daily fish, living remotely with no access to education, medication and technology wouldn't it be improving their lifestyle if they were to be introduced into the 20th century?
Which would be better: letting them go on living as they are for the entertainment of foreign tourists who come over to take pictures of them for $1 (which is now becoming a fad in almost all the southern parts of the country - turning the people into beggars and forcing them dress up in clothes and paints that they wouldn't normally wear so that they can get a few cents here and there), or is better to genuinely improve their lifestyles by bringing electricity and hence the infrastructure of modernization into their homes?
To a people who are living at lowest rungs of the economic ladder any step upwards is an improvement.
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This said the methods of building the dam and the impact it has crosses borders and is a question that's open for discussion. In that respect I welcome the criticism Ethiopia has gotten. However most of it is purely dogmatic, baseless and out of place. The petitioning that many NGOs have started to the WB and other institutions to stop them from financing the dam is very counterproductive to their stated cause. Which is why many on this forum have said that it is not out of any kind of altruistic motives that they are acting but more out of self-interest. For if Ethiopia had gotten the loans from so-called "reputable actors" it would have been easier to mitigate the impacts of the dam on the ecology.
Also, the decision that Ethiopia took to look to China for financing has nothing to do with the refusal of "reputable actors" to finance the project. It was because of the time these institutions took to approve a loan. The president of the AfDB has gone on record at the WEF saying that had Ethiopia not been impatient the bank would probably have approved the loan.
(1) yes, Africa can meet its energy demand from other renewable energy sources; hydropower is the least expensive alternative.
(2) transmission lines tap electricity from inter-connected grid system, linking electricity being transmitted to a certain destiny to a single power plant is wrong.
(3) why are you concerned about Gibe? For sure it is neither because you care for the people living downstream of Gibe dam nor you care for the environment. For us, poverty is number1 enemy; for the aid-industry, it is a life-line. We immensely suffer due to our poverty while the aid-industry makes money by talking about it. Am not surprised by the sentence "...Christian Aid and International Rivers have documented that Africa's power needs can be addressed without building destructive dams..." Yes, more true is lots of NGOs conduct number of studies (for the consumption of the shelves) hiring expensive experts. Can you site project(s) implemented by those organizations yielding benefits equivalent to that sought by Gibe III?
(4) you NGOs (people) provide nothing to our community but relentlessly criticize governments and international agencies that strive to deliver something. Ain't doing so hypocritical of you? If you really care, give us something life-changing rather than blocking the financial channels opting to help us emerge out of poverty.
This fund raising imperative for organization survival has caused most of the reports, studies, etc. of environmental NGO (eNGO) to be as biased or more biased and anti-scientific than the reports produced by PR firms for special interests. Truth is an irrelevancy in fund raising.
Destroying rivers----No dam ever destroyed a river plus how vague!!
Forcible relocation -- they relocated 300 people, the electricity will give light for the first time in their life to 9million people, do the math if you still have a brain left.
increase conflict-----dont worry for that Ethiopia have the biggest army in Africa
Renewable???? are you kidding me?? where do we put the Extra expensive solar panel on the huts of grass houses??
The big problem with you and the writer of this article is that you still think you are in the era where you think western AID control Africa and some writers think they still have influence. Well thanks to china that era is gone. Wake up its 2012!!!!