World Committee on Dams Report: Oxfam Responds
Oxfam hopes that the development banks, the National Mekong Committees, and the Mekong River Commission will heed the commission's findings and recommendations and incorporate them in their own policies and practices.
Oxfam America welcomes the report of the World Commission on Dams, whose findings confirm Oxfam's long held concerns that the poorest rural people rarely benefit from large dam construction and that more often than not, dams actually bring greater poverty to the people most in need of improvement to their lives. During the 1980s a staggering $4 billion a year was spent on dam construction, and to date the building of dams has driven up to 80 million people from their homes.
Nowhere are poor people more worried about dam building than in the Mekong River basin, which is often described as the world's largest untapped natural resource and where 65 million people depend on the River for their daily livelihoods.
Concern is so strong amongst the international group Oxfam that it has established the Oxfam Mekong Initiative, which is designed to ensure that the wishes of the poorest people are taken into account as the Mekong River is exploited--often for national or self interests. The seven Oxfams that support the Mekong Initiative provide charitable support for more than 120 poverty reduction programs across the Mekong Basin.
The Oxfam Mekong Initiative is driven by the principle that it is the basic right of humans to have access to the resources that they need to sustain themselves, as well as the right to participate in both political and economic decisions that affect them. Oxfam emphasizes the promotion of gender equity, particularly within a framework of people's rights to water and living resources.
According to the World Commission on Dams, few dams have ever been critically evaluated to see if the benefits they provide outweigh the costs. A quarter of all dams built to supply water deliver less than half the intended amount, says the report. In a tenth of old reservoirs, the build-up of silt has more than halved the storage capacity. What's more, by stopping the downstream flow of silt, dams reduce the fertility of flood plains and "invariably" cause erosion of coastal deltas.
The Commission points out that while dams irrigate fields that provide up to a sixth of the world's food production, and though hydroelectric dams power many homes and factories, too often, the rural poor don't benefit at all--only more affluent urban dwellers. The report also concludes that some dams designed to prevent flooding actually exacerbate it. Such problems will worsen with climate change, it says. The Commission claims that dam construction is one of the major reasons for freshwater fish going extinct and bird species vanishing from floodplains. This alone hits at the heart of the needs of farmers and fishing people who live by subsistence.
These facts, highlighted by the World Commission on Dams Report, are of real concern to Oxfam America, which leads the Oxfam Mekong Initiative. Oxfam America hopes that the World Bank and other development banks, as well as the National Mekong Committees and the Mekong River Commission, will heed the commissions findings and recommendations and incorporate them in their own development policies and practices.