Robert Mcnamara's Other War by Sharma Patrick Allan;

Author:Sharma, Patrick Allan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2017-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

The Bank also proved unable and unwilling to recognize the importance to its work of ethnic divisions in developing countries. The organization’s Mutara Agricultural Development Project in Rwanda provides one example. Begun in 1974, the Bank intended the project to improve the lives of approximately 10,000 poor farmers in the highland regions in the northern part of the country by resettling them on government-supervised farms, “paysannants,” where they would receive small plots of land, modern agricultural technologies, and training.24 An audit conducted just a few years after the Bank disbursed the loan, however, found that the funds were put to a much different use. Local officials spent most of the money on construction of the implementing agency’s headquarters. They canceled social services and irrigation components. And many of the land titles ended up in the hands of wealthy individuals who lived in other parts of the country.25 To René Lemarchand, a consultant hired by the Bank in 1978 to appraise a follow-up loan, the reason was clear. The Hutu-dominated government had no interest in helping the mostly Tutsi farmers who were supposed to benefit from the project; instead, Bank resources helped the Hutus consolidate power.26 Yet rather than reassess its role, the Bank censored Lemarchand’s report and in 1979 sunk another $8.8 million into the project.27 Not surprisingly, the project continued to fail. Bank evaluation reports later concluded “many pastoralists from the region had left for Uganda out of fear of the project and the intentions behind it.”28

Indeed, the Bank’s rural development projects sometimes forced peasants off their land. An independent investigation of the organization’s work in Nigeria, for instance, concluded that the Bank failed to make adequate preparations for the thousands of people whose lands were flooded as the result of the construction of two dams. Even farmers who were able to maintain their holdings fared poorly. Unable to afford the inputs intended to help them increase production, many had to sell their land at reduced prices.29 Likewise, a project to improve the productivity of small farmers in the São Francisco River valley in Brazil resulted in the relocation of many to smaller plots. In one instance the Bank gave so little thought to helping Filipino villagers displaced by new irrigation works that a staffer involved in the project admitted that “a whole municipality was going under water” as a result of the organization’s negligence.30

Even more troubling were the Bank’s land clearing and population relocation schemes. Between 1968 and 1978, the organization made seven loans totaling over $160 million to the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) in Malaysia for projects to move peasants to palm oil and rubber farms in recently cleared tropical rainforest in the central and southern parts of the country. On the surface, these initiatives appeared highly successful. Because most of the land previously lay fallow, agricultural productivity in the region had nowhere to go but up. Thus, the Bank later boasted that “FELDA is undoubtedly one of the most important and efficient settlement agencies in the world.

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