Claim to Inspection Panel for Investigation of China Western Poverty Reduction Project

 

June 1999

On June 18, 1999, the International Campaign for Tibet filed a request for an inspection, asking the independent Inspection Panel to investigate the World Bank’s compliance with social and environmental policies in the design and appraisal of the China Western Poverty Reduction Project (CWPRP). The claim alleges violations of World Bank policies on Information Disclosure, Indigenous Peoples, Environmental Assessment, Resettlement, and Agricultural Pest Management. In the preparation of this project, Bank management may have also violated Bank policies on Retroactive Financing and Investment Lending. The claimants believe that these policy violations represent a serious threat to the lives and livelihoods of affected peoples in the area and will result in irreparable damage to the environment, causing locally affected people material harm.

The claim is brought by the International Campaign for Tibet, a non-governmental organization that is acting in representational capacity for, and at the request of, individuals living in the project area who will be adversely affected by the policy violations if this project moves forward.

The CWPRP includes a component that is intended to benefit 57,775 Chinese farmers who will be resettled into the Haixi Mongol and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in Dulan County, Qinghai Province. The resettlement of these new migrants into the area will directly impact 4,000 local people, and will have indirect impacts on the entire county. The project also includes components for agricultural development and intensification in Inner Mongolia and Gansu. For Dulan County, in addition to the resettlement component, the project involves large-scale land clearance and leveling and the conversion of fragile, wind-swept, arid lands currently used for grazing by indigenous nomads, into intensive agricultural production. It also includes the construction of a 40-meter dam; extensive irrigation networks; rural roads; increased use of pesticides and fertilizers; labor mobility (encouraging migration from a rural way of life to the cities); and the potential entanglement with the extensive lao gai prison labor network and its associated industries. Moreover, it raises serious questions about the recognized risk of escalation of ethnic tension and resource conflicts; and the long-term development implications for the area. The project involves a great deal of social and environmental risk, and has provoked widespread international concern.

The above issues affect the lives and livelihoods of Tibetan and Mongolian ethnic peoples who will potentially suffer irreversible harm if this project goes forward. People living in the project area have stated that they believe that the settlement will create a dangerous situation and that if the project is carried out with the support of the World Bank, then the World Bank "will have participated in passing death sentence to us here."

The claim documents serious violations of World Bank safeguards and other policies -- policies that are meant to protect the environment and third parties, and move the Bank towards sustainable development. World Bank policies are supposed to ensure that social and environmental impacts are carefully assessed and harm is avoided, and they are supposed to shape careful and informed decision-making within the institution. The problems in this project are very clear and obvious, now that project information has finally, just days before the Board vote, been released to the public. These policy violations are not merely procedural, and they are not easily solved. They undermine the integrity of the entire project, and if the project moves forward we believe that it will constitute a serious threat to the ethnic minorities in the area and the fragile ecosystem in which they live.

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• Proceed to the  full text of the China-Tibet Inspection Panel Claim  
• Proceed to the World Bank China Western Poverty Reduction Project Fact Sheet
• Proceed to the Preliminary Analysis of World Bank Policy Violations in the China Western Poverty Reduction Project
• Proceed to CIEL’s Citizen’s Guide to the World Bank Inspection Panel for more background information about the Inspection Panel and how it operates.

 

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