By Robin Osborne
Overseas aid from official and non-government sources in Australia has hardly headed left, but it is certainly going green. Recent statements by the government, its aid arm the Australian International Development Assistance Bureau (AIDAB) and non-government organisations (NGOs) all have an environmental message to match the times.
Of course, what goes down on paper in Canberra, Sydney or Melbourne (the focus of the aid "axis") is not necessarily what occurs on the ground in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia or Kenya, but the heightened concerns are encouraging.
Smaller-scale aid projects, notably those with strong input from local communities, are proving the most successful on all criteria, including environmentalism.
These NGO projects, usually run on budgets ranging from a few thousand dollars up to, in rare cases, a couple of million, are "treading lightly on the earth" yet seeming to have the best impact on people in need. Small is both greener and more effective.
While NGOs like the Freedom From Hunger Campaign (FFHC) and the ACTU aid agency, Australian People for Health, Education and Development Abroad (APHEDA), have been thinking green for years, it was not until 1987 that the government decided to scrutinise AIDAB's capacity to "assess the environmental impact of proposed projects and ensure the environmentally sound management of such projects".
Fifty submissions were sent to the Senate's Standing Committee on the Environment by individuals and organisations, many expressing concern that some taxpayers' money was harming instead of helping the environment of developing societies.
In mid-1990, the government accepted many of the committee's recommendations in full and most others with minor changes. It noted that their implementation would produce an aid program "better able to promote and to realise the objective of sustainable development".
One key point was that AIDAB should ensure that none of Australia's untied budget support to PNG — which accounts for about one-third of this year's aid spending of $1163 million — contributes to environmentally damaging projects. So our "no strings attached" aid now has at least one condition, albeit an apparently desirable one.
"The degradation of rainforests in PNG is a particular
concern", the Senate committee had noted, largely in response to submissions initiated by the Rainforest Information Centre in Lismore.
In PNG, illegal logging has been conducted by Japanese and South-East Asian companies with the collusion of some senior politicians, for instance the deputy PM, former general Ted Diro, who admitted accepting US$130,000 in "political donations" from Indonesian strong man General Murdani.
Tracking the flow of official Australian aid money in a complex bureaucratic environment like PNG's will not be easy.
Also stressed by the committee, and endorsed by the government, was the need for Australian representatives on "multilateral" organisations (such as the World and Asian Development Banks) to convey "fully and forcefully" any concerns about the environmental effects of aid projects.
Harmful projects
In recent years, the World Bank has been criticised for helping to finance large-scale projects that have harmed both humans and their habitat.
One is the Kedung Ombo dam in Central Java, Indonesia, which inundated 47,000 ha of agricultural land and displaced 30,000 people. Practical help to the project came from our own Snowy Mountains Engineering Corp.
Another disaster posing as aid is Indonesia's transmigration scheme, which, despite protests and the resentment of indigenous Melanesians, continues to send tens of thousands of settlers to farm eco-fragile places like Irian Jaya.
Then there's the planned Narmada Valley dam in India. Although the Washington-based World Bank now boasts of having a team of staff ecologists, fiascos of the future like Narmada are still supported.
When finished (in 20 years) it will have destroyed the homes, lands and temples of 70,000 people, drowning almost 14,000 ha of forest and its wildlife. Pockets of stagnant water will increase the prevalence of malaria, while Indian experts have predicted soil waterlogging and increased salinity.
By way of contrast, an NGO aid project not far away has used far less funding to achieve impressive, and environmentally sound, results.
Australian donations have enabled FFHC to help local people in Rajasthan state to alleviate drought and conserve soil and water by building contour banks on hills, plugging gullies and damming small streams.
"The villagers agreed to keep their animals off land that was newly planted with trees", FFHC's national director, Bob Debus, said, "and today this area is dotted with verdant plots of forest which provide fuel, fodder and fruit".
In 1890, a British agriculturalist in India wrote: "Nowhere would one find better knowledge of soils ... Rotation, mixed crops ... I have never seen a more perfect picture of cultivation."
The age-old agricultural practices common to many countries were changed by colonial regimes, which sought the cultivation of crops such as rubber, cotton and coffee which were more useful — to themselves. Ironically, some of the most effective aid from the West is helping to
reverse practices imposed by Westerners in the past.
As Bob Debus said, when providing aid it is vital for the NGOs — and, of course, Australia's aid bureaucrats — to listen to what local people say.
To do otherwise is to risk pouring vast sums of scarce money down a bottomless pit or into the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt officials. (The classic non-listener is the World Bank, which confuses the voices of governments with those of their people.)
Magarini Settlement
An Australian tale of aid woe was examined in the book Development in Practice — Paved with Good Intentions, which was launched by Governor-General Bill Hayden in early February.
Written by Doug Porter, Bryant Allen and Gaye Thompson, academics and aid workers, it tells the story of the ill-fated Magarini Settlement Project in Kenya's Coast Province.
The project was begun in 1976 because of the Whitlam government's desire for a project "somewhere in Africa" to deflect African leaders' charges that Australia was a bastion of white racism. The scheme aimed to settle 4000 families on semi-arid land serviced with roads and water networks.
For a time it was our biggest aid project, consuming $25.3 million, most of which was wasted. In 1984, on the advice of the Department of Finance, the then foreign minister, Bill Hayden, pulled the plug on it. By then, the people had been living on food aid from the World Food Program for three years, having abandoned their plots.
The scheme had relied on water and labour that were unavailable and inputs beyond the farmers' means.
The book argues that the project was prompted too much by
commercial and diplomatic interests and that its activities were not sustainable in economic or environmental terms. The authors are critical of the role of AIDAB, especially its managerial style of development planning for the Third World.
However, AIDAB's 1990 discussion paper described the major industrialised nations as "pre-eminent polluters" as well as the users and beneficiaries of the world's resources, including those in developing countries. They must "take the lead in change", AIDAB suggested.
It raised the worry that poorer nations might see environmental concerns as a luxury only rich countries can afford to worry about.
In that context, it is encouraging that many smaller projects have fused practicality with greenness.
APHEDA's worker training aid projects pay close attention to environmental criteria, according to its program director, Phillip Hazelton: "We visit all sites before starting any project and liaise closely with local partners".
Since it started in 1984, the agency has used trade union donations in urban and rural areas of the Pacific, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
A current project on Negros island in the Philippines, backed by the Amalgamated Metalworkers Union and the Australian Bank Employees Union, helps former sugar cane labourers to set up sustainable farms.
"Worm-breeding [to provide organic fertiliser] is one important aspect", Hazelton said, "and you can't be more ecologically friendly than that. But 'environment' is a broad term and also covers our occupational health and safety training for factory workers."
Other projects help to train people in combating pollution hazards around factories and mines, he added.
Like Bob Debus, he stressed that the war against environmental degradation could not be won without major structural changes in the developing countries.
"For example, inequitable land ownership causes terrible problems, leading to the concentration of many poor people on a small amount of land, while larger tracts are used by the rich for the mono-cropping of cash crops. The high chemical inputs do long-term harm."
There is widespread awareness of the basics: three-quarters of the world's poor inhabit ecologically fragile areas, and
community-based development is the most appropriate way to improve peoples' lives. This includes protecting or repairing their environment.
Even the World Bank has got the message — those ecologists it boasts about do exist — but whether such bodies, and their main patrons, have the courage to act accordingly remains to be seen. n