Children Suffer as World Bank’s Borrowers Upend Their Lives
In the disappearing rainforests of Indonesia, a 9-year-old boy copes with the trauma of eviction
Revan
Pragustiawan loved his home by the river. The little boy’s ancestors
built the place in a rainforest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra,
using local bark and leaves in the traditional style of the Batin
Sembilan tribe. Over the years, his dad had improved the house with wood
and a metal roof.
Revan felt safe there, sleeping on a
plastic mat huddled up with his family, and spending his days playing
with his sister and helping with chores. By the summer of 2011, he was 5
years old, big enough to help his mother fetch drinking water from the
river and look forward to helping with a new garden his dad and some
neighbors were planning to sow along the riverbank.
Everything changed for Revan on the morning of August 10, 2011.
He
was at home when he heard the crack of gunfire. Soon after, as many as
two dozen police officers and 20 employees of the palm oil company PT
Asiatic Persada pulled up in heavy vehicles.
Tensions had been
running high between the company and the residents, who lived on land
that Asiatic Persada had leased from the government so it could develop
an industrial-scale palm oil plantation. Now the company intended to
take action. The men fired shots in the air, called the people in
Revan’s hamlet “pigs” and “animals” and ordered them to “run,” residents
later claimed.
Revan fled with his family through the woods and
down to the river, turning back to catch glimpses of bulldozers moving
in. As the machines reduced his home to a pile of sheet metal and wood,
Revan cried uncontrollably, tears streaming down his face. He was so
terrorized by seeing his home destroyed, his dad recalls, he began
speaking gibberish.
By day’s end, the men had destroyed all of the
hamlet’s 35 homes. Revan’s community was gone, swept aside amid Asiatic
Persada’s drive to satisfy its parent company’s growing appetite for
palm oil. It was a demand fueled in part by more than $145 million in
loans and guarantees from the World Bank Group that helped the corporate
parent expand its planting and processing operations.
Revan’s
story is a worst-case example of the trauma that children can suffer
when they live in the path of initiatives sustained by money from the
World Bank Group
, the multinational financial giant that styles itself as an anti-poverty champion.
Evictions,
loss of family income and other hardships associated with dams, roads
and other projects can be especially harmful to young people. Studies
show that children whose families have been forced to relocate are at
greater risk of disease, hunger and loss of education.
The
bank’s social and environmental safeguards forbid sudden, strong-arm
evictions. Families targeted for “involuntary resettlement” must be
installed in new homes or compensated so their living conditions are as
good or better than they were before.
But as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Huffington Post and other media partners
revealed
in April, the bank is failing to enforce those rules, with devastating
consequences for adults and children who live on or near land targeted
for development.
Along India’s Gulf of Kutch, a
study
by human rights activists found, pollution from a coal-burning power
plant backed by the World Bank Group damaged farms and fishing grounds,
forcing many families to pull children from school so they could work to
make up for lost income. This left adolescent girls who had to go to
work as domestic servants vulnerable to sexual exploitation, the study
said.
In Cambodia, children watched as their homes were demolished
by a wave of evictions in an area of Phnom Penh that was supposed to be
protected by a World Bank–financed land management program. As part of a
presentation
organized by children’s rights advocates, one child whose home was
destroyed wrote to World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim, asking him
not to “sit quietly while there are human rights violations with World
Bank funds.” Another young evictee, a preteen girl, wrote: “They beat me
even though I am a child! I lost all chance of education.”
The World Bank Group declined repeated requests for comment for this story.
“[Children] frequently develop post-traumatic syndromes, including nightmares, anxiety, apathy and withdrawal.” – U.N. report on forced evictions
In public statements, it says its work in Cambodia, India, Indonesia and other countries has helped children by
improving education,
boosting health care
for newborns and reducing child mortality. From 2003 to 2013, the
bank’s fund for the poorest countries ensured immunizations for nearly
600 million children.
Yet the bank is also increasing its financial support for dams and other big-ticket initiatives that are the
most likely to displace large numbers of people—even as it has acknowledged that it often fails to track the repercussions for people on the ground.
The
World Bank’s 468-page guidebook on handling resettlements includes a
page and a half outlining “good practices”—such as monitoring school
enrollment—that borrowers can embrace to help reduce harm to children.
Human
rights groups say guidelines aren’t enough—they want clear rules about
what steps the bank and its borrowers should take to protect children. A
2012 letter from more than 75 advocacy groups around the world urged
the bank to
strengthen its safeguard rules
by requiring that project planners do detailed assessments of likely
impacts on children, “including the potential for violence and
exploitation.”
Advocates were disappointed in July when bank officials released a
new draft
of a planned overhaul of safeguard policies covering loans to
government-sponsored projects. The draft says the safeguard standards
aspire to “remove barriers against those who are often excluded from the
development process, such as women, children, youth and minorities.”
But it includes no specifics about how children are to be protected if
their families are relocated.
“Just considering children isn’t
enough to solve any problems,” says Elana Berger, manager of the Child
Rights Program at the Bank Information Center, a human rights group that
monitors the World Bank’s practices. “You have to have a plan to
address their needs.”
‘Still afraid’
It is a sweltering afternoon in May. Revan and his father sit in the
cramped shack where the family now lives. Revan’s dad, a goateed
35-year-old named Irsan Saiful, built the structure from planks salvaged
from the wreckage of their old home. After a flurry of bad publicity
about the 2011 evictions, the company allowed the family and other
community members to rebuild in an area about a mile away from their
previous homes inside the 68,000-acre palm oil concession.
Revan
is now 9 years old. But he seems far younger. His shorts, safety-pinned
at the waist and falling to his knees, threaten to swallow his spindly
body, and the lid of his baseball cap obscures his round, watchful face.
Revan’s dad raises his hand to his heart as he talks about the
evictions’ emotional toll.
For three days, the family had nothing
to eat. Along with Revan’s home, the wrecking crew destroyed clothing,
food, cooking utensils, marriage records, even the little boy’s birth
certificate.
In the weeks after they were evicted, Revan and his
family lived under a tarp provided by the government. Humanitarian
groups contributed clothing and food. Some of the families were
compensated for the damage—Revan’s family received roughly $1,000—in
exchange for agreeing to rebuild farther from the river. Police remained
in the area for weeks, firing guns into the air daily and harassing the
evictees, the Batin Sembilan say.
As his dad talks, Revan is
sitting so close he’s nearly in his father’s lap. It’s been four years,
and he is still a worried, fearful child, unable to get over the shock
of watching his home get demolished. He misses the hours he would spend
playing alongside the river with his friends, and he still mutters words
like “evil” and “evictors” whenever he sees a security guard or
policeman.
“My son is abnormal,” Irsan says sadly. “If someone snaps a little, he is still afraid.”
The
evictions have taken a toll on all the children of the Batin Sembilan
community. Asked about the events of August 2011, a 12-year-old named
Aldi says he can’t remember a thing.
“Trauma,” his aunt offers by way of explanation.
The United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights
says
forced evictions can have long-lasting psychological impacts on
children: “They frequently develop post-traumatic syndromes, including
nightmares, anxiety, apathy and withdrawal.”
Along with
psychological damage, relocations and big industrial projects can affect
children’s physical health and educational progress, research shows.
In
the Akosombo region of Ghana, for example, the infection rate among
schoolchildren for “snail fever”—a water-borne disease that can cause
anemia, learning disabilities and colon damage—was 5 percent before
construction of a World Bank–backed dam but grew to 90 percent after the
dam was finished in the 1960s, according to environmental scientists
who studied the project.
Michael Cernea, a former World Bank
official who developed the bank’s first resettlement safeguards, has
noted that relocation “often interrupts schooling and for some of these
children it means that they never return to school.”
One survey
found that nearly half of displaced families in the Indian state of West
Bengal had pulled their children out of school because they needed them
to work to make up for the economic blows from the loss of their land.
Berger,
the children’s rights advocate, says even temporary disruptions in
schooling, family income and living conditions can have devastating
effects on a child’s development.
“Every year a child loses, you can’t get it back,” she says.
Before and after
On Sumatra, Revan’s parents and other adults who grew up before the
proliferation of industrial plantations recall childhoods that were
different from those that Revan and other young Batin Sembilan are now
experiencing.
“I played in the forest,” says the area’s tribal
chief, a 38-year-old named Damsi (Indonesians often go by a single
name). “I used to find wood and do farming. I collected sap that we used
for paint. We used to collect rattan for building.”
The
rainforest was lush with coconut palms, papaya trees, jackfruit, wild
mango. The Batin Sembilan hunted deer, cultivated vegetables and caught
catfish and crabs in the river. As a teenager, Revan’s dad grew cocoa,
coffee and chilies.
Things began changing dramatically for the
Batin Sembilan in the early 1980s. The semi-nomadic tribe lost tens of
thousands of acres to a World Bank–funded “transmigration” scheme that
resettled millions of Indonesians from the archipelago’s crowded islands
to less-populated ones like Sumatra. New farms were created and given
to the settlers, encroaching on lands where tribal people had lived,
hunted and planted for generations. “Transmigration had a major negative
and probably irreversible impact on indigenous people,” a World Bank
internal review later concluded.
In
the early 1990s the bank advised and financed Indonesia’s forest
policy, which over the past quarter century has resulted in the loss of
roughly one third of the country’s forest cover to timber, palm oil and
other industries. Two-thirds of the forested area of Jambi—the province
where the Batin Sembilan are primarily located—was signed over to
forestry and agribusiness interests.
In recent years, Wilmar International Limited,
Asia’s largest agribusiness,
has become a big player in Sumatra’s palm oil fields. The company
controls roughly 40 percent of the world’s trade in palm oil, which is
used in cookies, toothpaste, lipstick, ice cream and countless other
goods—at least half of all products on U.S. grocery shelves.
Between
2003 and 2008, the World Bank Group’s business-lending unit, the
International Finance Corporation, supported Wilmar’s palm oil business
with four investments—two loans totaling $62.5 million and two financial
guarantees totaling $83.33 million. In 2006, amid that infusion of
support from the IFC, Wilmar bought Asiatic Persada.
After the
purchase, Wilmar backed out of a promise by Asiatic Persada that it
would set aside more than 1,500 acres within its concession for use by
the Batin Sembilan. Wilmar instead proposed to establish a cooperative
on what would remain company-managed land 18 miles away from Revan’s
village, to be shared with other indigenous groups. The Batin Sembilan
rejected the offer, in part because of fears that they’d face conflicts
trying to share limited territory with other groups.
Tensions
between Wilmar and residents escalated, with the company eventually
forbidding the Batin Sembilan from collecting fallen oil-palm fruits—the
sale of which had been among the few sources of income left to them. In
July 2011, the company called in government police. A month later,
after a tussle with a resident accused of stealing fruit, the bulldozers
rolled in. Work crews flattened Revan’s village and two other
settlements, evicting 83 families in all, including dozens of children.
Wilmar
declined to answer questions about the evictions or other issues
relating to its operations, explaining “it is no longer our place to
comment on this case” since it sold Asiatic Persada two years ago. In a
statement released two weeks after the 2011 evictions, the company
referred to the residents of the hamlets as “illegal occupants” and
asserted that “no one has been forcibly removed from their land.”
“These
incidents are unfortunate,” the statement added, “but we firmly believe
that just as the local communities are entitled to human rights, law
enforcement personnel must enforce law and order to underpin those
rights, as well as protect themselves. Similarly, Wilmar has a duty to
protect our employees from risk and harm.”
No sanctuary
The landscape that Revan and many other Batin Sembilan kids now call home amounts to an endless sea of oil palm.
The
native flora is all but gone. Everything here, including the dump
trucks that ply the rutted roads around the clock, is dwarfed by the
massive fronds that hang over the place like the wings of some giant,
prehistoric bird. The rumble of the trucks and other equipment used for
transport and maintenance often scares the children, a reminder of the
bulldozers that destroyed their homes.
Amid the nutmeg-hued soil
and the muted green of the trees, the only contrast in color comes from
the shiny orange oil-palm fruits themselves, which glow from within the
spiky palm bunches piled at intervals along the side of the road.
The
area’s once-temperate weather is a thing of the past. The oil-palm
tree, which consumes roughly 80 gallons of water a day, soaks up
moisture from the ground like a giant sponge. The practice of clearing
plantation land leads to warmer local water temperatures, according to a
2014
study
by researchers from Stanford University and the University of
Minnesota. The lack of forest canopy means that air temperatures do the
same, locals say.
During the evictions four years ago, the few
fruit trees that remained in Revan’s village, which had been planted by
the community’s ancestors, were dug up and tossed in the dirt.
Now
Revan and other children eat mostly cassava leaves and
government-issued rice. The single shop that operates near the
communities inside the concession rarely has fruits or vegetables.
Instead, brightly colored packages of candy and fried snacks share the
shelves with multiple brands of clove cigarettes.
Revan’s mom
occasionally gets fish from the river. Locals say that one hardy species
manages to survive in the tea-colored water, thick with runoff from the
plantation and contaminated, they claim, with fertilizer and
pesticides. Once a month or so the family cobbles together enough cash
to buy meat or eggs.
Revan’s family continues to use the river for
bathing, and to wash their clothes. Getting there means spending money
on fuel for their motorbike—it’s too far to walk—and driving past the
site where their house once stood, now overgrown with tall grass. A sign
nearby warns that “damage to this land” will result in five years’
imprisonment and a fine of up to 5 billion rupiah, or more than
$350,000.
Downplaying risks
Indigenous peoples who have been forced from their homes because of
the expansion of Wilmar’s plantations turned to the World Bank Group for
help, filing a series of complaints with its Compliance Advisor
Ombudsman, which deals with issues involving loans to corporate clients.
The
complaints charged that the World Bank Group’s private sector arm, the
IFC, had ignored its own social safeguard rules, allowing the company to
take indigenous peoples’ traditional lands without due process or
consultation. This has created social conflicts that triggered
“repressive actions” by corporate and government security forces,
a 2007 complaint said.
The
ombudsman unit later found that IFC officials had downplayed the risks
of their investments in Wilmar. The IFC was aware for more than 20 years
that Indonesia’s palm oil sector was damaging the environment and
disrupting the lives of local populations, but it gave in to “commercial
pressures” to ignore problems on plantations within Wilmar’s supply
chain,
according to a 2009 report.
By
early 2012, the ombudsman unit had helped negotiate a series of
agreements that reduced police presence on the Sumatran concession and
arranged for compensation to be paid to Revan’s family and others who
had lost their homes. In April 2013, however, Wilmar sold off its stake
in Asiatic Persada to a pair of companies, one of them owned by the
younger brother of Wilmar’s co-founder. The new owners withdrew from the
negotiations, effectively voiding all agreements.
The ombudsman
later issued a report asserting that the sale “had direct and indirect
adverse consequences for the affected communities.” The case, which
opened the IFC to criticism that its safeguards could be evaded by a
change of ownership in any offending parties, remains under
investigation.
Asiatic Persada has resumed its aggressive tactics
within the concession. In December 2013, it evicted 150 families and
destroyed their homes, in a scene reminiscent of the 2011 evictions,
according to reports by local and international news organizations. In
March 2014, one resident was beaten to death and five injured during
another clash with security personnel on the Jambi concession.
Repeated attempts to get a reply for this story from Asiatic Persada or its new owners were unsuccessful.
‘We belong here’
Some families have moved off the Jambi concession, tired of the
fights and the locked-down atmosphere on the inside. “We have more peace
of mind outside the gates,” said a woman named Rogaya, who relocated
with her husband and three children to a relative’s home in a nearby
village.
Revan’s family has stayed close to its old home place
with the hope of maintaining the tribe’s—and children’s—traditional
connections to the land.
For centuries, the Batin Sembilan have
raised their sons and daughters to revere the soil, water and plants and
to pay respect to the spirits of ancestors believed to inhabit the
tribe’s territory.
Revan’s dad, Irsan, worries his son and
daughters are losing their identities as indigenous children. Moving
away would only make that worse. He says that even if the company
offered what for him would be a fortune—200 million rupiah (roughly
$15,000)—it wouldn’t be enough to drive him from the lands where the
Batin Sembilan have given birth and died for as long as anyone can
remember.
“I don’t care about how much the house costs. I care
about the fact that our ancestors left this for us,” the father says.
“We belong here.”
They are no longer alone. The company’s security
guards are a constant presence on the maze-like roads that snake
through the rows of oil-palm trees. Residents are jittery about engaging
with visitors. As the sun begins to set, they nervously shoo people off
company property. They suggest that a reporter and photographer leave
immediately, fearing that all might be in physical danger if the guards
were to catch them talking.
“There is a lot of intimidation,” Revan’s dad says. “I feel frightened and confused.”
His
son hopes one day that he and his parents and sisters can regain their
land and reestablish their lives by the river. As soon as it’s safe,
Revan intends to help his dad dismantle the worn, mismatched planks of
their new home in the relocation settlement so they can nail them back
together on the place where his mother was born.
Yes, Revan says
softly, he’s still angry with the palm oil company. But he knows his
options for the future are limited. So he hopes one day to get a job
working at the plantation.
Maybe as a guard.
“If I am security,” he says, “I will feel less scared. I might be able to carry a gun.”
