World Bank Project in Trouble Before It Starts
Cambodia Daily | 19 February 2016
Between 2008 and 2015, the World Bank and German aid agency GIZ spent
$13 million setting up eight social land concessions for thousands of
the poorest Cambodians, doling out small farms they could use to pull
themselves out of poverty and, after a few years, own outright.
Soon, the Bank hopes to start spending another $25 million on phase
two, building up the eight sites—plus five others set up with help from
Japan—and adding a new site in the north of Kompong Thom province.
The trouble is, the swath of land picked out for the new site is
already packed with hundreds of working farms. That’s raising questions
about how the Bank can turn it into a viable concessions for new
arrivals—and more doubts that the project itself can be turned into the
kind of replicable model for poor families that the Bank wants it to be.
“It’s not hard to predict the problems that are coming. We’ve seen
them already, and so has the government and the World Bank,” said Naly
Pilorge, director of rightsgroup Licadho, which has studied the Land
Allocation for Social and Economic Development (LASED) project.
“The first LASED project faced several problems because…recipients
received land that was already occupied,” she said. “In some cases,
landlessness was simply transferred as poor families were forced to make
way for other poor families. In other cases, land recipients remain
unable to use the land given to them due to ongoing disputes with
other families or powerful actors. The World Bank never acknowledged or
addressed these problems the first time around and now appears set to
repeat the same flawed process.”
Government officials, from the Ministry of Land Management down to
the Prasat Balaing district villages selected to host the new
concession, all acknowledge that families are already farming the
proposed 2,900-hectare site. But there’s little agreement on what to do
about it.
Sareth Boramy, the LASED project coordinator at the Land Management
Ministry, said he was aware that families were farming at least “some
part” of the proposed site, but declined to discuss how the government
might deal with them and whether eviction was an option, as it’s been
with past social land concessions.
“I don’t have any idea about the solution yet…. I don’t know if it will be hard or easy,” he said.
“We need to verify how much land [is] remaining,” he said. “We need
to check and analyze again—when they farmed, how much they farm.”
He stressed that a final decision on whether to turn the site into a concession for the project was still pending.
Prasat Balang district governor Touch Sokha said the plan would give
about 300 new families five hectares each. Though part of the site is
prone to seasonal flooding, he said he was optimistic that it could
still be turned into a social land concession. He said about 50 families
were farming a few hundred hectares, but predicted that they could be
easily incorporated into the project or have their farms simply cut out.
Officials who live in Doung commune, however, where the concessions would go, are not so sure.
Commune chief Sok Mengthong said the site was first earmarked for a
social land concession in 2006 and that uninvited families started
marking off and farming small plots of land inside the area within a
year.
“Now, about 1,000 families are cultivating the concession area and they have occupied almost all of the land,” he said.
“Our authorities will have difficulty preparing the area to become a
social land concession in the near future because many families are
farming the land,” he said. “We cannot evict the families because they
have been farming for a long time.”
Mr. Mengthong said a recent survey of the site identified about 900
hectares not being farmed. But in 2012, he said, a pair of local
businessmen each bought up roughly half that area from the families that
were farming it, paying between $300 and $400 per hectare. Having paid
more than a quarter-million dollars for the land, the pair might not
let the government and the World Bank hand it over to a few hundred new
families without a fight—or a payout.
Ta Mom village chief An Om said 240 families were farming about 400
hectares of the proposed concession in his village alone, some of them
since the 1980s.
“Those people don’t live on the land, but they farm on the land every
year,” he said. “I think the government will not be able to make the
area a social land concession because the families have occupied the
land and they will protest against the project.”
A satellite image of the commune published by Google Earth and dated
last month also shows little free land anywhere, most of it marked off
by a busy network of berms between worked-over rice paddies.
The problem is not new for the LASED project.
After visiting the original eight sites last year for a report on the
project, Licadho found that some families awarded plots were unable to
farm them when they showed up because others claiming the same land
were refusing to let the newcomers cultivate it.
It was but one of many problems the researchers found with the sites.
They also noted soil too poor to farm, plots covered in forest too
dense to clear, and a dearth of promised roads, schools and clinics to
make the communities liveable. In its own assessment, the World Bank
touted the more than 3,000 families awarded plots on the eight sites.
But Licadho found that many families had given up on their plots—and
their chance at a land title under the use-it-or-lose-it rules of the
project—because of the tough conditions, with some of the eight sites
more than half abandoned.
“While additional support is needed to meet the promises of reduced
poverty and increased food security for many of the families supported
by LASED, the World Bank and GIZ first need to acknowledge that the
project is far from a replicable model, and nowhere near a success
story by any standards,” Licadho concludes in a report it published in
June.
In its own assessment of the project, published four months later, GIZ echoed many of Licadho’s concerns.
It noted “low settlement rates” at some of the sites and called the
selection of suitable land the “biggest challenge” to starting up the
concessions because vacant land of suitable size was all too rare. GIZ
noted, too, the Cambodian government’s failure to put any of its own
money into the project and said the scheme would be “difficult to
replicate” without ongoing donor support.
German Ambassador Joachim Baron von Marchall acknowledged the risks
of giving families land they can’t use, but said GIZ bore little
responsibility for mistakes made.
“It is, of course, clear that the land that is being provided—
public land provided for such land concessions—should be land that
forms a viable basis for good living of the people who should be
settling there. Otherwise, they won’t accept it and go away again, and
that has happened. I don’t think it really had anything to do with what
Germany showed and taught the Cambodian side, but we have provided sort
of a framework for such land concession approaches,” he said in a recent
interview.
“GIZ has provided the tools, so to speak, to plan social land
concessions. How these are then being used is really beyond the realm
and the scope of GIZ.”
Germany is currently phasing out its land rights support for the
government after more than 20 years, in frustration with the slow pace
of reforms. It will still work on the second phase of the LASED project
once the World Bank approves it, Mr. von Marschall said, but only
through the families settled on the concessions—not the government.
“We are not working together anymore with the Land Ministry,” he
said. “We are only working together with the families themselves and,
as far as that is necessary, with the district governments. So it’s a
modified version.”
For its part, the World Bank has put out nothing but glowing reviews
of the project and ignored all requests for comment as it gears up for
phase two. If and when approved, it will be the Bank’s first new loan
to Cambodia using its own funds since 2010, after which it put a freeze
on new lending to the country in protest over the government-led
eviction of some 3,000 Phnom Penh families during a Bank-funded land
titling project.
Rights groups find it a sad irony that the project that might end the freeze could spark more evictions.
Instead of trying to turn the LASED project into something that could
and should be repeated across the country, said Ms. Pilorge of Licadho,
the government would be far better off helping titleless families
secure the land they have.
“A fundamental problem with distributing farmland to poor families
through SLCs is that there is hardly any vacant, suitable land
available in Cambodia,” she said. “Instead of investing time and much
money in a project certain to lead to more land disputes, the
government should focus on ensuring land tenure security for poor
families where those families already occupy land.”
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