Minister of the Environment Thórunn Sveinbjarnardóttir says that every nation needs to be responsible after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and that special needs will not be relevant.

According to her, Iceland should not apply for further exemptions.

Post-Kyoto negotiations will take place at the 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, between December 3 and 14.

When the Kyoto Protocol was agreed upon, Iceland was given a special exemption to increase greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by ten percent while most other nations were obligated to reduce their average emissions by 5.2 percent, Morgunbladid reports.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde proposed in the Althingi parliament that Iceland should apply for further exemptions from reducing GHG emissions after the Kyoto Protocol expires.

“In a coalition between two parties a compromise needs to be reached,” Sveinbjarnardóttir said in an interview with Morgunbladid. “But I do not worry because as soon as people look into this matter in detail and see what is at stake for life on this earth, they are bound to realize that private interests of single states are irrelevant.”

Sveinbjarnardóttir is a Social Democrat; Haarde leads the Independence Party.

The minister said Iceland has a responsibility as one of the richest countries in the world to be a good role model in environment issues and pressure other countries like the US to reduce their GHG emissions.

“If countries like the US, Australia, India and China will reach an agreement, Bali will prove a great success,” Sveinbjarnardóttir concluded.

The 12th of September was chosen as it marks the first anniversary of a historic action in Trinidad against ALCOA which helped build pressure strong enough to make the Trini Prime Minister, Patrick Manning, drop his ALCOA plans. In 2006 more than 80 locals threw themselves in front of the machinery of engineering company Trintoplan and their machine gun armed police escorts whilst they came to test drill for ALCOA. See the Rights Action Blog of the 13th September, 2006. On this Global Day of Action there was a gathering near San Fernando High Court in remembrance of that action.

“September 12 2006 was the day that activists confronted tractors and police on Foodcrop Road and this day will forever live in the hearts and minds of activists in Trinidad and Tobago as a crucial moment of our fight for environmental and social justice.”
– Attillah Springer, Rights Action Group

Meanwhile, Trinidadian lawyers were regrouping ahead of a legal battle against the Environmental Management Authority [EMA], representing heavy industry, that will be pivotal in the islands path of development. The EMA, whose two main stakeholders are NEC and the aluminium corporation Alutrint, were significantly turned down by the Judge in their plea that three NGO’s – RAG, PURE and Smelta Karavan should not be able to bring action against them. This important ruling recognises that the issue of heavy industrialisation is to Trinidad national, not merely local. The people Vs EMA continues on Thursday 13th September.

South Africa, for the Global Day of Action around 250 people marched on Alcan’s headquarters in Johannesburg to protest against Alcan’s preferential energy treatment ahead of a population of which 30% have no access to electricity. Alcan is to be provided with coal and nuclear powered energy for a new smelter in the Eastern Cape that will consume as much electricity as half of Cape Town, at some of the lowest prices in the world. The protesters blocked the entrance of the Alcan HQ for one and a half hours, allowing no one to come or leave!

The organisation Earthlife Africa Jhb, whose member Lerato Maregele attended the Saving Iceland 2007 Conference and protest camp, are taking part in the demonstration and have the following demands: First, Alcan and Eskom, the national power company, fully disclose all the details of their deal, including the actual price of electricity sold. Second, that Eskom allocate a basic lifeline of 100kwh per month to every South African.

Iceland, despite terrible winds and rain people visited the Minister for Environment at breakfast, protested outside the government offices in Reykjavik and gathered along the river Thjorsa (Þjórsá) in the day. The Icelandic Minister for the Environment, Thórunn Sveinbjarnardóttir, was visited at her home to have a friendly chat with activists and receive a letter asking her to clear up her seemingly contradictory green opinions (read the letter hér.).

The Icelandic government is trying to rush through the construction of numerous new and expanded aluminium smelters to bring the islands total aluminium output up to three million tonnes per year. These hydro and geothermal powered heavy industry projects have been condemned by environmental scientists and lobbying groups. Three dam reservoirs are to be created along the Thjorsa river, where protesters have gathered, to power a new Alcoa smelter near the northern town of Husavik, or an expansion of the Alcan plant in Hafnarfjordur which was vetoed in a local referendum.

“Unemployment in Iceland is 0.9%. So this destruction is only based on the greed of Landsvirkjun [the national power company] and has no economical logic. We are here to show support with the local farmers who are fighting against Landsvirkjun to defend their land and our land.”
– Saving Iceland activist Siggi Hardarson.

Denmark, 50 people marched along the roads of Copenhagen in an act of solidarity. The crowd marched with a banner that read “Global Struggle Against Heavy Industry,” pausing by a surprise en-route confetti and banner drop that proudly read “Queers Against Heavy Industry.” There they heard a talk about the aluminium industry globally. Finally they arrived at the Icelandic embassy and Greenland’s Representation Office, outside of which they heard talks by an Icelander about the situation in the country, and about Saving Iceland and our camps. Also a talk was given on the situation in Greenland, where Alcoa is in the planning stages of a smelter project whilst the Greenlandic prime minister Hans Enoksen is presently in New York seeking loans to finance the hydropower project.

In the UK, a protest was held in the north-east of England at ALCAN’s Pharmaceutical Packaging Facility on Colbourne Avenue, Cramlington. They held in a letter of protest and held placards. Additional protests took place at the coal-fired power station at Lynemouth.

“The population of Iceland is roughly the same as that of Newcastle – we felt we had to come and show some solidarity with this little country that is trying its best to fight its corner against the newly ferocious aluminium corporations. The North East of England is slowly becoming a showcase of new, clean energies – we are well placed to spot it when the language of ‘greenwash’ is used to present terribly destructive and stupid developments as ‘clean’ energy. It has to be stopped, for all our sakes.”
– Mark from Newcastle

In Holland a solidarity message appeared along the traintracks near Arnhem (NL). The phrase “save the last wilderness of Europe” (in dutch) and “savingiceland.org” was spraypainted on a part of the concrete palisade of the ‘betuwelijn.’ The ‘betuwelijn’ is a controversial mega-infrastructural project that connects the Netherlands with Germany.

In New York, a lively and loud bunch gathered outside of Alcoa’s New York headquaters, making trouble of themselves and giving the aluminium industries most greenwashing member a well needed image tarnishing. Whilst eco-warriors attempted to storm the Alcoa offices and do an office occupation and banner drop from the 3rd story terrace roof, Saving Iceland Superhero came to do battle with Super Villain Alcoa.

“There was Aluminum Man, with black cape with alcoa symbol on the back. dr. doom face, shirt with alcoa symbol on front. a sith, and bone gloves and black spandex. And a saving iceland super hero with green cape w/ saving iceland logo on it, saving iceland logo on front of shirt. orange tights and green bandana around head. with a stick. and also a small river that was painted, that the Aluminum Man would block with stones and spray paint silver. They battled in the streets for a few hours.”
– Reported a witness of the dramatic events

Their banners read “ALCOA: Perpetrating Ecocide Across the Planet”, “Alcoa is killing Iceland and Trinidad” and “Dammed Rivers=Damned Planet”. After a while a certain Wade Hughes came from the Alcoa office to have a chat with the group. Wade Hughes has been on our Hall of Shame for a long time, shown shmoozing with Siv Fridleifsdottir, the politician who audaciously decided to overturn Iceland’s National Planning Agency ruling that the Alcoa Reydarfjordur plant was illegal. Mr. Hughes is an ex-Greenpeace activist and he cares so much for whales. One can only assume that he is one of the reasons why Greenpeace (corp.) has maintained an indifferent position to the heavy industrialisation of Iceland. After 30 minutes of chatting in the street, Mr. Hughes offers 3 of the activists to come up into the corporate conference room for a discussion that lasted 2 hours. here was a few of the many things that were discussed that made them look like idiot’s:
1)activist: so, how do you feel about the reindeer, pink footed geese and other bird species that breed here?
Hughes: they will find somewhere else!
2)activist:so, what are your plans for greenland.
Hughes:we will be there within 2 years. we have been well accepted by the people there!
3)activist: so, you have a hard time building these smelters and dams in the USA cause of tight regulations, so you are moving to places where you can?
Hughes: no, thats not true, we are moving to these places for(you ready for this)CHEAP ENERGY!(straight out of his own mouth!)
4)hughes:Karahnjukar is not in the highlands!!
Before the 2 parties parted, wade was told this fight will go on and on and on.

(man in white shirt in pic is Wade.)

In India, a small victory was made when the Supreme Court allowed its Central Empowered Committee (CEC) on forestry issues input into a survey on the impacts of bauxite mining on tribal peoples and the ecology on the Nyamgiri Hills. Three years ago the CEC condemned British mining company Vedanta for plans to mine the Nyamgiri Hills in Orissa for bauxite and for violating numerous forest protection laws in constructing its Lanjigarh smelter, which is now almost complete yet still completely illegal, much like ALCOA’s Reydarfjordur smelter whose failed Environmental Assessment Report and court condemnation were brushed aside by the government. The Ministry of the Environment and Forest (MoEF) had sought to do way with the CEC: can you spot a common theme of all the supposed ‘Ministries for Environment’ involved in the GDOA? More info on the Nyamgiri situation can be found here

In Australia, residents in the West have acquired the support of US Attorney Erin Brockovitch in a legal battle against Alcoa. The corporation intends to double the output of its operations in the region whilst residents of the nearby town Yarloop are demanding that Alcoa relocate them. They claim that they are “living in a toxic bubble” and that their health has dramatically suffered due to ALCOA’s work.

A global movement against heavy industry is becoming! We leave you with the words of Attillah from Trinidad, writing one year ago today after the critical Battle of Foodcrop Road.

“This is only the beginning of the struggle. We stand firm with the communities as they continue to agitate for change in Trinidad and Tobago. Change in how the government treats the people. Change in how we treat with our natural resources. Change in how we relate to the environment.

It’s an uphill struggle but a few of us are committed to it and we continue to believe that we are not putting our asses on the line in vain.

Translations of the above text in Spanish, Italian and German are available in the language sections to the left.

Related Websites:

Iceland – SavingIceland.org
fighting plans for pristine wilderness to be destroyed by mega-hydro and geothermal energy for the aluminium industry (ALCOA, ALCAN, Century, Hydro, Rusal).

Trinidad – Rights Action Group
fighting the islands most rural and wild peninsula from being invaded by two gas powered aluminium smelters (Alcoa, Alutrint)

South Africa – Alcan’t at Coega and Earthlife Africa
fighting away a coal and nuclear powered aluminium smelter (ALCAN) that will consume as much electricity as half of Cape Town, whilst 30% of the countries population have none at all.

India – Alcan’t in India
this campaign has recently managed to fight away Alcan but is now confronted by mining corporation Vedanta taking Alcan’s shoes, destroying the natural habitat of India’s indiginouse population of Orissa

Brasil – Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens – Brasil or Movement of Dam Affected People – Brasil
Huge dams are being built all over Brasil and the Amazon rainforest. Not only is the amount of greenhouse gasses released from these far greater than the equivalent amount of energy produced by a coal fire plant, but massive amounts of people are being displaced. Most of the energy is being used for heavy industry, including ALCOA.

Australia – Community Alliance for Positive Solutions INC.
currently suing Alcoa with US attorney Erin Brockovitch due to the devastating affects on the health of residents around its mega smelter in the east of the country.

The plan for this international day of action was borne the Saving Iceland conference in Olfus, Iceland, on 8 July 2007.

Community Alliance for Positive Solutions Inc. – A group representing communities whose health has been seriously affected by ALCOA’s pollution.

In the 2007 Saving Iceland protest camp, people from five continents explored the similarities between their fights against common enemies, in particular the aluminium industry, and were empowered by the enormous strength of the global movement they were creating. From there, this global day of action was decided upon.

We call on activists from all over the world to join in with creating a locally based yet global movement for planet and people that kicks heavy industrial corporate greed off this earth!

Actions are already being planned in Iceland, Trinidad, USA, UK, South Africa and possibly other countries. Please join us on the 12th and show these companies that we will not tolerate their exploitation of the planet.

We will facilitate you in publicizing your protest and giving advice, if you need it. Lots of European targets can be found here with and update here. Also see Saving Iceland’s Nature Killers section for more ideas. Even one person with a banner outside a relevant embassy will make a difference, though bigger actions will be happening.

Related Websites:

Iceland – SavingIceland.org
fighting plans for pristine wilderness to be destroyed by mega-hydro and geothermal energy for the aluminium industry (ALCOA, ALCAN, Century, Hydro, Rusal).

Trinidad – Rights Action Group
fighting the islands most rural and wild peninsula from being invaded by two gas powered aluminium smelters (Alcoa, Alutrint)

South Africa – Alcan’t at Coega and Earthlife Africa
fighting away a coal and nuclear powered aluminium smelter (ALCAN) that will consume as much electricity as half of Cape Town, whilst 30% of the countries population have none at all.

India – Alcan’t in India
this campaign has recently managed to fight away Alcan but is now confronted by mining corporation Vedanta taking Alcan’s shoes, destroying the natural habitat of India’s indiginouse population of Orissa

Brasil – Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens – Brasil or Movement of Dam Affected People – Brasil
Huge dams are being built all over Brasil and the Amazon rainforest. Not only is the amount of greenhouse gasses released from these far greater than the equivalent amount of energy produced by a coal fire plant, but massive amounts of people are being displaced. Most of the energy is being used for heavy industry, including ALCOA.

Australia – Community Alliance for Positive Solutions INC.
currently suing Alcoa with US attorney Erin Brockovitch due to the devastating affects on the health of residents around its mega smelter in the east of the country.

The concept for this international day of action was borne at this circle: Olfus, Iceland, 8 July 2007

This article was first published in June 2007 in the journal Caterpillar and the Mahua Flower

Felix Padel and Samarendra Das are also the authors of  ‘Double Death –
Aluminium’s Links with Genocide’

‘Agya, What do You Mean by Development?’

BY FELIX PADEL AND SAMARENDRA DAS

The pursuit of aluminium in Orissa has resulted in cultural genocide.

Displacement has destroyed the tribal society’s structure while
pollution from factories has rendered areas uncultivable, snatching
away the residents’ main source of livelihood.

The fact that the arms industry is one of the driving forces behind
aluminium production makes the indifference with which locals are
treated even more sinister

A new wave of industrialisation, imposed under the guise of development,
growth and poverty alleviation, is threatening to displace hundreds of
villages in Orissa and other neighbouring states. These areas, slotted as the
ideal locations for mining, metal, dam and power projects, are home to
indigenous people, who are being largely ignored as unavoidable casualties
in the race towards progress.

In India, industrialisation has already displaced an estimated 60 million
villagers in the past 60 years. Two million of those dispossessed lived in Orissa, and a shocking 75 percent comprised Adivasis and Dalits.[1] Very few of them have been adequately compensated; most report no improvement in their standard of living though such displacement is unabashedly presented as a precursor to development. In fact, as the displaced point out, the projects have achieved precisely the opposite result. The poverty that they have been reduced to is just as painful as the erosion of their cultural values and traditions, which invariably accompanies the forced separation from the land that they and their forefathers cultivated.

How can one understand the processes involved? Each of us has an area
of expertise, but to comprehend what is happening, one should opt for a
multi-disciplinary approach. In anthropology, understanding comes from
assimilating the viewpoints of the people concerned, as expressed in their
own words. Yet few of us listen to what the Adivasis have to say. We have seen thousands of Adivasis being transported to meetings around India, yet
completely sidelined in the road shows. They are rarely asked to give their views, they simply sit in dignified silence during the meetings, and return to their villages unhappy about the confusion among the very people who claim to offer help.

Cultural Genocide

The present industrialisation process may boost India’s growth rate, but
its impact on Adivasis amounts to cultural genocide. Tribal culture exists
through the relationships dictated by social structures and it’s this binding fabric that displacement tears down.

The economic system, along with the tradition of cultivation, is destroyed as people are removed from their land and can no longer work as farmers. The kinship system is fractured, as social relations traditionally depend on a village’s layout, and the spatial distance from each person’s kin living in neighbouring villages. A mining company’s entry into an area invariably splits people into those for and against. In every area where a project causes displacement, there is tension between those who accept compensation and move from their homes, and those who oppose the plan.

The religious system is undermined as sacred village sites are removed,
and venerated mountains mined away. At Kinari village, from where people
were shifted to Vedantanagar to make way for the Lanjigarh refinery, a woman who had seen bulldozers flattening her village and its central Earth shrine, said to us days after the forced move: “Even our gods are destroyed.” For her, losing her land means she can never grow her own food again. All the values attached to the customary way in which people supported themselves have thus become redundant.

The material culture, which helps people make most of what they have, is
destroyed as soon as the houses people built from local earth and wood are
knocked down to be replaced with concrete structures. But most of all, it’s the power structure that is completely transformed. From being in control of their area and its resources, people find themselves at the bottom of the extremely hierarchical structures of power and authority.

Corruption plays a role in the murky process by which entire villages are
given away for projects, and even in its underhand avatar, has a strong negative impact on the society as a whole. It polarises people, making the elite class richer, and their “conspicuous consumption” becomes more wasteful and tasteless than ever. In a front-page article on February 21, 2007, the Oriya daily Sambad mentions a new scandal about a coal mine near Talcher. The report suggests that kickbacks of Rs 200 crores (about 45 million dollars) were given to secure a single coal mining lease even as the issue of Tangarapada, Niyamgiri and Khandadharo mining leases remain unresolved. Tangarapada, incidentally, is a chromite deposit in Jajpur district that was leased to Jindal Strips. However, the Orissa High Court criticised the deal stating that the state stands to lose 4,500 million dollars if the mine goes ahead as planned.[2] Niyamgiri is Orissa’s most controversial bauxite deposit straddling Kalahandi and Rayagada, while Khandadharo is a forest- and iron-ore rich mountain area of Keonjhar.

Whose Wealth is It Anyway?

Orissa’s immense riches have been a source of conflict, with the proponents of ‘development’ mostly getting their way over the tribal communities who have lived in the area for years. For instance, Orissa has India’s biggest bauxite mine in Panchpat Mali, run by NALCO. It also boasts of two of the country’s seven working refineries (NALCO’s at Damanjodi and Vedanta’s newly completed one at Lanjigarh), and two of its six smelters (NALCO’s at Angul and Indal’s at Hirakud). Many projects are in the offing, such as refineries, with Utkal’s being constructed now in Kashipur. Several more smelters are planned, with Vedanta’s in Jharsuguda district already under construction and Hindalco’s in Sambalpur at an advanced planning stage.

It’s worth recalling here that British geologists originally conceived of this whole scheme, complete with dams to power the factories, rail links and port facilities, in the 1920s. According to them, the bauxite from Orissa’s mountains was “so good that, if large quantities exist, the tract must prove important when the [Raipur-Vizag] railway is constructed… This importance is heightened by the existence of possible hydro-electric sites in the adjacent Madras (Jaipur State) area to the south-west, and to the fact that a harbour is to be built at Vizagapatanam.”[3] Besides, it was the geologist TL Walker who named the base rock of Orissa’s bauxite-capped mountains Khondalite, after the Konds, Orissa’s largest tribe, who live all around these mountains and consider them sacred entities.[4]

Economists view Orissa’s famed mineral wealth as unutilised resources. But Adivasis look at their mineral-rich mountains as sources of life that nourish the land’s fertility. If trees are cut down and mountains mined, large areas of Orissa will dry out and lose their fertility fast — something that is already visible around Panchpat Mali and Damanjodi.

Bhagavan Majhi, a Kond leader of the Kashipur Movement, expresses similar sentiments about the Utkal Alumina project. After the Movement
stalled it for 12 years, Utkal restarted the construction of its refinery in 2006. An area of several square kilometres is being reduced to bare earth right next to Bhagavan Majhi’s village of Kucheipadar. Hills are being gouged out and flattened by dozer-rippers. Two villages on the refinery site, Ramibeda and Kendukhunti, have been erased from existence. Their inhabitants have been moved to a colony beside the work site and now exist only as a captive labour pool.

Ramibeda’s strongest leader and biggest landowner, an elder named Mangta
Majhi, died after police torture in 1998. It’s believed that the cops came at night in an Utkal company vehicle, called him down from his mancha (raised platform) from where he was guarding his chilli-crop, beat him with rifle butts, tied him up with two Dalits from Kendukhunti, and kept him in custody for some weeks. When he was released, his face was disfigured by beating, and he died a few days later.[5]

Today, Utkal’s plan is to mine 195 million tonnes of bauxite from the top
of the local mountain Bapla Mali, which people from three different tribes
spread over a large area hold as sacred. Utkal, meanwhile, estimates that the deposit will be finished within 30 years. Their work, therefore, involves the permanent removal of a non-renewable resource. In the bargain, however, the flow of Bapla Mali’s numerous perennial streams will be adversely affected.[6]

The police, who repeatedly attacked Kucheipadar, were banned from
entering the village for some years by its inhabitants. During a confrontation, Bhagavan Majhi spoke to a senior officer. He recalls, “I put a question to the SP. I asked him, ‘Sir, what do you mean by development? (Agya, unnoti boile kono?) Can you call displacing people development? The people, for whom development is meant, should reap its benefits. After them, the succeeding generations should enjoy its benefits. That is development. It should not be merely to cater to the greed of a few officials.’ Development is not destroying mountains that are millions of years old. If the government has decided that it needs alumina, and has to mine bauxite, they should give us land as replacement. As Adivasis, we are cultivators. We cannot live without land.”[7]

It’s clear that the pursuit of aluminium results in cultural genocide in two ways. One, displacement directly destroys the social structure of the tribal society. Second, the factories themselves will affect the environment so adversely that large areas of west Orissa will become dry and uncultivable in the near future. Bauxite mining damages the capacity of mountains to retain water, leading to the drying up of water bodies. Besides, the factories themselves consume huge amounts of water and also pollute the environment. The depletion of forests, and the factory fumes, together drastically reduce rainfall, a fact that the Advasi understands as well as any scientist.

In a wider sense, excessive aluminium production results in cultural
genocide because of the “resource curse”, which denotes the extreme level of financial manipulation and exploitation that areas rich in resources are subjected to. The aluminium industry undermined several countries’
independence economically and politically right from the start. The resource curse is unfolding in Orissa, where values have become corrupt and a culture of “briberisation” is evident. Cultural genocide also results from the link between aluminium and the arms industry. The connection with war is little known, but aluminium is one of the four metals classified as ‘strategic’ because of its importance in manufacturing arms. This is the reason why Abdul Kalam, a nuclear scientist who at the time of writing was the President of India, devotes several pages of his book India 2020 to explain the importance of
aluminium and its role in achieving his vision for India as a “developed
country”.[8] Both these points are discussed in detail later in this paper.

Resistance and Resettlement

It’s possible to pinpoint January 2, 2006, as the date when tribal resistance to displacement strengthened (also see page 178). That was the day of the Kalinga Nagar killings, when the police fired at those protesting against the construction of a Tata steel plant in their land, killing 12 Adivasis. The Visthapan Virodhi Janamanch (People’s Platform against Displacement) has kept up a high-profile blockade in Kalinga Nagar since then.

Another Tata steel plant planned in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh
faces similar resistance from Adivasis who say their “consent” was not given freely. Their protests come in the backdrop of a manufactured civil war, which started with the government-sponsored creation of the Salwa Judum (Peace March) in mid-2005. The aim of this war is not just to exterminate Maoists, but also to implement industrialisation plans that have faced sustained opposition from tribal society. This has resulted in the forced displacement of at least 80,000 Adivasis in Dantewada district, with human rights abuses and conditions of horror and squalor that beggar the imagination.[9] In West Bengal, where blood baths have followed land acquisition plans, the High Court recently gave a strong judgement about the illegality of Tata’s land acquisitions at Singur.

There is talk of a generous new Resettlement and Rehabilitation (R&R)
policy at the all-India level, but what do the promised R&R packages actually consist of? Essentially, cash for the minority with land deeds, a new concrete house in a colony by the work site, and promises of employment — promises that in the past have rarely, if ever, been kept.[10] What the packages hardly ever include is land to replace what has been taken away from the displaced, even though international experts agree this is a crucial issue. The World
Commission on Dams recommended including a provision for this, but the
suggestion was rejected both at the central and state levels. Similarly, the Extractive Industries Review, an independent review commissioned by the World Bank which recommended that the Bank stop funding coal and mining projects in developing countries and instead concentrate on renewable energy sources, has also been ignored.[11]

Bhagavan places on record the many unanswered questions surrounding
the land issue: “We have sought an explanation from the government about
the people who have been displaced in the name of development. How many
have been properly rehabilitated? You have not provided them with jobs, you have not rehabilitated them at all. How can you again displace more people? Where will you relocate them and what jobs will you give them? You tell us first. The government has failed to answer our questions. Our fundamental question is this: how can we survive if our land is taken away? We are tribal farmers. We are earthworms (matiro poko). Like fishes that die when taken out of water, a cultivator dies when his land is taken away from him. So we won’t leave our land.”

The key recommendation of R&R experts and the World Bank’s Resettlement policy is that the quality of life of the displaced people should improve. However, this has almost never happened. Companies hide this reality by bandying about such fine-sounding terms as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and advertising a ‘missionary’ model of charity, consisting of standardised programmes that centre on education, health, sports and Self-Help Groups. All these programmes betray a complete lack of understanding of tribal culture.[12]

Vedanta Resources devotes 60 pages of its Annual General Report for
2006 to the “good works” done as part of its CSR programme, with glossy
colour photos of smiling tribals who have been “civilised” through such programmes. This is a gross distortion of the real situation. Several hundred people have been killed in work accidents at Vedanta’s Lanjigarh refinery and it’s well known locally that labourers are often not paid for their work and have to beg for jobs.

Adverse Impact

Aluminium is one of the most energy intensive of industries. Refining a
metric tonne of alumina requires an average of 250 kilowatt hours (kwh) of
electricity, and smelting a tonne of aluminium needs at least 1,300 kwh. The Wuppertal Institute in Germany estimates that the amount of water needed to produce one tonne of aluminium is no less than 1,378 tonnes (for steel, a comparable amount is 44 tonnes of water, also a huge quantity). Altogether, a tonne of aluminium produces 4-8 tonnes of toxic red mud as solid waste (from refineries) and 13.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide (mainly from smelters) while the overall “ecological rucksack” of “abiotic material” is 85 tonnes.[13] In simple terms, this means that the negative impact of producing aluminium is around 85 times its positive value. A recent UK government report notes that the externality costs of carbon emissions alone stand at 85 dollars per tonne, giving over 1,000 dollars per tonne of aluminum.[14]

The process of manufacturing aluminium from bauxite involves four stages
that have a negative impact on society and environment: bauxite mining;
alumina refining; aluminium smelting; and generation of electricity to run
all three aforementioned operations. Mega-dams for hydropower and coal-
fired power stations are built to meet this demand. By extension, the several hundred thousand people displaced by the reservoirs in Orissa and by coal mining, both resources required for power projects, are also casualties of the aluminium industry.

The externality costs of dams, refineries and smelters are relatively well documented. By contrast, the extent to which the fertility of Orissa’s land is lost because of the mining of mountain-top bauxite deposits is little understood. Bauxite has a strong water-retaining capacity. It’s porous and acts as a sponge, and holds the monsoon rain throughout the year, releasing it gradually. Mining it severely reduces the mountain’s water-retaining capacity. This aspect has been studied way too little, presumably because aluminium companies sponsor most of the scientific studies on bauxite, and do not encourage research that reveals the industry’s negative effects. The kind of distortion involved is revealed in recent reports that expose the gross manipulation of scientific evidence on climate change.[15]

A careful study of the aluminium industry’s history shows that aluminium
is actually sold for less than the cost of its production. Refineries and smelters can only make a profit if they receive huge subsidies in electricity, water and transport, as well as tax rebates. India’s last independent energy audit of the aluminium industry, in 1988, explicitly mentions this.16 Companies themselves exclude certain costs from their calculations, especially the price paid by the environment and society. These costs are passed on to the host government, and are eventually borne by the least powerful section of the population.

Mining and metal production also head the list of industries being outsourced to India. Europe and the US have been closing down aluminium
plants as electricity prices rise and environmental laws become more stringent. Alcan closed its last UK refinery in 2003 (Burntisland), just as it finalised plans to build a refinery in Kashipur. It might appear as if Europe is reducing its carbon emissions slightly by this outsourcing, but this reduction is illusory.[17] Aluminium used in Europe still produces massive carbon emissions, even if these are now polluting India and not Europe.

Resource Curse

The ‘resource curse’ affects many areas of the world that are rich in natural resources. In these parts, massive projects are started to exploit the riches, the local population is promised grand wealth in return, and inevitably all that follows is a terrible cycle of exploitation, poverty and violence.[18] Nigeria’s oil delta, Sierra Leone, Angola and many other countries in Africa, South America and Asia exemplify this pattern at its worst. The oil companies’ behaviour in Nigeria, for instance, demonstrates the dangers lying in store for Orissa. Shell and other such companies make vast profits at the cost of people’s lives while also wreaking the environment. Those protesting are killed by the security forces trying to stamp out opposition. One of the most famous deaths was that of Ken Saro Wiwa, hanged with eight other Ogonis on a false murder charge in 1995, against world condemnation, but with Shell connivance.[19]

The aluminium industry has in effect controlled the economy of several
countries from the moment they gained Independence. Guyana’s
independence was delayed from 1957 to 1966, during which time the British
permitted limited self-government in the country. During those years, Cheddi Jagan was elected into power three times on the promise that he would increase the bauxite royalty to a reasonable level and nationalise Alcan’s subsidiary company. In return, the MI6 and CIA tried to destabilise the country and when the industry was finally nationalised in 1970, there was considerable pressure from the World Bank to compensate Alcan.[20]

In Jamaica, the US ambassador warned Michael Manley in 1972 that if
he made boosting the bauxite royalty and nationalising the industry an
election issue, it could result in him being overthrown. This was not an idle threat as the CIA supported Pinochet’s coup in Chile the next year, on behalf of Anaconda and Kennecott copper companies and Pepsicola. Manley, however, went ahead with his plans in 1974, and nationalised a 51 percent stake in his country’s bauxite mines. The same year, he formed the
International Bauxite Association of bauxite-producing countries (IBA), which for a while negotiated a higher price for bauxite with aluminium
companies, by making the price of the raw material — in this case bauxite — 7.5 percent of the price of the finished product, the aluminium ingots.
Compare this to the London Metal Exchange’s aluminium price, which is
0.4 percent of that of the ingot, also India’s bauxite royalty rate since 2004.[21]

One of the world’s biggest and worst dams was built on the Volta River in
Ghana to power a huge smelter run by Kaiser Aluminum, through the
subsidiary it set up, VALCO (Volta Aluminium Company). It displaced at
least 80,000 people, obliterated 740 villages and spread river blindness and schistosomiasis, making an estimated 70,000 people blind.22 The main
agreement between the company and Ghana’s first President Nkrumah was
manipulated to Kaiser’s advantage, with the World Bank acting as the
company’s accomplice. The CIA tried to destabilise the country between
1957 and 1966, when Nkrumah was overthrown, one month after the dam
and smelter were opened.

The creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs), now a hot topic in India,
is not a new phenomenon either. There is a long history of multinational
companies making use of industrial enclaves in regions that are resource-rich but kept poor. The aluminium industry made its profits in Guyana, Jamaica, Ghana, Guinea and many other places only because of subsidised enclaves. These countries’ history of corporate exploitation show what lies in store for Orissa from upcoming aluminium plants. Vedanta’s and Hindalco’s smelters planned in north Orissa are located in SEZs. The SEZ Act (2005) offers outrageous subsidies in electricity, water and land prices comparable to the VALCO Master Agreement in Ghana, and negates India’s legislation that protects labour rights, land rights and the environment.[23]

A similar resource curse caused by the aluminium industry is evident in
parts of Australia and Brazil. In north Australia, the Alcan and Alcoa projects in Cape York and Arnhem Land displaced Aborigines while the Tucurui dam in Brazil resulted in the displacement of indigenous people.24 The same story unfolds in parts of central India affected by mining, a concern that was voiced by the then President of India KR Narayanan on the eve of Republic Day on January 25, 2001. Alluding to the Maikanch police killings that had happened five weeks before, he said, “The mining that is taking place in the forest areas is threatening the livelihood and survival of many tribes…. Let it not be said by future generations that the Indian Republic has been built on the destruction of the green earth and the innocent tribals who have been living there for centuries….”

Fuelling War

One of the main, though hidden, forces driving aluminium production
is the arms industry. Bhagavan Majhi makes this connection when he asks
where Bapla Mali’s bauxite will go: “If they need it so badly, they need to tell us why they need it. How many missiles will our bauxite be used for? What bombs will you make? How many military aeroplanes? You must give us a complete account.”

The connection with war goes back to aluminium’s first royal patrons,
Napoleon III of France and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. Aluminium’s
explosive properties were discovered in 1901, when ammonal and thermite
were invented, and the metal has indeed changed the course of world history.

There is a connection between the reason why aluminium plants require
huge amounts of electricity and the metal’s use in arms. Smelters need the
power supply to split aluminium from its bonding with oxygen, in molecules
of aluminium oxide. Thermite reverses this process; a bomb is packed with
iron oxide and aluminium powder. When the fuse ignites, the aluminium
leaps to the high temperature of its “heat of formation” to re-bond with
oxygen, making the explosion huge. Thermite was first used in the ‘Mills
bomb’ hand grenades, 70,000 of which Britain produced in the First World War. These killed at least 70,000 soldiers and the inventor, Sir William Mills, was knighted after the war. During the First World War, aluminium companies realised that their fortunes were linked to the production of arms and ammunition. About 90 percent of Alcoa’s production was used for making arms and, as the Aluminum Corporation of America’s standard biography observes, “war was good to Alcoa”.[25]

In the 1930s, aluminium became the basis of aircraft design, and as
Germany, Britain and the US started producing thousands of war-planes,
aluminium companies made unprecedented profits. Aluminium still forms
80 percent of the unladen weight of a jumbo-jet and most other aircraft,
often through metal matrix composites, fused with plastics.26
During the Second World War, aluminium was used as a prime ingredient
in fire bombs, including napalm, which killed tens of thousands of civilians in air raids over Germany and Japan. In fact, the main ores for war metals are all found in Orissa — iron, chromite and manganese for steel, bauxite, and uranium. Hitler was apparently well aware of Orissa’s iron and bauxite deposits, one reason why Japanese bombs were dropped on Orissa’s ports.[27] One of the main purposes of America’s mega-dams was also to power aluminium smelters. “Electricity from the big Western dams helped to win the Second World War”, as it was used for making the aluminium that shaped arms and aircraft.[28]

After the war, profits from aluminium plummeted, until it was
spectacularly revived by the Korean War, the Vietnam War and a succession
of US-instigated wars. Aluminium lies “at the very core of the military-industry complex” set up by the then US President Dwight D Eisenhower during the Korean War. He left his office in 1961 with a warning: “We have been compelled to create a permanent arms industry of vast proportions.”[29]

The US started to stockpile the metal in 1950. As an American aluminium expert wrote in a pamphlet in 1951: “Aluminum has become the most
important single bulk material of modern warfare. No fighting is possible,
and no war can be carried to a successful conclusion today, without using
and destroying vast quantities of aluminum…. Aluminum is strategic in
defence. Aluminum makes fighter and transport planes possible. Aluminum
is needed in atomic weapons, both in their manufacture and in their delivery… Aluminum, and great quantities of it, spell the difference between victory and defeat….” [30]

Every US missile fired in Iraq or Afghanistan uses aluminium in a
combination of explosive mechanisms, shell casings and propellants. The
“daisy cutter” bombs used in “carpet bombing” exploit aluminium’s explosive potential, as do nuclear missiles, including the 30,000 nuclear warheads in the US. Between the two World Wars, there was widespread understanding that arms companies played a crucial role behind the scenes in promoting wars. The League of Nations declared in 1927 that “the manufacture by private enterprise of munitions and implements of war is open to grave objection”. But vested interests were too strong. At the League’s Conference on Disarmament at Geneva in 1927, an American lobbyist was paid 27,000 dollars to carry out six weeks’ propaganda for arms companies, which scuppered any agreement. The arms industry then, as now, was at the centre of the economies of the most powerful countries. As a British commentator noted after the complete failure of this conference, “War is not only terrible, but is a terribly profitable thing.”[31] Behind the arms companies stand the mining companies and metals traders. Every shell used in the US-led wars has to be replaced by new shells, made from newly mined minerals.

Manufacturing Consent

If one were to look at the question of sustainability, there is no doubt that the tribal communities that are being dislocated hold most of the answers. They take very little from nature and waste almost nothing. Therefore, it’s no surprise that Bhagavan Majhi and others wonder whether the planned mining projects represent development at all, considering they will last only about 30 years, at such high costs to the local people and the environment.

At conferences that promote aluminium, the view expressed is that India
is “backward” as its per capita aluminium consumption is low per year: less than one kilogramme per year, compared to the 15-30 kilos in ‘developed’ countries. Yet, if one looks at the high cost of manufacturing aluminium and the dire effect it has on climate change, India’s low consumption should be viewed as the more developed alternative. Besides, medical research widely agrees that tiny yet significant quantities of aluminium are constantly leaching into the human body from packaging and water supply. These deposits cannot be excreted and are collected in the brain, and it has even been linked to Alzheimer’s disease.[32]

Ironically, aluminium claims to be “green”, based on two points: one,
that it can be recycled, and two, it reduces the weight of cars, thereby cutting down the use of fuel. But these benefits are misleading and in fact do not count when environmental costs are considered.33 The social costs involved in running aluminium factories, and the amount of fuel these units require, actually mandate reduced extraction and consumption of the metal.

An important point to be noted is that tribal people, being less used to compartmentalising ideas, are able to immediately see the connection between Bapla Mali’s bauxite and the bombs and wars that “consume vast quantities of aluminium”. The questions that locals such as Bhagavan Majhi ask need to be given answers and there should be a Cost Benefit Analysis of aluminium projects. What are the environmental and social costs of NALCO’s existing Orissa projects? As each tonne of the metal produced takes up 1,378 tonnes of water, to what extent will it leave the land around Damanjodi barren? The answers to these questions represent the other side of the big profits that the company makes as it increases its aluminium exports.

This leads us to the most important question: who is actually controlling
the policy of industrialisation? Orissa is the most highly indebted state in India due to the various infrastructure projects in the state that the World Bank and other organisations have lent money for. These loans create
tremendous pressure on the government as repayment has to be made in
foreign exchange. Besides, the Bank’s conditions, such as those demanding
removal of all legislation that curtails corporate power, have to be met. As a result, SEZs are being created and for “improving the climate for foreign investment”, and the safeguards in Indian Law and the Constitution that protect land rights, labour rights and the environment are being dismantled.

Orissa’s main policies and financial decisions are now being decided from
London and Washington, in a hierarchy of power that is unknown to the
people who have been affected by the projects. A letter from the policy director of the British Government’s Department for International Development (DFID), to the person overseeing the Extractives Industries Review in 2003, shows how this power is exercised. The director warns in the letter that there is a “real risk” that the WB Board will reject the report [which indeed did happen], unless certain basic changes are made.34 The letter states, “The issue of Prior Informed Consent [note how the word ‘free’ is not used with consent] needs some clarification. It is not clear whether consent is a blanket requirement over the whole project…. To what extent is the Bank or Government prepared to veto a national development package on the basis of disagreement from an individual?” The last question fundamentally misrepresents the issue of tribal communities’ land rights by confusing it with the rights of an individual. Here is a representative of the British government expressing exasperation at the idea that tribal people in India or any other country should have a blanket veto on a mining project taking over their land — a mindset that is astonishing similar to the colonial attitudes the East India Company flaunted before India’s independence.

When the idea of Free Prior Informed Consent is discarded, it basically
validates the occurrences in Orissa, where ‘consent’ is manufactured in public hearings that are manipulated by heavy police presence and threats. It’s also the reason why villagers affected by hundreds of projects in Orissa and neighbouring states are forced to give their ‘consent’ and part with their land, though the non-alienability of tribal land is guaranteed by the 5th Schedule of India’s Constitution as the basic right of Adivasis.

The Environment Impact Assessments of projects are not taken seriously
either; they are inevitably delayed and the methodology used is questionable. Social Impact Assessments hardly exist, and when they do, they are conducted by officials who have no training. There is no recognition of the fact that the projects come at a tremendous cost to India’s cultural heritage.[35] What is Indian culture, and where is located? The traditions of Indian music, religion and craft are now so heavily marketed or politicised that their essence is often contrived and artificial, in sharp contrast to the unbroken traditions of village society. This was Indian culture as Mahatma Gandhi understood it. Cultivating the land and collecting plants from the forest lie at the heart of tribal culture, and when villages are displaced, this is also a tradition that is lost. Yet, compounding the cultural genocide, there has been a constant process of censoring and sidelining Advasi voices and denying the existence of their knowledge, as Bhagavan Majhi and others point out.36 He says, “We want permanent development. Provide us with irrigation for our lands. Give us hospitals. Give us medicines. Give us schools and teachers. Provide us with land and forest. We don’t need the company. Dislodge the company. We have been repeatedly saying this for the past 13 years. But the government is just not listening to us.”

India is already a highly developed country, and was before European
companies ever reached it. Protection of people’s basic rights and protection of the environment for future generations are the hallmarks of a developed society. Yet, the laws ensuring this protection, which developed in a long and painful process in the 60 years after independence, are being dismantled because of pressure from abroad. The industries that are being imposed on the local population are not sustainable and their activities certainly do not ensure development in any real sense of the word.

.

FOOTNOTES
1. Fernandes 2006 pp 110-111

2. The Telegraph, December 7, 2004: ‘Opposition Takes Naveen Case to Governor’

3. Fox 1932: Bauxite and Aluminous Laterite, p 136 (previous editions: Bauxite and
Aluminous Occurrences of India, Calcutta: GSI Memoirs 1923, and Bauxite 1927)

4. Fox 1932 p 135

5. The story of Mangta’s death has been neglected in writings about the Kashipur
movement. We have heard first-hand accounts of it from his son and the Kendukhunti men
as well as other witnesses

6. The three tribes living around Bapla Mali are Kond, Jhoria and Pengo. The plan is to
mine approximately six million tonnes of bauxite a year, similar to what NALCO is doing
on Panchpat Mali

7. SP is the Superintendent of Police. This quotation, and others from Bhagavan Majhi
given later in the paper, is from the documentary film Wira Pdika: Matiro Puko, Company
Loko by Amarendra and Samarendra Das, which gives Orissa’s Adivasis’ response to mining
in their own voices, without any commentary

8. Kalam & Rajan 1998: India 2020: A Vision for the New Millenium. Penguin

9. Human Rights Forum December 2006: ‘Death, displacement and deprivation. The war
in Dantewara: a report’. Hyderabad

10. Fernandes 2006, Mathur 2006

11. Fernandes 2006 p109

12. Fauset 2006

13. Ritthoff et al 2002 p 49. It’s estimated that when a tonne of aluminium is produced,
5.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide are emitted if the smelter is hydro-powered from a dam; the
emissions reach up to 20.6 tonnes if it’s powered by a captive coal-fired power station
(Richard Cowen: Geology, History and People, chapter 14, Cartels and the Aluminium
Industry, www.geology. ucdavis.edu). Most
of India’s smelters apparently use a combination of electricity from dams and from their
own captive coal-fired power stations, which they build to ensure a constant supply of electricity as well as to keep prices low. These statistics are from the International
Aluminium Institute’s website  www.world-aluminium.org), plus the IAI’s ‘The Aluminium
Industry’s sustainability report’ [no date], IAI’s Aluminium Applications and Society:
Automotive, Paper 1, May 2000

14. Nicholas Stern, 2006. A previous report by the Department of Environment of the UK
government estimated 56-223 dollars per tonne of carbon dioxide (Andrew Simms in Ann
Pettifor ed, Real World Environmental Outlook, London: Pallgrave 2003 p 66)

15. Goldberg 2007, Monbiot 2006, Simms 2005, J Roberts & D McLean 1976 pp 86-9

16. BICP Dec 1988, Energy Audit of Aluminium Industry

17. Haberl et al 2006

18. Ross 1999, 2001

19. Rowell et al, 2005

20. Graham pp 20-23 & 93-101; Cheddi Jagan 1975: The West on Trial: The Fight for
Guyana’s Freedom; Marcus Colchester 1997: Guyana: Fragile Frontier (London: Latin
American Bureau with the World Rainforest Movement); Mark Curtis 2003 Ch 17

21. Girvan 1971: Foreign Capital and Economic Underdevelopment in Jamaica; Graham p
259 ff; Blum 2003 p 263; Holloway 1988 p 73

22. McCully 1996 pp 265-6, Caufield 1996 pp 1979-83, Gitlitz 1993 Ch 4 on Ghana’s
Volta dam

23. Graham 1982 pp 21-22, 117-188. The complex twists and turns of these negotiations
for Ghana’s dam and smelter forms a large part of Graham’s book

24. J Roberts et al 1976, Gitlitz 1993

25. Graham p 20

26. Statistics from the International Aluminium Institute, London

27. Hitler’s interest in Orissa’s bauxite/aluminium and iron ore is outlined in an article in
Oriya in Samaj, May 3, 2005 by Ajit Mahapatra who met one of Hitler’s key metal experts,
and the widow of another

28. Graham p 23

29. Graham p 79, Eisenhower quoted in Anthony Sampson 1977 p 103

30. Dewey Anderson 1951, Aluminum for Defence and Prosperity, Washington, US Public
Affairs Institute, pp 3-5

31. Quotations from Sampson 1977, passim

32. Exley 2001

33. Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that when the emissions from aluminium production are taken into account, aluminium-intensive cars
would only start emitting less than steel cars after being used for 15 years (Mathias 2003)

34. Sharon White to Professor Emil Salim, October 20, 2003

35. Mathur 2006 pp 46-48

36. Padel 1998, and testimony from several people interviewed in Wira Pdika: Matiro Puko,
Company Loko

REFERENCES

1. Anderson, Dewey 1951, Aluminum for Defence and Prosperity, Washington: US Public
Affairs Institute

2. Bakan, Joel 2004, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit, London: Constable

3. Blum, William 2003, Killing Hope: US Militarism and CIA Interventions since World War
Two, London

4. Zed Holloway 1988: The Aluminium Multinationals and the Bauxite Cartel, NY: St
Martin’s Press

5. Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prices, Dec 1988. Energy Audit of Aluminium Industry,
Delhi: GoI

6. Caufield, Catherine 1998, The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations, London: Pan

7. Curtis, Mark 2003, Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World, London: Vintage

8. Dennis, Michael Aaron 2003, ‘Earthly Matters: On the Cold War and the Earth
Sciences’, in Social Studies of Science, October, 33/5 pp 809-819

9. Exley, Christopher ed 2001, Aluminium and Alzheimer’s disease: The Science that Describes
the Link

10. Amsterdam, El Sevier

11. Fauset, Claire, 2006, ‘What’s Wrong with CSR?’ Corporate Watch Report, Oxford

12. Fernandes, Walter, 2006, ‘Liberalization and Development-induced Displacement’, in
Social Change Vol 36 No 1, pp 109-123

13. Fox, CS 1932: Bauxite and Aluminous Laterite, London: Technical Press

14. Girvan, Norman 1971, Foreign Capital and Economic Underdevelopment in Jamaica,
Institute of Social and Economic Resources, University of Jamaica

15. Gitlitz, Jennifer S 1993, ‘The relationship between primary aluminium production and
the damming of world rivers’, Berkeley: International Rivers Network, Working Paper 2

16. Goldberg, Suzanne 2007, ‘Bush team accused of doctoring climate science reports,’
Weekly Guardian Feb 9-15 p 1

17. Graham, Ronald 1982, The Aluminium Industry and the Third World, London: Zed

18. Haberl, Helmut, Helga Weisz, Heinz Schandl 2006, ‘Ecological embeddedness: 1700-
2000’, Economic and Political Weekly Nov 25 pp 4896-4906

19. Heiner, Albert P 1991, Henry J Kaiser: Western Colossus, San Francisco: Halo

20. Holloway, SK 1988, The Aluminium Multinationals and the Bauxite Cartel, NY: St
Martin’s Press

21. Kalam, APJ & YS Rajan 1998, India 2020: A Vision for the New Millenium, Penguin

22. McCully, Patrick 1998, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams,
Hyderabad: Orient Longmans [London: Zed, 1996]

23. Mahariya, Baba 2001, ‘Development: At Whose Cost? An Adivasi on Dislocation and
Displacement’, in KC Yadav ed Beyond the Mud Walls: Indian Social Realities, Delhi: Hope
India

24. Mathias, Alex 2003, ‘Greening Aluminium’, in The Carbon Challenge Journal, London

25. Mathur, HM 2006, ‘Resettling People Displaced by Development Projects: Some
Critical Management Issues’ in Social Change vol 36 no 1, pp 36-86

26. Monbiot, George 2006, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, London: Allen Lane

27. Padel, Felix 1995/2000, The Sacrifice of Human Being: British Rule and the Konds of
Orissa, Delhi: OUP

28. —— ‘Forest Knowledge: Tribal people, their environment and the structure of power’
in Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, ed Richard
H Grove, Vinita Damodaran & Satpal Sangwan, Delhi: OUP

29. ———— & Samarendra Das 2004, ‘Exodus Part Two: Lanjigarh’ in Tehelka March 13,
2004, p 22, Delhi

30. Palast, Greg 2003 [2002], The Best Democracy Money can Buy: An Investigative Reporter
Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons, and High Finance Fraudsters, London:
Robinson

31. Ritthoff, Michael, Holger Rohn & Christa Liedtke 2002, ‘Calculating MIPS: Resource
Productivity of Products and Services, Wuppertal spezial 27e, Germany: Wuppertal
Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy

32. Roberts, J & D McLean 1976, Mapoon – Book Three: The Cape York Mining Companies
and the Native Peoples, Victoria: International Development Action

33. Robins, Nick 2006, The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India
Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, London: Pluto

34. ———— Sep 30-Oct 1, 2006, ‘Capital Gains’, Financial Times magazine, London

35. Ross, Michael Jan 1999, ‘The Political Economy of the Resource Curse’, in World
Politics no 51

Large dams have dramatic consequences. Ecosystems are destroyed and numerous people are made homeless, often without adequate resettlement. But it is yet little known that large-scale hydro-electricity is a major contributor to global warming. The reservoirs could, despite their clean image, be even more devastating for our climate than fossil fuel plants.

A few years ago, I spent a month in the valley of the Narmada River, to support tribal activists who have been resisting the Sardar Sarovar dam in central India for decades. These indigenous inhabitants, or adivasis, are desperate. In their struggle, inspired by Gandhi, they attempt to drown themselves when their villages are flooded. Death seems preferable to being forced to move from their valley to tin houses on infertile, barren soil. If they’re lucky, they can live on land that nobody else wants, the only available in the densely populated India. This forced resettlement, made necessary by ´progress´, is not unsimilar to what befell American Indians or the Aborigines in Australia. The consequences of mega hydro: cultures die and alcoholism, depression and violence remains.

Another dramatic example is the uprooting of the Chakma in Bangladesh by the Kaptai dam. 40,000 Chakma fled to India, but were not given a legal status. Ensuing violent conflicts around land have led to a brutal end of 10,000 lives.

Mega hydro has an atrocious record. The World Commission on Dams (WCD), consisting of experts, opposition and industry, was installed to produce an independent review of large dams. The WCD estimated in 2000 that 40 to 80 million people have been displaced worldwide. A more recent report by the University of Yale estimates that in India alone, large dams have forced 21 to 40 million people to move. The majority was built for irrigation, but the irrigated agricultural acreage increased by a mere 1%. The World Bank states that more than half of the large hydro projects do not meet their economic targets. Considerable cost overruns are common and have added a considerable burden to the national debt of several developing countries, particularly in South America.

The ecological consequences of large dams are also grim. They include significant and irreversible loss of species, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The massive alteration of major river systems has led to more than a third of the species of sweet water fish to be extinct or endangered.
This can also have economic consequences. Damming the Columbia in the western US resulted in the American government spending 435 million dollar yearly since 1996 on measures to mitigate the impact on fishing in the Colombia basin. Despite the expense, many of the wild salmon species are extinct, or on the brink of extinction.

Despite the social and environmental devastation, large dams can still count on sympathy. After all, they are thought to provide clean energy and thus a weapon in the battle against climate change. But more and more evidence is emerging that suggests something completely different.
When a reservoir fills and land is drowned, the original vegetation starts to rot. The methane that is formed, escapes when the water bursts forth from turbines under pressure. The changing water level due to seasonal variation ensures a continual supply of rotting organic matter. A dam reservoir is, especially in the tropics, like a big engine converting atmospheric carbon into methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide.
The emission of this gas from dam heads has not been modelled until recently. The National Institute for Research in the Amazon has surveyed major dams in Brazil and reports that, thanks to this methane engine, mega hydro emits 3 to 54 times more carbon dioxide-equivalent in greenhouse gases per megawatt than modern gas power stations.

Ironically, climate change itself decreases the effectiveness of hydro-electricity. Many hydro-dependent countries, including Tanzania, Albania, Brazil, Ghana, Norway, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan and Vietnam have suffered serious power shortages due to droughts.

Large dams also affect the climate indirectly. Brazil wants to build three new dams in the Amazon basin to supply electricity to the aluminium industry. Aluminium contributes heavily to climate change, due to emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide and perfluorocarbons: potent, extremely persistent greenhouse agents, released in the electrolytic processing of bauxite. Iceland is building the 190 meter high Karahnukar damn for the American aluminium giant ALCOA: the first in a series, that, when completed, will flood the largest pristine wilderness in Europe.
Iceland has a comfortable amount of yet unspent carbon credits. But Icelandic aluminium smelters will far exceed the 1,600,000 tonnes of emissions permitted under the Kyoto Convention if all of the planned smelter projects materialise.
Like the Sardar Sarovar dam in India, Karahnjukar in Iceland and the industrialisation program are fiercely contested. But the governments of these countries and others still regard mega hydro as a symbol of ingenuity, progress and a matter of national pride. But now that it is becoming evident that hydropower contributes to global warming, it is in all our interest to express to these governments that there are no excuses left for the devastation wrought by large dams.

Published in the newspaper Trouw (Netherlands), 21-1-2007.

Original (in Dutch):

• Trouw (paid access only)
• Or from groenfront.nl

See also:

• ‘Role of river-suspended material in the global carbon cycle’ is here in pdf
• ‘Glacial Rivers Reduce Pollution on Earth’ by Gudmundur Pall Olafsson
• Hydroelectric Power’s Dirty Secret Revealed – New Scientist
• ‘Kárahnjúkavirkjun, sýnd veiði en ekki gefin’ eftir Grím Björnsson jarðeðlisfræðing
  – Skýrsla sem þingheimur mátti ekki sjá
• Virkjanir í jökulám óhagstæðar fyrir loftslagsvernd, eftir Hjörleif Guttormsson
  – Enn ein falsrökin fyrir Kárahnjúkavirkjun hrakin
• ‘Stóra samhengið’ eftir Guðmund Pál Ólafsson náttúrufræðing
  – Virkjanaæði stjórnvalda stefnir fiskimiðum landsins í voða

“The evidence we present goes against the conventional history of aluminium, which tends to portray the industry as central to various countries’ economic power and prosperity, without understanding the financial manipulation and exploitation between and within countries, and the true costs.”

Few people understand aluminium’s true form or see its industry as a whole. Hidden from general awareness are its close link with big dams, complex forms of exploitation in the industry’s financial structure, and a destructive impact on indigenous society that amounts to a form of genocide. At the other end of the production line, aluminium’s highest-price forms consist of complex alloys essential to various ‘aerospace’/’defence’ applications.1 The metal’s high ‘strategic importance’ is due to its status as a key material supplying the arms industry. In these four dimensions ‘ environmental, economic, social and military ‘ it has some very destructive effects on human life.

The Orissa Government is presently trying to set up a State-wide programme of rapid industrialization based on a vastly increased scale of mining projects ‘ primarily bauxite, iron-ore, coal and chromite, along with aluminium refineries and smelters, steel plants, plus coal-fired power stations and hydro-electric dams to power them. The idea is that this will rapidly bring great wealth into the State in the form of Foreign Direct Investment, which will quickly pay off Orissa’s Foreign Debt to the World Bank and other foreign institutions, at the same time as it promotes overall development in a State which has a high level of poverty and records of starvation deaths.
To comprehend the implications, it is instructive to look at back articles in EPW on aluminium. From the 1960s to 1980s, the emphasis was on economics: the huge subsidies in electricity prices and tax-breaks and how these were lobbied for or justified by Government, the decrease in percentage of aluminium reserved for electrical cables to boost rural electrification, problems of labour and power cuts; articles critical of the industry and in its defence (EPW 1967-1980, Kale 1972, Rajagopalam 1981, Subrahmanyam 1982). From Vidhya Das’ first article on Kashipur in 1995, the emphasis shifted to exposing an escalating abuse of human rights in Orissa, which culminated in the police killings of three Adivasis at Maikanch in December 2000, and which is coming to a head again now; against a People’s Movement to try and stop this invasion of their land and resources (Das 1995-2003, Sarangi 2002-5, Bandyopadhyay 2004). The early articles showed little awareness of the human cost to several 100,000 Adivasis uprooted by aluminium plants and the dams which power them. Later articles highlight abuses of power. What is needed is a clear analysis of the political economy of bauxite and aluminium, to comprehend the deeper causes of abuse being perpetrated now in many parts of Orissa.
In this article we present a preliminary overview of this political economy through analyzing each of the four dimensions named above. The evidence we present goes against the conventional history of aluminium, which tends to portray the industry as central to various countries’ economic power and prosperity, without understanding the financial manipulation and exploitation between and within countries, and the true costs.

India’s Aluminium History: Impacts on Society and Environment
When Nalco’s aluminium complex was being set up in Orissa during the early 1980s, Subrahmanyan commented that to understand its effects, one must comprehend ‘the past, not very pleasant, history of the Indian aluminium industry’ (EPW 1982). In fact, to realize what lies in store for Orissa if even a few of the planned bauxite and aluminium projects go ahead, it is necessary to understand aluminium’s history in a succession of other countries, which all show similar patterns of lavish promises followed by extreme exploitation (Graham 1982).
In the US and Canada, big dams built from the 1920s-40s to power aluminium factories displaced numerous indigenous communities, and had dire effects on the environment (McCully 1998), alongside intensive pollution from the factories themselves. In Guyana, Suriname, Jamaica, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Guinea, Ghana, Sierra Leone and other countries, these effects on indigenous peoples and nature have generally intensified, often accompanied by a high degree of foreign financial and political control which has completely undermined these countries’ actual economic independence.
Aluminium production has been linked with big dams from the start. From the first wave of big dams built in Europe and north America in the 1900s-1930s to the Three Gorges dams in China, supplying electricity and water to aluminium factories has been a principal reason for their construction (Glitlitz 1993, McCully 1996). This is because smelters consume exceptionally large amounts of electricity. To produce a ton of aluminium a smelter consumes at least 13,500 kwh (kilo-watt hours). It also produces very high emissions of Carbon Dioxide: an average of 13.1 tons per ton of aluminium produced. 2 This electricity is needed to split aluminium from its strong bonding with oxygen. A refinery, which is often located near a bauxite mine to reduce transport costs, produces alumina (aluminium oxide, Al2O3) by refining off alumina’s bonding with iron, silica, and about 40 other mineral elements found in substantial quantities in bauxite. A smelter splits off aluminium’s even stronger bonding with oxygen, by passing a high electric current through dissolved alumina.
India’s first major aluminium company was INDAL (INDian ALuminium). It was set up as a subsidiary of ALCAN (ALuminium CANada), a principal supplier to the UK arms industry as well as to the US, and originally a subsidiary of ALCOA (AL. CO. of America).3 Alcan’s set-up was designed in part to facilitate US control of aluminium cartels centred in Europe (Graham 1982, Holloway 1988). Since the 1990s at least, the aluminium cartel has been directly controlled by the US administration (Stiglitz 2002).
The foundation-stone for the Hirakund dam was laid by Orissa’s last British Governor, and then again by Nehru in 1948. By 1959 it was supplying Alcan/Indal’s Hirakund smelter, whose bauxite was mined and refined in present-day Jharkhand to the north. Irrigation, flood control and hydro-power were given as the dam’s main purposes. This dam displaced at least 160,000 people, over 50% of them Adivasis, as well as a lot of forest and rich cultivated land ‘ almost as much land as has been irrigated from the reservoir (Viegas 1992). As for flood-control, flash floods caused by sudden release of the water in Hirakud Reservoir during exceptional rain, in 1980 and during the Cyclone of 1999, killed more people than died in many years of flooding before the dam’s existence.
So hydro-power was the main reason, aimed primarily to supplying factories, both during the 1950s-60s, and in a massive new, DFID-financed expansion about to be implemented right now. Supplying the Hirakud smelter, as a prime customer for a large supply of hydro-power, was almost certainly among the main reasons for its construction, though as in most other cases, this purpose was not made explicit.
Soon after, in the early 1960s, the Rihand dam was built to supply Hindalco’s refinery-smelter complex at Renukoot (Shaktinagar) on the UP-MP border, displacing a comparable population. None of India’s dam projects has kept proper statistics of the people displaced, and none has resettled them adequately. Almost every family of each displaced population suffered a tremendous drop in living standards. The bare estimates of numbers cover a horrendous reality of uprooted communities and human lives reduced to a level of destitution and virtual enslavement. Similar stories surround the Koyna dam in Maharashtra, the Mettur dam in Tamil Nadu, and Korba in Chhattisgarh, which is named after the Korva tribe who were displaced en masse by Balco, and whose Census-recorded population shrank from about 84,000 to 27,000 in 1991-2001.4
Then came NALCO (National AL.CO), ‘the pride of Orissa’, one of India’s biggest profit-making PSUs, set up in 1980. An article in EPW in 1981 (Rajagopalam et. al.) gave a range of economic arguments against setting up Nalco ‘ in particular the low price for bauxite enforced by external pressures (i.e. the aluminium cartel), plus excessive consumption of electricity, water, etc., and excessive pollution. Damanjodi refinery and the Upper Kolab dam displaced over 50,000 people, Adivasis the majority (Jojo 2002). The rail link between Koraput and Rayagada, built to facilitate Nalco and future aluminium firms, had negative effects on the forest and interior Adivasi villages over a wide area. And Nalco’s smelter at Angul has inflicted serious pollution on thousands of people, killing all the fish in a long stretch of the Nandira and Brahmani rivers, as well as killing people and damaging extensive areas of cultivated land when its toxic waste fly-ash ponds have flooded. 5
Tribal villages all around Nalco’s bauxite mine on the long summit of Panchpat Mali have suffered pollution and lost their land’s former fertility, while over 200 deaths in work accidents at the Damanjodi plant nearby have gone largely unreported and uncompensated, as have deaths from fluoridosis around the Angul smelter, and deaths from industrial pollution among workers in all these plants.6 So Nalco’s high profits come at a huge human and environmental cost that has never been properly calculated ‘ part of the subsidies and ‘externalities’ of aluminium production we examine below.
When Nalco’s example was emulated by BALCO (Bharat AL.CO), wanting to mine the summit of Gandhamardan, a movement arose to prevent this, representing an alliance of local Adivasis, Dalits, Hindu activists and many others. They came together to save the Gandhamardan Mountain range, which has an exceptional wealth of forest cover, as well as mythical and medieval temple heritage. Balco built a colony for several thousand workers, which is now derelict. The planned bauxite mine on the ridge was finally declared illegal on environmental grounds in 1987, after hundreds of protestors had endured police beatings and arrest, and women had stopped the passage of mining vehicles by laying their children in front of them to maintain the blockade, saying: ‘What future do they have if you destroy our Mountain?’
A movement to try and stop construction of the Upper Indravati dam project was less successful – crushed by lathi-charges and mass arrests in April 1992. This project involved building 7 dams, financed through loans from the World Bank. When a WB official was visiting villages nearby in 1993, tribal women told her, ‘If we starve, you also bear a responsibility’, and indeed, the worsening poverty in the area surrounding the reservoir now is notorious.7 The cost of construction rose even more than usual during construction, which was also marred by an accident in August 1991 when a tunnel suddenly flooded killing an estimated 200 (mostly tribal) workers. At least 40,000 people from 99 villages were displaced. The reservoir has caused mass deforestation and impoverishment of surrounding communities, which are still without the electricity they were promised (despite hydro-power the project supplies to distant factories), and where people have to cut and sell the remaining forest in order to stave off starvation. Again, this project’s purpose was almost certainly to supply power and water to the aluminium factories presently being planned or implemented. 8

Orissa’s Bauxite Plans
So already, two of India’s six working smelters, and one of its six refineries, are located in Orissa, as well as a string of big dams to give electricity and water to these factories. The present plans for intensive mining of Orissa’s bauxite alongside a complex of big dams, aluminium factories and rail links actually date back to the 1920s. The British geologist Cyril Fox gave an outline for mining bauxite from Karlapat and the other Bauxite-capped mountains, refining and smelting it using Orissa’s hydro-electric sites, transporting it through the Rayagada railway (then under construction), and exporting the product via the harbour being planned at Vishakhapatnam. 9 Fox’s outline actually lays out the whole plan for Orissa’s aluminium industry, as a colonial undertaking involving factories, dams, railways and port, fed by bauxite mines on the main mountains. If the British Raj understood Orissa’s aluminium potential, so too did Hitler, whose airforce used unprecedented quantities of aluminium. Also steel: one of his mineral experts made the highly significant comment (in the light of recent iron/steel projects, particularly that of the Korean giant, Posco) that ‘You can rule the whole world if you control the iron ore of Keonjhar’. Hitler got the Japanese to make Orissa a prime target of attack for this reason, which resulted in a few air-raids on Orissa’s ports.10
But the present plan is as colonial as British and German plans were: foreign-based companies’ plans to extract Orissa’s minerals at an unprecedented rate receive support from foreign Governments. Most of the profits will inevitably go abroad, leaving behind a trail of disaster for Orissa’s environment and cultivators. Briefly, Orissa’s new aluminium ‘master-plan’ involves:-
1. Utkal Alumina’s planned mine on Bapla Mali (west of Kashipur) and refinery below, near Kucheipadar village (Rayagada District). This has now been delayed for 13 years by the People’s Movement, centred in Kucheipadar and other villages. Utkal was originally a consortium of Indal, Tata, and Norsk Hydro. Tata withdrew after the project faced stiff opposition in the mid-90s. Its place was taken by Alcan, which had an interest anyway through its subsidiary Indal, in which it then had a 54.6% stake. In a little-investigated deal, it sold this controlling share to HINDALCO (HINDustan AL.CO. of Aditya Birla’s group of companies). After the police killings at Maikanch, Norsk withdrew, leaving Alcan and Hindalco. So on the surface, the line-up of companies is completely different now. Yet in effect ‘the company’ is still the same, supported in the same ways by the District authorities. Utkal’s high-level foreign backing was evident when the World Bank tried to make it a model scheme of its BPD project (Business Partners for Development), organizing talks in Rayagada in October 2000, which raised the temperature of debate just before the Maikanch police killings. After these killings, Utkal was discreetly withdrawn from the WB’s BPD website without explanation. The Inquiry into Maikanch further delayed Utkal, which is trying to implement its project now. Hence the present campaign of police intimidation.
2. Hindalco’s plan for mining Kodinga Mali (on the SW rim of Kashipur), with a
refinery at Kansariguda village, and an expansion of the Hirakud smelter.
3. Larsen and Toubro’s plans for mining Siji Mali and/or Kuturu Mali (N and NE of
Kashipur) from Sunger (where a movement was active against its plans in the ’90s), plus a refinery near Kalyansingpur, in a joint venture with Dubai Al.Co. (Financial Express 16/12/05) L & T is originally a Danish company, which manufactures arms at several factories in India.
4. Sterlite/Vedanta’s project near Lanjigarh to mine the northwest ridge of the Niyamgiris. Construction of their refinery below is under way, after evicting Adivasis who had agreed to accept compensation. These evictions took place early in 2004. Adivasis in the Lanjigarh area ‘ including those who refused compensation, whose villages stand just outside the boundary wall ‘ live now under a shadow of tremendous pressure from the company people, contractors and police; as well as a climate of fear, after one leader of their Movement, Sukru Majhi, was run over deliberately on the newly metalled Lanjigarh-Doikal road on 27th March 2005.11 The legality of the Vedanta project, and its impact on the exceptional Forest which covers the lease area, has been questioned on numerous fronts by the Central Empowered Committee of the Supreme Court, who inspected it in Dec.2004 and June 2005 (CEC Report Sept. 2005). The refinery is being constructed by an Australia-based company called Worley, through foreign finance. The Indian company Vedanta Alumina is owned via Sterlite Industries. by Vedanta Resources, which was launched as a UK company on the London Stock Exchange in December 2003, and invested in by several leading European banks (see below). This investment is also funding a huge new smelter complex at Korba, and plans for another smelter near Hirakud.12
5. Khandual Mali near Karlapat (west of Lanjigarh) was under threat: initially from a local company, Sulakshmi Mines and Minerals, aiming to make money through selling the mining rights. An attempted sale to BHPBilliton (the world’s biggest mining company) was declared illegal in 2004, after BHP had already announced its intentions to set up a bauxite mine and refinery in Kalahandi. This Mountain is the one referred to by Fox in the 1920s. Both environmentally and socially it is an area of exceptional importance and sensitivity, and the villagers living on the mountain have made clear their resistance to mining it.
6. Other projects being planned include Gandhamardan again, whose mining rights have been purchased by a Canadian Company called Continental Resources; Mountains in the Kuttia Kond territory, whose bauxite was recently surveyed by Jimpex; and Deo Mali, Koraput’s (and Orissa’s) highest Mountain, which Nalco has designs on. In Chattisgarh, Balco-Sterlite-Vedanta is setting up a bauxite mine at Bodai-Daldali, on a mountain near Kawardha, bordering MP and Kanha National Park, where Baiga tribals have already been displaced.

The Exploitative Nature of the Aluminium Industry
If this account of India’s aluminium industry and the plans for Orissa has stressed the negative features, what are the benefits alleged by those promoting this expansion? Huge profits, with prices soaring through demand from China, and foreign exchange which some Govt. sources claim will pay off Orissa’s huge debt. Plus employment opportunies, and foreign investment to bring wealth to Orissa’s backward districts, and promote all-round development.
The profit in the short-term is not in doubt. But profit for whom? Clearly not for the uprooted Adivasis. The lack of respect being shown to them now in Lanjigarh and Kashipur is an ill omen for their future. They have already met others dispossessed by the Indravati, Kolab and Damanjodi projects, and know that promises of a good ‘resettlement package’, ’employment opportunities’ and other benefits are basically a fraud. The employment situation around Damanjodi is very harsh, with fierce competition for work, poor or non-existent compensation for work-related injuries and deaths, etc. It is also highly questionable whether aluminium projects will pay off Orissa’s debts or create further debt. Will it make these ‘backward areas’prosperous, or will it increase their poverty?
Aluminium’s history shows that in many ways the industry’s whole economy is based in exploitation: getting a valuable resource very cheap, and selling it dear. The main profits do not go to the Indian or Orissa Government, but to a small elite of Indian and foreign executives and bankers, who have streamlined ways of getting their profits out of India. What Anil Agarwal is doing at Lanjigarh and Kawardha to make profits in London represents a new kind of colonialism, on a bigger scale than the East India Company ever dreamed of, if only because the means of extracting India’s key resources swiftly and permanently, are now at hand. Vedanta’s expansion has been backed by foreign banks, including Barclays, ABNAmro, and Deutsche, as well as ICICI (linked with the US Prudential Bank).
The whole idea of big dams and aluminium factories as a super-boost for a region’s economic development is a dangerous myth. Its paradigm is the US, and it is true that aluminium played an important part in this country’s rise to pre-eminence from the 1930s, though without benefit to the areas where factories were sited, and at great cost to the environment. Aluminium has been at the centre of what Chomsky characterizes as US industrial management by military spending to stave off economic decline (2003 p.39). The history of how other countries were induced to make the aluminium industry central to their economies shows a highly contrasting pattern: after an initial investment phase, of fine promises and intensive construction, the industry promotes external control and economic dependence, which ends up stifling a region’s prosperity altogether.13
The British started large-scale coal and iron-ore mining in north Orissa. But the escalating displacement since Independence ‘ at least 3 million indigenous cultivators thrown off their land in Orissa alone, by mines, dams and metal factories ‘ is unprecedented. Yet there are certain significant precedents in colonial history: ‘the enclosures’, when public land was privatized all over Britain in the 17-19th centuries, Scotland’s ‘Highland Clearances’ in the 19th century when huge estates were cleared of ‘the clans’ of crofters (subsistence farmers), and the genocide of native Americans and Australians by European colonists. In other words, Orissa is repeating the very pattern of genocide which confronts Europeans and Americans with the most shameful parts of their history. But mining and the metals industry are the central issue now.
Plans for Orissa’s rapid industrialization also involve a huge increase in coal and iron-ore extraction. Posco’s steel project is just one out of 37 current plans for steel plants. ‘Kalinganagar’ (Jajpur District), where recent protests by Adivasis unwilling to be displaced were met with ferocious police suppression, involves plans for a vast industrial park. And every day, several thousand trucks carry iron-ore from north Orissa to Paradeep for export. The northern districts of Keonjhar, Mayurbhanj, Sundargarh, Jharsaguda and Jajpur have already faced mass displacement and deforestation, as well as pollution, from iron and coal mining. Over 40 sponge-iron factories (which process iron-ore into iron for the steel plants) in Keonjhar alone are particularly polluting.14

Cost-Benefit Analysis
The main conventional costs of aluminium production include electricity, water, coal, caustic soda, transportation and labour. Everywhere an aluminium industry sets up, it receives hefty subsidies in these areas. In Orissa, the al.cos are getting each one cheap through direct and indirect subsidies, and legislation safeguarding the environment and labour rights has recently been weakened.
It has long been recognized that al.cos can only make a profit by being heavily subsidized. This is rarely spelt out publicly, though well documented in Government and academic studies of the industry (including several articles in EPW). What this means is that the aluminium prices that fluctuate every day in the London Metal Exchange are actually considerably lower than the real cost of producing the metal ‘ and far lower than the real cost when the actual effects, or ‘externalities’, of production are taken into account.
It seems that the last published Govt. document that was reasonably open about aluminium finance was Dewey Anderson’s Aluminum for Defence and Prosperity published by the US Administration in 1951. This was during the Korean war, when the military demand for aluminium was soaring. Anderson argued that the US must stockpile much more aluminium for war, particularly for its air-force; that the cost to the US economy and environment was too high to produce more within the country; and that more should be imported from Alcan, which was then constructing a huge new smelter on Canada’s west coast, fed by bauxite/alumina from third world sources. This document is thus a blueprint for exploitation of third world resources.
Anderson’s comments apply as much to Orissa today as they did in the US 50 years: ‘Aluminum reduction is no great maker of employment, uses little skilled labor, and adds little to the independent development of an area.’ Electricity should be used more wisely ‘than allowing aluminum metal manufacture to consume it all with such relatively small return in community advancement.’ And the nation’s natural resources should not be wasted: ‘the US cannot any longer afford to make aluminum if it can be obtained in large enough quantities and on favourable price terms from other sources.’ 15
In other words, since the second world war, a key starategic aim of the US has been to acquire a large and regular supply of bauxite/aluminium as cheaply as possible from 3rd world countries. US aluminium production more than tripled between 1948 and 1958, ushering in a ‘golden new age’ for America’s al.co.s.16
If the al.cos (aluminium companies) get electricity, water and labour super-cheap in Orissa, even more so the basic raw material itself. Bauxite has no fixed price. The current trend is to pay a royalty for its extraction to the Indian Government, which is fixed at approximately 0.35% of the LME price per ton of finished metal. The IBA (International Bauxite Association), a producers’ cartel of bauxite-exporting countries, managed to double the price they were getting for bauxite in the early 1970s, under the leadership of Michael Manley in Jamaica, whose Government faced a campaign of severe destablisation by CIA operations as a result (Blum 2003 p. 263), and this success has never been repeated.
As the al.cos themselves put this, getting a cheap source of bauxite is their ‘starting point of value creation’.17 As it is refined, smelted, and fabricated, each stage of production ups the profit margin. But the highest profits are made further along the line, in the sophisticated alloys and Metal Matrix Composites demanded by Defence. This ‘strategic importance’ is a key reason Abdul Kalam gives for expanding India’s aluminium industry, outlined in his book with Y.S.Rajan, India 2020: a vision for the new millenium (1998).
Aluminium’s history in the 3rd world needs to be understood in this context. Al.cos come into a region advertising huge economic benefits in employment and for boosting the local economy. As Anderson says frankly in 1951, and subsequent analysis confirms (e.g. Graham 1982), these benefits do not materialize. This is clear from examining the extent of subsidy in materials alone; but also from the economic cost which Govt. institutions are beginning to attach to pollution. A recent British Govt. report costs carbon emissions at $56-223 per ton of CO2. At an average of 13 tons of CO2 emissions per ton of aluminium (above) this should add at least $700 to the cost of aluminium. But of all sectors of the economy, metal production has by far the highest ratio of carbon emissions to profits, because of markets’ historic inability to internalize pollution costs in commodity prices.18 So carbon emissions are factored out of the Cost-Benefit analysis, as an ‘externality’. The same with other emissions and effluents, including sulphur dioxide, fluoride and HFCs, Spent Pot Lining, and Toxic Red Mud, which invariably pollutes the ground-water near a refinery. In the Lanjigarh case the Red Mud Pond is actually planned right beside the source of the Bamsadhara River, below Niyamgiri.19
Since these damaging effects are classed as ‘externalities’, they are not included in the cost of production, and it is not the companies that pay these costs: they fall on the host country and the local people. The high cost of subsidising India’s aluminium industry was recognized in India’s Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prices Report in 1988, especially in terms of the highly subsidies for their electricity. The BICP actually recommended trying to reduce aluminium consumption ‘ a recommendation aggressively reversed by the New Mineral Policy introduced in 1993.
As for aluminium’s supposed status as a ‘green metal’ because of its high rate of recycling: it is actually a very small proportion that is recycled, and recycling has no discernible dampening effect on bauxite mining and the huge rise in output of new aluminium. Raising the proportion of aluminium used in cars in India from 10 to 20 kg may (or may not) save 20% of fuel costs, but the high cost of greenhouse gases emitted in smelting aluminium alone destroys any environmental benefit.20 So contrary to al.co propaganda, aluminium is the ungreenest of materials, and its present expansion is a model of unsustainability.

FDI and the Corporate Takeover of Orissa
The new wave of mining projects planned for Orissa, starting with Utkal, Vedanta and Posco, represent huge injections of Foreign Direct Investment. Since the new National Mineral Policy brought in while Manmohan Singh was Finance Minister in 1993, the share of mining ventures that can be owned by foreign companies has risen from 26% to 74%, and lobbyists are trying to get this raised to 100%. This is one way that profits from these projects are streamlined now for taking out of India. Foreign Banks which have invested in Vedanta and other joint ventures, are becoming right now the effective owners of some of Orissa’s richest mineral deposits, with a view to rapid extraction, and minimal checks on the consequences for the environment and local people.
It is well known that the main profits from FDI really go abroad (Woodward 2001), and in mining, the foreign companies are actually gaining control of India’s most precious resources: its mineral deposits and flowing water. In other sectors such as electricity and telecommunications, foreign companies such as Enron have pulled off notorious scams in India, and the evasion of responsibility for the Bhopal disaster by Union Carbide/Dow Chemicals shows the kind of dangers which foreign companies pose. But with mining companies the danger and exploitation is at an altogether different level, since minerals are a finite, non-renewable resource as well as, in effect, ‘the starting point of value-creation’ in world finance. From bauxite’s natural placing in the earth it ensures the land’s fertility. Damage from mining the bauxite cappings on south Orissa’s greatest mountains is irreversible, both for nature and for indigenous communities.
The role of the World Bank needs close examination here. Orissa’s foreign debt is one of the largest, with the highest Debt to GSDP ratio of any State. 46% of GSDP goes in interest payments alone. For the financial year of 1999-2000 the Orissa Govt.’s loan receipt was Rs.3,690.40 crore, while its debt repayment totalled Rs.3,068.43 crore. These are basic facts behind current plans for Orissa’s Fiscal Reforms. 21
But loans from the WB come with a hidden list of ‘conditionalities’, which typically involve the removal of legislation that restricts foreign companies’ entry into the Indian market. The market reforms that started in Orissa with privatizing the power sector in the mid-90s, were basically orchestrated through the WB. Those reforms paved the way for the current series of deals that puts Orissa’s best mineral deposits under the financial control, and in effect the ownership, of foreign companies and banks.22
This explains why the World Bank rejected key conclusions of its own Extractive Industries Reviewi in 2004, which had shown that WB involvement in mining was having disastrous effects and should be phased out.23 Hence the significance of the WB’s hushed-up involvement at Rayagada in October 2000.
Looking at Orissa’s foreign loans as a whole, the WB has been the main lender, and played a key role in arranging loans from other Banks too. These loans financed the first phase of Orissa’s industrialisation, including the Upper Indravati reservoir. This has already silted up so badly that two of the project’s four turbines are not working ‘ a design fault whose cost has to be borne by Orissa, not the Japanese engineers of Mitsubishi who constructed it. By getting Orissa so deeply in debt, the WB has effectively put it in a position where the Government has no choice but to open its doors to foreign companies and sell them its mineral assets (or has been persuaded of this by its foreign creditors). Getting Orissa into such un-repayable debt, while financing projects like Upper Indravati that will assist future mining projects, has functioned as part of an over-all plan for foreign companies to get hold of Orissa’s minerals at the cheapest cost.
George Monbiot’s Captive state: the corporate takeover of Britain (2000) shows how Corporations have gained huge power and wealth at the expense of local Government throughout the UK. Similar studies have analyzed this situation in the US, including the series of scams which Enron practised to make huge profits in the power sector, tripling costs for consumers in California etc. The way this corporate takeover is being orchestrated in Orissa follows the same pattern.
But in India it has another significance too. In certain precise ways, it is very similar to the manipulations of finance and law through which the East India Company swiftly assumed the attributes of India’s Government in the 18th century. The villagers in Kucheipadar, surrounded by police and company intimidation, have a clear understanding of this. ‘The company’ which has invaded their land and lives so destructively is repeating history. It behaves in the same colonial, even genocidal manner which brought the East India Company to power: a Government of India dedicated to the aim of making quick profits, whose greater part goes abroad, by exploiting India’s resources as swiftly and fully as posssible. Collecting revenue gave today’s District Collector his title. Given the repressive implementation of these projects through mass police deployment and alleged harassment, the corporate nature of the GoI which British rule established is apparently being reasserted.
The EIC was one of the world’s first Companies. Today’s companies merge into each other through complex patterns of mutual share-ownership etc. Their mandate subordinates every other value to one main aim: creating maximum profit for their investors, and in effect, for their top executives. Companies’ expert ‘caring’ image is a carefully manipulated mask (Bakan 2004). They merge into Banks, and into Government too via ‘revolving doors’. Company Directors control the present US administration ‘and most other Governments – as never before. So when Adivasis in Orissa oppose ‘the Company’, they are opposing a takeover of India’s soil by foreign capital, in a form that in many ways is a direct reincarnation of ‘the Company’ that forced India under British rule.
The aluminium companies form a cartel, controlled by key financial institutions, particularly from Washington and London.24 As with mining enclaves all over the third world, the Orissa Govt. has been made lavish promises of rapid wealth creation by foreign companies and Govts. Will the promises be believed yet again, and the people’s interests sold out? Or will the Government listen to the people and debate the merits of its policy and deals openly?
India’s mineral deposits are starting to come under a kind of foreign control that will not be easy to limit. This is the significance of the wave of protest currently sweeping across Orissa: You’re our Government! Don’t let this happen! An increasing number of people are now aware that Indian companies have the backing of foreign companies and banks as well as foreign Govts. (whose arms manufacturers depend on a constant supply of metals at the cheapest possible rate), and that these institutions have been manipulating the rules and technologies to ensure that the main profit leaves Orissa. As for what remains behind in Orissa, the people it brings most affluence to can be seen as a professional elite who serve company interests.

Aluminium for Arms
The world’s most lucrative and powerful companies are those producing arms in ‘defence’ or ‘aerospace’, and these are the al.cos’ highest-paying customers. The whole history of mining and metal technology is connected closely with the history of weaponry, which has motivated and funded inventions since the Bronze and Iron Ages. The industrial revolution led to a huge arms build up during the first half of the 20th century, which was among the causes of the two world wars.
‘War was good to Alcoa’, and all the al.cos flourished during the two world wars, when about 90% of aluminium went into military uses.25 In the 1920s, lobbyists for arms companies scuppered a League of Nations motion to ban the selling of arms for private (company) profit. At that time there was a widespread understanding that arms companies were a prime cause of wars (Sampson 1977). Where is this understanding now?
Aluminium’s ‘strategic’ value to the arms companies ‘ to America’s ‘permanent war industry’ in particular, which Eisenhower called its ‘military-industrial complex’ ‘ is obviously a key reason that the real costs of producing aluminium are hidden and transferred as we have indicated. Britain too, while closing down most of its manufacturing industries during the Thatcher era, kept ‘aerospace’ or ‘defence’ as a cornerstone of its economy, as the most lucrative and ‘strategic’ sector.26
One reason for aluminium’s strategic value is thermite, a little-known invention at the dawn of the 20th century in 1901, that virtually defined the violent course of the 20th century. While smelters require huge supplies of electricity in order to split aluminium from its bonding with oxygen in molecules of aluminium oxide, thermite reverses this process: a bomb is packed with iron oxide and aluminium powder. When the fuse ignites, the aluminium leaps to the high temperature of its ‘heat of formation’ to re-bond with oxygen, making the explosion huge. This was the basis of the first world war hand grenades, second world war incendiary bombs and napalm, and the ‘daisy cutters’ used by American planes for ‘carpet bombing’from the Korean and Vietnam wars to Iraq. Aluminium is also basic to the technology of nuclear missiles.
Anderson’s words in 1951 (p.1-5) remain true today: the aluminium industry is ‘at the very core of the military-industry complex’ Aluminum has become the most important single bulk material of modern warfare. No fighting is possible, and no war can be carried to a successful conclusion today, without using and destroying vast quantities of aluminum’ Aluminum makes fighter and transport planes possible. Aluminum is needed in atomic weapons, both in their manufacture and in their delivery’ Aluminum, and great quantities of it, spell the difference between victory and defeat”
Although the aluminium percentage in war-planes has diminished, the complexity of aluminium alloys used has increased, alongside a new range of composite fabrics blending oil or plastics with aluminium. These alloys and composites are crucial for aircraft, missile technology, and satellites, as well as war-ships and tanks. 27 Kalam and Rajan base their argument for India expanding its aluminium industry on the strategic importance and the high cost of this technology (1998). In other words, military might is a driving force and key source of profit behind aluminium production, now as much as before.
Balco supplied aluminium to India’s nuclear weapons program. 28 Alcan has long supplied the UK weapons industry. 29 Vedanta has received clear financial and British Govt. backing from London. 30 One wonders whether the supply it offers of cheap aluminium from Orissa may have been planned for years?
Graham gave the percentage of aluminium used in the arms industry at around 30% (1982 p.250). Lists of aluminium consumption by sector miss out arms manufacture now, and when ‘defence’ or ‘aerospace’ is given it does not rise above 4%. If this is correct, it is still substantial, since it represents aluminium’s most complex and highly-priced alloys. However, we believe the figures have been considerably ‘massaged’through listing many defence applications under ‘auto’, ‘construction’ etc., and not taking account of stockpiling. The US started its aluminium stockpile in 1950, and the Defence Production Act of 1959 prioritized this and classed aluminium as one of 4 ‘controlled metals’ for defence. The stockpile reached nearly 2 million tons in 1963, and was again prioritized in the first year of Reagan’s administration in 1980, and since.
How much aluminium is being consumed and destroyed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? What kinds of profits are these wars bringing to the al.cos as well as arms companies? The faster the military hardware is consumed, the bigger their trade. War is still probably the al.cos’ best business, although the contracts and statistics proving this have long been hard to access.
But alongside these military uses, and in effect subsidized by them, is the increasing ‘consumption’ of aluminium in other industries: especially in building construction, car manufacture, and packaging. India is portrayed as backward because its average annual aluminium consumption per head is less than 1 kilo, while ‘developed’ countries average at least 20 kilos – an unsustainable wasting of precious natural resources which we have all unwittingly become part of.

The Human Cost
The biggest ‘externality’ kept out of aluminium’s price is the human cost. Mining history in third world countries has always involved a tussle between foreign-controlled companies and the national Governments whose resources are being extracted – a tussle the foreign companies have always won, because they have the close backing of their foreign Governments, each promoting its own economy, and foreign Banks. When Cheddi Jagan in Guyana, Nkruma in Ghana and Michael Manley in Jamaica tried for a little more Government control over the foreign-controlled aluminium industry which dominated their finances, the WB immediately withdrew loans, or threatened to, and their Governments went back to servicing US and British economic interests (Graham 1982).
But in this tussle for profits out of mining, what gets left completely out of the picture is the interests of the indigenous people. They get virtually nothing. Only the tiniest percentage of outlay or profits goes on even attempting to compensate them for their dislocation. At first, the company and Govt. authorities say the indigenous people will benefit and raise their standard of living by ‘getting developed’. When the people concerned point out their standard of living and quality of life has fallen drastically, a different justification is given: these ‘backward’ people must pay ‘the price of progress’ ‘ a ‘sacrifice’ for the nation’s development as a whole.
This is why Adivasis, and those who know them, say these projects are not development at all, but its opposite ‘ a destruction of everything their culture values: land, forest, mountains, flowing water, and the freedom to make their own decisions. Protestors against these projects are often labelled ‘anti-development’. But for local communities the industrial projects themselves are anti-development, in the sense of lowering their standard of living.31
Government officials in the areas of Orissa affected by rapid industrialization plans, when asked why they don’t give Adivasis proper development in the form of schools, hospitals etc, now often reply: ‘the company will give this to you': ‘Utkal debo’, ‘Vedanta debo’. This puts people’s vital services at the whim of unelected officials of the very companies that are dispossessing them, which then advertise their ‘charity’ through claims of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’.
The human cost behind the bland bureaucratic term ‘development-induced displacement’ is beyond calculation. All the big ‘development’ projects mentioned have displaced thousands of Adivasis, and invariably lowered their standard of living.to an extreme degree. As Kishen Pattnayak put this: ‘The first step of mining is displacement. In Orissa there is not a single successful story of rehabilitation by the government of displaced families, who otherwise have been surviving on the natural resources of the area by living peacefully since hundreds of years on their own land.’ 32
The social structure of tribal society is inevitably fractured by displacement, as numerous studies have shown. Adivasis know that what is at stake is nothing less than their continued existence as a culture. They live in close-knit communities. Their social values are centred on their relationship with their land and natural environment, and in being self-sufficient for most of their needs by their own labour: for food, building their own houses, etc. To call them ‘poor’ is correct only when the system of exploitation imposed on them by trader-moneylenders is already taking away a large part of the food they grow. Where they are still largely self-sufficient and control their own land ‘ as in Kucheipadar, and in villages displaced by the Narmada dams ‘ they do not see themselves as poor. 33
The same with moral values: ‘We’re all saints here’ as an elder said to us in a Kond village in Kandhamal District, meaning that everyone in a tribal community lives without excess or wastage, and without trying to accumulate surplus wealth: without the cruel ‘competition’ that non-tribal society promotes at every level. As true Gandhians, in other words! They see outside society as degenerate and corrupt in the extreme. In particular, they see that projects for their own ‘tribal development’ have been riddled with corruption, in the hands of non-tribal contractors and officials whose main concern is creaming off their own ‘PerCent'(P.Sainath 1996). What has been imposed on them already ‘in the name of development’ is cultural genocide. What right has non-tribal society to speak of ‘developing them’? Shouldn’t they be developing us, and teaching us the principles of how to live sustainably?
Yet instead of giving tribal culture the respect it deserves, mainstream society still tends to denigrate it, perceiving it through negative stereotypes ‘ ‘primitive’, ‘backward’, ‘ignorant’, ‘uneducated’, ‘superstitious’, ‘lazy’ etc ‘ which actually turn the truth on its head.
The word ‘sustainable’ sustains considerable abuse nowadays. Almost the only lifestyle that could be defined as really sustainable ‘ over a period of over 2,000 years since Ashoka’s time for instance ‘ is one based on communities sustaining themselves through growing their own food, and a strong social structure. Sustainability, in this strict sense, is the essence of Adivasi society. It has sustained itself for centuries through knowledge of appropriate techniques of cultivation and collecting forest produce, not taking too much from nature, and wasting virtually nothing. Present use of terms such as ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainable mining’ are basically a lie. ‘Sustainable’ has been narrowed to mean basically ‘profitable’ over a period of up to about 20 years. What about the next 2,000?
This phrase ‘sustainable mining’ began to be used from 1999, when the world’s 10 biggest mining companies met to launch a project they called ‘Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development’ (MMSD, part of their Global Mining Initiative), to see how the mining industry could ‘contribute to the global transition to sustainable development’. The long-term vision ‘ how to plan to live sustainably in the long term – is completely absent from the corporate perspective. There is a pervasive blindness to the fact that our limited resources are being permanently destroyed for the sake of short-term gain ‘ that ‘current forms of extraction, and the trend for ever-increasing extraction and consumption of mineral products is totally unsustainable” (Evans 2002)
The main tribe involved in the Orissa Movement, living all around Orissa’s bauxite mountains, are the Konds. Their name for themselves is Kuwinga, and they are almost certainly the same people as the Kalinga who fought so hard for their independence against Ashoka’s conquest, over 2,000 years ago. The bauxite lies in a layer about a hundred feet thick on top of these 4,000 foot mountains, whose parent rock was named Khondalite by British geologists, since these mountains form the heartland of ‘Khond’ territory. They also happen to be central to Kond religion and identity. Gopinath Mohanty, in his autobiography, gives a revealing account of a Census official describing to him how some Konds, when asked their religion, replied simply, ‘Pahar’ (Mountains). The official found this answer absurd, but it actually shows a profound understanding: these bauxite-capped Mountains support abundant plant-life over a wide area, through hundreds of stream that form on their sides. The forest cover, especially when it exists all over a mountain, as with Niyamgiri and Gandhamardan, but also when it is reduced to a small curtain around the rim of the summit, as on Bapla Mali and the other ‘deforested’ mountains, holds the soil together for these streams to form. The bauxite itself acts as a sponge. It formed here over a period of at least 3 million years, through an annual weathering pattern of alternate rain and sun. Its porous quality makes bauxite ideal for holding the monsoon rain-water over the coming months of the hot season, releasing it slowly through the streams throughout the year, enriched with life-giving trace elements of all the minerals which bauxite is rich in. This is why an abundance of bauxite is probably the main factor in the growth of the world’s best tropical and sub-tropical forests, from Orissa to Brazil, north and west Australia, and many other areas.
In other words, Orissa’s mineral wealth, certainly in the case of bauxite, is its famed fertility in cultivated land and forest life. Take away the bauxite cappings of these mountains, and Orissa starts to become a desert ‘ a process already visible around Panchpat Mali in Koraput district. For when bauxite is mined out, the mud that is left exposed laterizes and hardens: its previous life-giving properties of storing water etc go into reverse.
So the human cost is not only the sacrifice of Adivasi society: it’s the sacrifice of future generations of countless Oriyas yet to be born. What kind of planning destroys all of this for ever for a few years’ profit riding the world’s currency markets?
By contrast, Konds viewing their mountains as Devata ‘ what could be
more realistic and logical? They understand that the mountains give life, in a way that company engineers and certain politicians apparently do not. Even referring to the minerals in these mountains as ‘resources’to be ‘utilized’ brings an ideological distortion. For those living near these mountains, they are not ‘resources’ but quite simply the sources of life.
This is why ‘genocide’ is an appropriate term for what is happening to Adivasis: a slow death. Not literally the physical death of every individual, as happened in the paradigm case of most of America’s or Australia’s tribes. But a psychic death: technically, ‘ethnicide’ – the killing-off of cultures. Without their culture, seeing the sudden confiscation of the land where their ancestors lived and the collapse of their communities, no longer able to grow their own food and forced to eke a living through exhausting and degrading coolie work for the very projects which destroyed their homes, Orissa’s displaced Adivasis exist in a living death, witnessing the extermination of all they have valued.
In terms of social anthropology, industrial projects imposed on a tribal area destroy the cohesive social structure of tribal society. They are dispossessed of the land that is central to their self-sufficient economy and production of food, as well as to their identity, and many shift closer towards a class of landless labourers. The factories, from the moment their construction starts, generally cause a considerable degrading of their remaining cultivated land through pollution and desiccation. Their religion and moral values receive a shock at the disrespect shown by company and Govt. people towards their mountains, forest and water-sources ‘ as well as to themselves. In terms of kinship and the structure of social relations through kin groups, communities are torn apart when they are resettled, as well as from the variable, divisive treatment they receive from ‘the company’. Mining companies have a strong tendency to divide people against each other. They bring a new spirit of competitiveness, and hierarchy into what have been markedly egalitarian societies. Those who hold out against company interests tend to get poorer, while those who serve its interests get chances for quick wealth. In other words, a corruption of values sets in, which goes hand in hand with mass poverty, prostitution and the break up of families, and an assault on everything in their social as well as natural environment which traditionally they valued.34
This is why the 5th Schedule of India’s Constitution made it a duty of the Indian Govt. to uphold tribal people’s rights to their land, and even when a ‘development project of national importance’ has been determined upon, to consult with communities and compensate them properly. 35 This has not happened, as Kishen Pattnayak pointed out, in even a single case.
The movement to stop mining companies invading and taking over large tracts of Orissa should be understood therefore as a vital expression of civil society against forced dispossession. Like similar movements against excessive industrialization throughout central India, it remains basically non-violent, despite facing extensive violence from police and company thugs. While the majority of those active in the movement are Adivasis, because they have the most to lose, and the very roots of their culture and way of life are threatened, large numbers of Dalits and other non-tribals are with them. It is instructive to witness how this broad coalition has been misrepresented by propaganda from certain elements in the Government and media, which at times even implies that the activists are Naxalites.
Adivasis live under a system of habitual exploitation. Legal redress
is limited, since many police and lawyers collude in this system and cream off a major share. Naxalites or Maoists offer an attractive alternative to people who have suffered years of exploitation and humiliation, even though Naxalite/Maoist power structures are sometimes as hierarchical and disrespectful of people’s sustainable lifestyle and traditional values as mainstream society. Like companies, they represent an arbitrary, unaccountable power. They also invite police retaliation. In a sense, if violent repression of the non-violent movements against industrial projects drives displaced people to follow the Naxalite-Maoist path, this makes it easier for repressive elements in the State Govts. to attack them with violence. Even now they sometimes label supporters of this movement as Naxalites to justify attacking them. Police brutality can even be seen as a strategy to drive what are essentially non-violent movements into a more violent path.
One of the harshest effects on society whenever a mining company enters an indigenous area is to split it into those for and against the enterprise. This is abundantly clear in Orissa now, where pro-mining towns-people have turned violently against villagers who still live from the land, non-tribals against tribals: a splitting tendency that reaches into tribal society too. It is also evident in the Movement itself, where the role of NGOs is a particularly divisive issue – evident in the EPW articles by Vidhya Das and Deboranjan Sarangi, whose differences on this issue, and the question of NGOs’ funding from foreign Governments and institutions with corporate links, have divided people who are essentially on the same side. Questions of foreign funding and accountability of NGOs are vital issues for discussion.
Yet what makes this Movement so strong is that people from many different walks of life and interest have come together and taken great risks to defend Orissa’s tribal culture and environment. Dividing the opposition is a classic tactic of corporate power, especially when the present Orissa Government has issued stern warnings that opposition to its programme of rapid industrialisation will not be tolerated ‘ even though, as we have seen, for Adivasis and their standard of living, this programme is itself anti-development. In the Orissa Assembly on 4th Dec. 2004 Naveen Pattnaik stated (as shown on TV News):
‘No-one ‘ I repeat no-one ‘ will be allowed to stand in the way of Orissa’s industrial development and the people’s progress.’
But who defines the people’s progress?
The ‘enemy’ exploiting India’s resources and oppressing the people now is still in a very real sense foreign financial control, but this is not as visible as when the British ruled India directly. And behind the foreign companies and financial institutions is a foreign system of relating and valuing, which comes down to a single aim: maximizing profit. The company, as it evolved in the US under the ‘robber barons’ such as Rockefeller and J.P.Morgan, exists purely to make a profit. Effects of its actions on people are considered irrelevant. It represents a totally hierarchical, unaccountable form of power, with no long-term safeguards.36 One significant contrast in the Indian context is the ancient example of the Arthashastra, which emphasized the creation of wealth through mining, but insisted that the State should own and control all important mines and not allow them to get into private hands.
India’s aluminium output is increasingly for export, servicing foreign demands. The Environment Secretary T.N.Seshan declared in 1987 that Nalco’s mine on Panchpat Mali could provide all of India’s aluminium needs for the next 100 years: if India’s natural resources are to be used and conserved properly, no more bauxite mines should be opened now. The contrast to this view is represented in Kalam and Rajan’s book (1998), and the present lobbies pushing for a new phase of Orissa’s rapid industrialization, which view it as a source for India as a nation to become richer and stronger in relation to China and other countries. But stronger in what sense? Is India repeating the colonial powers’ history of repression and over-exploitation in treatment of indigenous minorities and over-exploitation of nature? What ends are justified through these means?
As the President of India K.R.Narayanan said on Republic Day 25th January 2001, alluding to the Maikanch police killings 5 weeks before:
‘The mining that is taking place in the forest areas is threatening the livelihood and survival of many tribes…. Let it not be said by future generations that the Indian Republic has been built on the destruction of the green earth and the innocent tribals who have been living there for centuries….’

Photos from everyday life and resistance in Kashipur

www.kashipur.info

ALCAN CSR Profile 2005 pdf – Can ALCAN claim to be the Best? It’s Corporate and Social Responsibility in Question

See also: ‘Agya, What do You Mean by Development?’ By Felix Padel and Samarendra Das

Notes
1. Abdul Kalam and Y.S.Rajan emphasize the crucial importance of these aluminium alloys for India’s defence industry in their influential book (1998), which gives their vision for India in the new millennium.
2. It has been estimated that producing a ton of aluminium gives off emissions of 5.6 tons of CO2 if the smelter is hydro-powered from a dam; and 20.6 tons if it is powered by a captive coal-fired power station (Richard Cowen: Geology, History and People, Ch.14 Cartels and the aluminium industry, www.geology.ucdavis.edu). Most of India’s smelters apparently use a combination of electricity from dams and from their own coal-fired power stations, which they build to ensure a constant supply of electricity as well as to keep its price low.
3. During the 1960s Alcan set up an arms-manufacturing subsidiary in the UK, called Alcan-Booth, which was soon designing ‘complex and high property aluminium alloys for the aircraft industry’, as well as its own range of tanks and other military vehicles (Alcan-Booth 1973).
4. See the India People’s Tribunal Report on pollution at Mettur, at www.iptindia.org, headed by Justice (Retd) A.B. Kadri of the Madras High Court, and G.M. Sainath 2005 on the Korvas: AIDS infiltrates tribal world of Chhattisgarh: the Korva tribe. Korba: D H News service,  gmanjusainath at gmail.com.
5. Extensive toxic flooding and loss of life was caused during the Cyclone in 1999, and by a break in a tailings dam on 31st Dec. 2000 (reported in articles in the Indian Express and Asian Age between 1st and 11th Jan. 2001), as well as since.
6. Contamination of many acres by fluoride, its wasting effects on humans, livestock and crops, and the lack of compensation were reported on Orissa News, 13/9/04. The high levels of pollution in general from the Angul smelter, and on the rivers in particular, are laid out in a 1995 Report, Status of environmental pollution in the Angul-Talcher area, by the State Prevention and Control of Pollution Board, Bhubaneswar.
7. Caufield 1998 p.223. See also: State of Orissa’s Environment: a Citizens’ Report, 1994, Bhubaneswar, pp.144-5, and Oriya articles in Samaj 23/9/03 and Pragativadi 24/12/04.
8. A large part of Indravati’s water was channeled northeast into the Tel river, from which pipes are being laid to supply Vedanta’s Lanjigarh refinery.
9. Fox 1923 and 1932 p.136.
10. Hitler’s interest in Orissa’s bauxite/aluminium and iron-ore is outlined in an article by Ajit Mahapatra in Samaj (3 May 2005), who met one of Hitler’s key metal experts, and the widow of another.
11. Sarangi 2005, Menon 2005, and People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR ): Investigation into the impact on people due to the Alumina projects in south Orissa, Bhubaneswar, May 2005.
12. Nostromo 2005, Financial Express 16.12.05, an official announcement of Vedanta’s Jharsaguda smelter plan.
13. Graham 1982, The aluminium industry and the third world, is a detailed study of this, and the quotations from Anderson below include a frank admission of the main points in our argument here.
14. There has been great recent expansion in sponge iron production as well as protest by affected Adivasis in Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and West Bengal. Orissa currently exports over 15 million tons of iron ore per year (The Hindu, 15/11/05). Orissa has 79 and Chhattisgarh 72 of these factories, which are presently threatening to close down (Dec. 2005), because they cannot get iron ore cheaply enough  telegraphinidia.com 19 & 25/12/05). Yet few are equipped with mandatory Electro-Static Preceptors which limit carbon emissions  newindpress.com 13/12/05). A public hearing on 31/10/05for a new Keonjhar plant at Malangtoli was declared fraudulent by local Adivasis (The Statesman 2/11/05).
15. D.Anderson 1951 p.21.
16. Smith 1988 p.250.
17. Thiery Berthoud of Pechiney (Nalco’s partner), in the keynote address to the Indian Conference on Aluminium in 2003 (INCAL Proceedings vol.1 p.7)
18. This much is admitted by the Henderson Investors’ report on Carbon emissions (June 2005), whose attempt to evaluate this cost has produced a (highly conservative) estimate of over $30 per ton of CO2 emissions. A recent report by the Dept. for the Environment of the UK Govt. gave the higher estimate of $56-223 per ton of CO2 (Andrew Simms in Ann Pettifor ed. Real world environmental outlook, London: Pallgrave 2003 p.66).
19. Nostromo 2005, CEC Report Sept. 2005.
20. Thea Picton: ‘Aluminium: green metal?’ in Mining Monitor, October 1998.
21. Govt. of Orissa, Finance Dept. 2001: Fiscal and Governance Reforms.
22. PRAYAS & C.S.Venkata Ratnam 2003.
23. Moody 2005 pp.75-6, 86-7.
24. Holloway 1988, Stiglitz 2002, and our forthcoming book: Out of this Earth: Orissa’s indigenous lifestyle and the aluminium cartel.
25. 90% of Alcoa’s output was going to military applications during the first world war (Smith 1988 p.127), and a similar percentage during the second.
26. Harold Wilson pushed for a new generation of smelters in Britain, among them the nuclear-powered smelter at Anglesay in Wales. Those in Scotland are run by Alcan.
27. Nathan Hodge in the Financial Times, 30 June 2005, ‘Pentagon studies China’s influence on the price of weapons metals’ mentions aluminium with titanium and steel as today’s key weapons metals.
28. Details of Balco’s deal supplying lightweight aluminium alloys for India’s Agni and Prithvi nuclear missiles were published in the Telegraph on 2/3/2001.
29. This is an important part of Alcan’s historic role, during the 1st and 2nd world wars and after, witness Alcan Booth 1973, Graham 1982 (passim).
30. Senior DFID officials played an important role establishing Vedanta Resources in London. One of its first Directors was Sir David Gore-Booth, an ex-British High Commissioner to India. And the Dept. for Trade and Industry advertised the investment and employment opportunities of the Lanjigarh project on its website until this was questioned by an activist in the UK.
31. On the debate on what constitutes real development see the last chapter, ‘In the name of development’, of Padel 1995.
32. Kishen Pattnayak was a political leader in the Gandhian tradition, most influential on People’s Movements in Orissa and India as a whole, until his untimely death in September 2004. This quotation is from his introduction to our forthcoming book, Out of this Earth: Orissa’s Indigenous Lifestyle and the Aluminium Cartel.
33. In the words of an Adivasi from MP, about to be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar reservoir: ‘To you who are part of the Govt and the towndwellers, our land seems to be just some Hills and Forests. But we are living in comfort… You take us to be poor. But we’re not. We live in harmony and co-operation with each other… We produce many kinds of Grains with our own efforts, and we don’t need money. We use Seeds produced by us… The Forest is our moneylender and banker…’ (Baba Mahariya 2001)
34. Elwin characterized this process of tribal culture losing its cohesion and vitality as a ‘loss of nerve’. Scudder, who was the WB’s chief consultant on ‘involuntary resettlement’ for many years, has written extensively on the effects of displacemnt (e.g. 1997). On the social effects of displacement on tribal people in India and Orissa, overviews in Viegas 1991 and Pandey 1998.
35. The Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA) of 1996 consolidated the provision in Article 244 of India’s Constitution preventing the purchase of tribal lands by non-tribals, by insisting on a process of proper, democratic consultation with tribal communities, even in the case of major projects, considered of national importance. The Bhuria Committee whose findings became law under the PESA Act, was charged with extending the authority of local Panchayats in Schedule V areas.
36. Bakan 2004 gives an instructive and influential overview of the history of ‘the company’, from the EIC to modern company practice. Matthew Josephson’s Robber Barons (1962) shows how the patterns of financial manipulation evolved in the US between 1861 and 1901 that are now so pervasive. David Korten’s When corporations rule the world (1995) explores this theme in more detail.

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August 08, 2007 06:00am
Article from: The Australian

RIO TINTO aims to be the world’s biggest aluminium producer – with the help of some of the world’s cheapest energy – before the end of the decade.

Rio Tinto Aluminium chief executive Oscar Groeneveld said yesterday that the possibility of a new aluminium smelter in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, coupled with closer links with Abu Dhabi once the Rio Tinto/Alcan merger was completed, would create a leading world player in the aluminium business.

Rio Tinto and the Malaysian conglomerate Cahya Mata Sarawak signed a heads of agreement yesterday for a feasibility study into a proposed development of a $US2 billion ($2.3 billion), 550,000 tonnes a year smelter at Similajau, about 60km from Bintulu.

The project is predicated on supplying the Chinese market, which continues to expand rapidly.

China is constrained in new smelting capacity because its electricity comes mainly from high-cost coal, which is increasingly under attack for its greenhouse gas emissions.

Rio Tinto will have 60 per cent of the Sarawak project, which has the potential to be expanded to 1.5 million tonnes, or roughly 60 per cent of the total current aluminium capacity of Australia and New Zealand – 2.3 million tonnes – which is produced by Rio, Alcoa and Norsk Hydro. In Australia and New Zealand, Rio Tinto produces about 800,000 tonnes of aluminium a year.

The first phase of the Sarawak development will take about 1.1 million tonnes of alumina a year which will be supplied from Rio Tinto’s existing production network, probably the Yarwun refinery at Gladstone, which is undergoing a $US1.8 billion expansion from 1.4 million tonnes to 3.4 million tonnes a year by 2011.

Speaking from the Sarawak capital of Kuching, Mr Groeneveld said the deal had been under discussion for months, long before Rio Tinto made its $US38.1 billion agreed bid for Alcan.

He said the combined Rio Tinto/Alcan business would be the world’s number one in bauxite, number two in alumina, after Alcoa, and number two after United Company RUSAL but was aiming to be number one in all three components of the aluminium business.

Nominally, Rio Tinto/Alcan accounts for around 4 million tonnes of metal a year with United Company RUSAL claiming 4.3 million tonnes annual metal production.

“Alcan is bringing on the Sohar plant in Oman which will brings us more new metal capacity,” Mr Groeneveld told The Australian.

“We are also keen to become involved with Abu Dhabi’s plans for a substantial aluminium industry based on its cheap energy.

“So you can see Sarawak’s output will be complementary to those objectives.”

Studies for the Sarawak plant could take 18 months to complete but current plans have first production flowing from the fourth quarter of 2010.

Power for the smelter will come from the controversial 2400 megawatt Bakun hydroelectric dam, which is under construction involving one of the highest rockfill dams in the world. Bakun has attracted criticism from conservationists because it is slated to supply peninsula Malaysia with power via a long transmission network including undersea cables.

Conservation groups claim that up to 10,000 people will have to be relocated as the dam fills.

Mr Groeneveld conceded that Rio Tinto had obtained one of the few hydro-electric supply sources available to the aluminium industry anywhere in the world.

US environmental campaigner Erin Brockovich has joined West Australian residents to examine the merits of a court case against mining giant Alcoa.

About 160 Yarloop residents have complained of respiratory problems, skin irritation, sore throats and eyes, extreme fatigue, mental dysfunction, stomach upset, blood noses, cancers and organ failure in the last 11 years.

They claim emissions from Alcoa’s Wagerup refinery are causing the ill effects.

Ms Brockovich, whose environmental campaign against a Californian mining company was made famous by Julia Roberts in the Hollywood movie Erin Brockovich, agreed to review the case after receiving an email from a Yarloop resident.

“We think we live in a big world but it’s really smaller than you think,” Ms Brockovich said.

“Somebody from the area that was sick, from what they believe to be Alcoa, emailed me.

“I was intrigued with her illnesses and concerned at what she was suffering through and recommended one of our toxicologists see her and he did.

“After he did some testing and researching he said ‘this is something you should look into.’ ”

Alcoa has bought some properties around the refinery but real-estate values for the remaining homes in Yarloop have dived in value.

Yarloop resident and Community Alliance for Positive Solutions action group chairman Vince Puccio said residents just wanted a fair go.

“What we are about is not about shutting Alcoa down, it’s about accountability and for them to take full responsibility for what they’ve done,” Mr Puccio said.

“It’s got nothing to do with shutting it down.

“What we want is a fair go for everybody … not just for Alcoa.”

Simon Morrison, who is acting as Ms Brockovich’s Australian lawyer, said it was too early to start talking about dollars or compensation but he was confident the residents had a good case.

“Obviously to look into the case you have to have some sort of case before you start,” Mr Morrison said.

“We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think there were reasonable prospects in the case.

“It’s far too early to start talking dollars.

“What we do know is, something has gone terribly wrong.

“In terms of how much money would compensate these people for what has happened, the short answer is as many dollars as it takes.”

Alcoa of Australia later said its Wagerup refinery was the most studied industrial facility in Western Australia and had been deemed safe for employees and neighbouring communities.

“Wagerup refinery meets the most stringent health and environmental standards in the world and will continue to do so when expanded,” the company said in a statement.

“Alcoa has nothing to hide and will continue to take a transparent and responsible approach to the public release of scientific information about the refinery.

“As it has done with the community and other stakeholders, Alcoa is happy to brief Ms Brockovich on any matters that may be of interest to her.”

See also: The great red mud experiment that went radioactive
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Reuters
By Rob Taylor
7 August 2007

Erin Brockovich joins Down Under refinery fight

CANBERRA – With just a hint of Hollywood, famed U.S. environment warrior Erin Brockovich has joined Australian anti-mine activists in what they believe may be the fight of their lives.

Brockovich, who in the 1990s took on California power company Pacific Gas in a struggle turned into a Hollywood film starring Julia Roberts, added her weight this week to a possible class action suit against mining giant Alcoa in Western Australia state.

History, Brockovich said, might be repeating itself in the tiny town of Yarloop, south of Perth, where local residents have complained of health problems they blame on emissions from the nearby Alcoa bauxite refinery.

“We think we live in a big world but it’s really smaller than you think,” Brockovich told local media on Monday.

“Somebody from the area that was sick, from what they believe to be Alcoa, e-mailed me. I was intrigued with her illnesses and concerned at what she was suffering through.”

Alcoa said the company’s Wagerup refinery had been tested independently and found to be safe.

“Wagerup refinery meets the most stringent health and environmental standards in the world,” the company said in a statement, offering to brief Brockovich “on any matters that may be of interest to her”.

“Alcoa has nothing to hide and will continue to take a transparent and responsible approach to the public release of scientific information about the refinery,” the company said.

Brockovich won a U.S.-record $333 million from Pacific Gas after uncovering a scheme to conceal contamination of groundwater in the town of Hinkley. The saga was turned into the film Erin Brockovich, for which Roberts won an Oscar.

Yarloop residents told Brockovich they believed the Alcoa mine was causing breathing problems, skin irritation, chronic fatigue, mental problems, nosebleeds and even cancer over an 11-year period.

An Australian legal firm, Shine Lawyers, based in Queensland state on Australia’s east coast has offered to fight the case on behalf of 160 Yarloop residents on a no-win, no-cost basis.

“It’s far too early to start talking dollars. What we do know is, something has gone terribly wrong. In terms of how much money would compensate these people for what has happened, the short answer is as many dollars as it takes,” Shine Lawyers Partner Simon Morrison told Australian Associated Press.

“What we are about is not about shutting Alcoa down. It’s about accountability and for them to take full responsibility for what they’ve done,” Yarloop resident and Community Alliance for Positive Solutions action group chairman Vince Puccio said.

Across a pool of oily water deep inside a rocky cavern carved into a mountain, two steel pipes stretch up into a black void. They rise as high as the Empire State Building. Within weeks these pipes will be connected to enormous turbines and some 40km (25 miles) away, the waters of a 57 sq km reservoir will be released.

The power station in the mountain is only part of the construction project being built in eastern Iceland. It is designed to provide electricity for an aluminium smelter operated by the American multinational, Alcoa. And while the generators may be hidden from view – the source of the energy certainly is not.

An hour’s drive along the new asphalt road, which winds across a windswept plateau, you reach what was once one of the most isolated parts of an isolated country: Kárahnjúkar. The monochromatic scenery of black rock and white snow, under grey skies, was once dominated by a deep fissure in the earth – a canyon carved by the waters from Europe’s largest glacier. Now that flow has dried to a trickle and this incredible natural feature is blocked by the massive concrete wall of a new dam.

For those building the Kárahnjúkar dam this marks an exciting new stage in the country’s development. “The hydroelectric resources of Iceland are stranded here in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,” says Sigurdur Arnalds, an engineer from the national power company, Landsvirkjun.

“We cannot sell the power to other countries because we are isolated here. The sole purpose of this is to sell electrical power to foreign industries, in this case it’s aluminium to Alcoa. If you look at it globally this is clean energy.”

Far better to build aluminium smelters in Iceland, goes the argument, than power them with fossil fuels elsewhere. It’s estimated that by using “green” energy, carbon emissions from aluminium production are reduced by some 90 per cent. For companies keen to stress their environmental credentials, you can see the attraction of setting up in Iceland. From the cold water pouring off the glaciers to the reservoirs of hot water under the ground that can be tapped for geothermal power, there’s more green energy here than Iceland’s 300,000 inhabitants could possibly need.

But if it’s all so green – why is opposition to the project so vociferous? Environmental campaigners are coming here from across the world, the Icelandic singer Bjork has written songs about Kárahnjúkar and politicians are highlighting the issue in forthcoming elections.

“This is the greatest environmental impact possible in Iceland,” says Ómar Ragnarsson, one of Iceland’s most respected journalists. After covering the story of the dam for the country’s national broadcaster, he became so incensed that he switched from journalism to campaigning. “We are taking this valley from future generations just for the benefit of some power utilisation company,” he complains angrily. “All this area will be hit with such destruction that the Icelanders will be shy of showing it for thousands of years.”

Some people already claim to be feeling the effects. Some 120km downstream of the dam, Örn Thorleifsson farms on the island of Húsey. The nearest village is almost two hours’ drive away. It really does feel like the end of the world. He calls it a beautiful paradise – a haven for birds, seals bask on the beach; apart from the wind rattling the windows, it’s almost totally silent.

“Everything has changed since they began to build the dam,” he says. “They destroyed everything.” He tells how sand and clay, washed down the mountain from the construction, have ruined local fishing grounds. The dam has also blocked the flow of glacial sediment to the coast. Without these sediments, Mr Thorleifsson claims, his island home could disappear.

But in this part of Iceland, Mr Ragnarsson and Mr Thorleifsson are in the minority. You’ll struggle in the villages to find anyone who has a bad word for heavy industry. Take the pretty community of Reydarfjordur for instance, near where the Alcoa smelter is soon to start production. The economic benefits of having a major employer here are tangible: there’s a new shopping mall, new roads are being built, tunnels are being drilled through the mountains to connect communities often cut off whenever there’s bad weather. Before the smelter, the area was in terminal economic decline, people were moving away and houses were being abandoned.

Around the headland from Reydarfjordur, the power lines from the mountains come to an end at Alcoa’s state-of-the-art smelter. The raw materials will arrive by sea – the processed alumina powder coming all the way from Australia. The metal is produced in 336 large vats or pots, as they’re called, working at 900C with each requiring a staggering 180 000 amps of electricity. It’s the reason the dam has to be so big. The first pot starts production next month and by the end of the year the plant will be producing some 346,000 tonnes of aluminium per year. More than a tonne for every Icelander.

The process of aluminium production also generates carbon dioxide. So while the energy may be green, aluminium can’t really be described as carbon neutral. And this isn’t the only aspect of Iceland’s energy policy that isn’t quite as green as it might first appear. Under the Kyoto protocol, thanks to the country’s clean energy reserves, Iceland negotiated an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. As a result heavy industries that locate here can produce carbon dioxide without penalty – therefore avoiding carbon taxes or the complications of offsetting or trading carbon emissions.

Nevertheless, Alcoa has a pretty good track record when it comes to environmental responsibilities, with targets to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Its website talks of stewardship and sustainability. But Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir, a Green MP, believes Iceland is being taken advantage of. “We have this beautiful untouched nature, in itself a resource that can be used for the benefit of the nation through tourism, through science, through other kinds of things other than selling cheap electricity to foreign aluminium plants,” she says.

Although the dam and smelter projects were approved by an overwhelming majority in the parliament in 2002, Ms Halldórsdóttir says a lot has changed in the past five years and people are now coming round to her point of view.

And while it may be too late for Kárahnjúkar, it’s not too late to stop other areas being developed. The government is consulting on building two new industrial smelters and expanding a third. If they are given the go-ahead, at least four more dams will need to be built. “There’s no need to try to attract more and more to Iceland.” A surprising statement, perhaps, to hear from Iceland’s new Minister of Industry and Commerce, Jon Sigurdsson. “Aluminium is a good addition to our economy; it’s an important part of our development – but only a part.”

Richard Hollingham presents Crossing Continents tomorrow at 11am on BBC Radio 4

Here are some links to articles that provide vital facts that have been left out of the above article or correct some of its nonsense:

‘Conclusion of the Environmental Impact Assessment of the Kárahnjúkar Project’
The Icelandic National Planning Agency

‘Former Minister of Industry Under Fire for Corruption’
Iceland Review

Hydroelectric Power’s Dirty Secret Revealed
New Scientist

Glacial Rivers Reduce Pollution on Earth
Gudmundur Pall Olafsson

Hydropower Disaster for Global Warming
Jaap Krater

‘ALCOA’s Alarming Record on Pollution’

 

 

Impoverished Indians fight ALCAN’s bid to open a mine in their backyard. Since this article was written the repression has been stepped up.

The first thing that greeted Angad Bhalla on entering Maikanch, a town in the east coast mineral-rich state Orissa, India, was the painting of an Adivasi tribal man in traditional clothes and the admonition: POLICE NO ENTER.

The sign is a clear indicator of the relationship between the Adivasi tribal people and the state police after what happened here on December 16, 2000. Activists and Adivasi had gathered, as they had many times since 1993, to plan their strategy of resistance to the government takeover of their agricultural lands for mining purposes. When the police moved in to break the meeting up, violence erupted, culminating in the police opening fire, killing three and disabling many more.

It was news of these murders that drew the attention of Angad Bhalla, a Canadian filmmaker who was in India to shoot a film on a Coca-Cola plant in Kerala, a state on the country’s southwest coast. But the Kashipur incident – named after the district in Orissa in which it took place – and the story of the Adivasi movement against the aluminium industry made him embark on the documentary film project UAIL Go Back. The film has been shown on the smaller festival circuit around the country, but it highlights a big problem, with roots in Montreal.

A decade-long fight

The Kashipur incident was a critical point in the eight-year long struggle between the Adivasi and the state government of Orissa, but the government is seen by many as only a front for “the company.” The company in question is the Utkal Alumina International Ltd. (UAIL), one of whose stakeholders is Alcan, the Montreal-based aluminium giant that owns 18 per cent of the global aluminium refinery capacity and is deployed in 41 countries, employing 53,000 people. UAIL, currently a joint venture between Alcan and the Indian Aluminium Company Ltd. (Indal), has been working to set up an aluminium plant in Kashipur since 1993, when the federal government of India made the decision to privatize its hitherto public mining industry. One hundred per cent of the annual one-million tonnes of aluminium that is expected to be produced here will be exported to the Middle East and North America.

And once the government approved the privatization plans, it eschewed its responsibility to the Adivasis and is now in the process of dissolving the constitutional protections that ensure Adivasi control of their own land. Palma, an Adivasi woman, says to Bhalla in his film, “These companies have begun a theatre and our politicians are paid actors in their play.”

Orissa is rich in bauxite, the mineral that contains aluminium’s raw material, as well as coal, limestone, silica, chromite, dolomite and nickel, to mention a few sources of its mineral wealth. Its mining history began in the 1950s. By 1970, it had 155 working mines and by the early 1990s, 281. According to a report by Mines, Minerals and People, a Hyderabad, India-based organization that represents tribal people and groups, mining and major dams have to date displaced 150,000 Adivasis in Kashipur.

By the early ’90s, the state’s mining industry had gone global. The government of India has approved investments from 13 multinational companies from the U.S., Australia, the U.K., South Africa and Canada. Alcan is one of them.

Learning from experience

But half-a-century of development has impoverished the Adivasi. Displaced from their land and discriminated against in the industrial job market, they are now fighting to keep their land, their only remaining resource. In Dhamanjodi, a town four hours away where an aluminium plant has operated since 1986 (run by the state enterprise NALCO with the collaboration of the French multinational Pechiney), the Adivasi have an immediate reference. Those who took government compensations frittered them away. No one got jobs at the plant. Non-Adivasi from neighbouring states are favoured for the jobs. Women have their own problems with settling for the cash compensation – many of the men spent the money in a matter of months, leaving nothing for their families.

Opponents say the UAIL project will cause major displacement, health risks and destruction of the livelihoods of 60,000 people in the area. According to the company and government’s estimate, only 2,452 acres and three villages with a total 148 households will be displaced.

The worst fears are for the environment: the mine would be located in the catchment area of the Khandabinda and other tributaries of the Indravati river. The fear is that the mining sludge will silt up the Indravati and bury the surrounding Kalahandi district’s reservoir, endangering the chronically drought-prone area, not to mention risking human and animal health.

Marginals get radical

India has the second largest concentration of tribal peoples after Africa and they occupy the lowest rung in the Indian economic and social system. Orissa has a remarkably high percentage of Adivasi; while the national Adivasi population is 8.1 per cent of India’s total, they make up 22.21 per cent of Orissa’s population. There is an added demographic of Scheduled Castes, or Dalits, who occupy the bottom rung of the caste system, making up 16.2 per cent of the population. In Kashipur district, 68 per cent are Adivasi and 18 per cent are Dalits. This concentration may have something to do with their radicalization.

What is unique about the anti-mining movement in Kashipur is that it is organized and led entirely by the Adivasi, and that it held out for so long – it has been active for over 10 years. It has encompassed protest meetings, opinion polls (where 96 per cent of the Adivasi said no to the project), rallies of thousands (one, in 1996, involved 20,000 people “gherao”ing – surrounding – the company office) blocking roads, bridge construction and convoys of company staff cars on PR trips. Protesters have been teargassed, beaten and, in Maikanch, killed. It has resulted in many arrests and numerous court cases involving Adivasi men, women, NGO activists and even children.

UAIL was a joint venture promoted initially by Norsk Hydro of Norway, Indal and Tata Industries Ltd. Tata eventually withdrew and Alcan became a joint partner in 1999. After the police firing at Maikanch village in December 2000, Norsk Hydro withdrew. According to Angad Bhalla, the work of Norwegian environmentalists and church groups in creating an anti-mine campaign had an impact on the company’s decision. Alcan, however, has stayed on with its 35 per cent stake in the UAIL project.

Activists in India are hoping for a similar movement in Canada since, according to Achyut Das, an activist involved in the movement, Alcan’s role is crucial in the future of UAIL.

Waiting for answers

Pending the release of the judicial enquiry into the Maikanch killings, UAIL activity is dormant. Though the enquiry is completed, the report has not been released. Meanwhile, Alcan has emerged this year as one of the “World’s Most Admired Companies” on Fortune magazine’s global corporate reputation survey and is rated high by GovernanceMetrics International, a global corporate governance ratings agency, for its social responsibility. It’s also poised to acquire French multi-national Pechiney, following various regulatory bodies’ approval this autumn.

Alcan states that it awaits the release of the report. Joseph Singerman, Alcan’s Montreal-based media representative, says that the results of the judicial enquiry into the deaths of three men have been in the state government’s hands for nine to 10 months but have not been released to Alcan. Nor has there been a briefing to anyone about the results of the enquiry.

When Angad Bhalla first went to Kashipur to do research for his documentary, the Adivasi tribal people were delighted to hear he was Canadian since the Montreal-based Alcan is a big part of what they’re fighting against. Asked if the industrialists and the Adivasi cannot arrive at a negotiating point, Bhalla says, “I don’t think we have the right to determine what that point is. It is for the Adivasi to decide how their land is utilized.”

 http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2…

“What you got…..we don’t want,
what you’re selling…..we ain’t buying!
So no matter, how hard you’re trying,
we want no industrial wasteland in our yard”
(Anti-Smelter Warriors Anthem, chorus)

by Sujatha Fernandes, CorpWatch September 6th, 2006

The roads that wander through the southwestern peninsula of Trinidad pass small fishing villages, mangrove swamps, and coconut plantations; they skirt herds of buffalypso and reveal sheltered beach coves. This February, Alcoa signed an agreement in principle with the Trinidad and Tobago Government that threatens to fundamentally alter this gentle landscape. Plans by the Pittsburgh-based manufacturing company to build a large aluminum smelter have sparked criticism from local residents and environmentalists.

The $US1.5 billion project slated for the Chatham/Cap-de-Ville area envisions a 341,000 metric-tons-per-year aluminum smelter, an anode plant, and a cast house. Alcoa, the world’s leading producer of aluminum, is promoting the project as a boon to local employment and other community benefits.

Alumina, a material from which aluminum is derived, will come from Alcoa refineries in Jamaica, Surinam, and Northern Brazil. Alcoa’s Director of Public Strategy Wade Hughes, said that the government of Trinidad and Tobago had invited Alcoa to build a smelter, citing the islands’ advantages: competitive energy prices, local economic needs, and “strategic positioning for manufacturing in close proximity to the large markets of North and South America and Europe.”

Cedros Peninsula United, a local organization opposing Alcoa’s proposed smelter, charges that the project will hurt villages along the peninsular: It will displace 100 families, release emissions harmful to health and the environment, pose occupational safety hazards, and diminish bio-diversity. The group has also raised fears that the smelters will create electromagnetic fields (EMF). EMF have proven controversial at China’s state-run aluminum smelters in Nanshan and Shandong, and at a facility that Alcoa operates in Sao Luis, Brazil.

“There is very little evidence for health risks related to chronic direct current [DC] EMF exposures at the levels currently found in aluminum potrooms,” said Hughes.

But Cedros Peninsula United is concerned about the effects of EMF on plants and people. They cite a 1994 legal action in which a sick worker at Kaiser Aluminum, another U.S. company operating smelters, blamed EMF for the cancer that killed eight of 90 aluminum potroom workers. The Washington State Department of Labor and Industries ruled in his favor, but failed to find a direct link to EMF. Instead it determined that the response of Kaiser’s medical claims processors to the illnesses was inadequate, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Whether on not EMF from DC current causes cancer, other harmful emissions from aluminum smelters are clearly dangerous. Studies in Australia found that hydrogen fluoride, inspirable dust, and sulphur dioxide from aluminum smelters caused respiratory problems such as asthma, wheezing, and chest tightness in workers. A 30-year study by the University of Calgari found in 2004 that aluminum smelter workers in Sardinia, Italy, exposed to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were between 2.4 and 5 times more likely to die of pancreatic cancer. In Norway, the Department of Horticulture and Crop Sciences studied three aluminum smelters and concluded that even low emissions of fluoride caused serious damage to nearby vegetation.

Another Alcoa smelter under production in east Iceland has led to similar protests over the health and environmental effects.

Despite these concerns, Alcoa is moving ahead. In March, it applied to the Environmental Management Agency (EMA) for a Certificate of Environmental Clearance (CEC). Permission was granted in July for Alcoa to undergo an Environmental Impact Assessment.

Communities of the Southwest Peninsula

The city of San Fernando lies at the mouth of the large cove where Trinidad’s Cedros Peninsula begins its reach into the turquoise Caribbean. Its 62,000 Indo and Afro-Trini residents reflect the mixed roots of indentureship and slavery through which Trinidad came into being. The city’s main promenade features statues of the icons of resistance in the African and Indian diaspora: Pan-African nationalist leader Marcus Garvey and the Indian nationalist leader and architect of non-violence Mahatma Gandhi.

Following the independence of Trinidad and Tobago from the British in 1962, middle class political parties such as the black-led People’s National Movement (PNM) and the Indo-Trinidadian United National Congress (UNC) have attempted to mobilize and divide the population along ethnic lines for political gain.

The prospect of the smelter, however is proving a unifying force as the ethnically diverse but tight-knit communities of the peninsula organize to protect their environment and their way of life. The mostly poor, rural, black and brown communities of the peninsula have formed alliances and organizations such as the Chatham/Cap-de-Ville Environmental Protection Group, Cedros Peninsula United, and the Rights Action Group.

Religious groups wield particular influence on the island, which is largely Catholic and Hindu. The national organization Catholic Commission for Social Justice (CCSJ) has joined the battle to defeat the proposed plant. On a local level, Hindu, Muslim, and Presbyterian communities have also offered support.

On August 10, the Trinidad and Tobago Civil Rights Association began an eight-day march from the peninsula to the capital, Port-of Spain, some 90 kilometers away. The proposed smelter was a key concern. The president of the association and former attorney general, Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, called on Prime Minister Patrick Manning to make public his plan for dealing with waste from the smelter.

In addition to protests and marches, the Civil Rights Association together with the Chatham/Cap-de-Ville Environmental Protection Group are pursuing legal channels to stop the construction. Maharaj, the lawyer on the case, is preparing to file public interest litigation to prevent the government from taking any further steps until it puts in place proper regulations.

Maharaj charges that the government signed the agreement with Alcoa without first obtaining the approval of the relevant regulatory bodies, in this case, the Environmental Management Agency. Moreover, in 1984 the parliament had designated the entire Cedros Peninsula, including the proposed smelter site, as agricultural and forest land. The government, therefore, must seek parliamentary approval before allowing industrial use. Also, according to Maharaj, the smelter will violate draft pollution rules that are before the parliament. Maharaj told Corpwatch that, “Alcoa has admitted in their application that the smelter would discharge hazardous substances and dangerous vapors, and they have not demonstrated how these substances will be disposed off.”

If the local courts side with the government and Alcoa, activists may appeal the ruling in the Privy Council in London. Although nominally independent, the constitution of Trinidad and Tobago still retains the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London as the highest court of appeal.

“The government is resolved to accommodate Alcoa in its desire to build its smelter plant at Chatham/Cap-de-Ville,” said local environmental activist Ishmael Samad. “And the judiciary, which is supposed to be independent, could well be influenced to render a judgement in favour of the government. Therefore the Privy Council in England, our final court of appeal, is our only hope.”

Alcoa’s Strategy in Trinidad

Faced with mounting opposition, Alcoa has spearheaded a public relations campaign to win over the populace with pledges of good jobs and a clean environment. The company, which earned $26.2 billion in 2005, according to its website, is buying full page ads in local newspapers. A March ad promised “750 to 800 long-term jobs to Trinidad” and touted the smelter as part of Alcoa’s “community partnerships.” An April ad in the Trinidad Express read, “Alcoa’s smelter in the Park. Progress–in harmony with Community and Culture” and another claimed, “Alcoa–investing in communities. Our social investment policies are followed by social action.” In a May ad in a weekend edition of the Trinidad Express, Alcoa described itself and the project environmentally friendly: “Alcoa–Longtime steward of the environment.”

Fitzroy Beache, president of the Chatham/Cap-de-Ville Environmental Protection Group, was not convinced. “Alcoa does this everywhere there go; they are doing this in Iceland to stop the protest and buy out everybody. Now they try to come to the community saying they’ll build parks and football fields. But we don’t want that, we don’t even want Alcoa in our community right now.”

The Chatham/Cap-de-Ville Environmental Protection Group demanded to meet with company representatives, and after all-night vigils outside the prime minister’s office, protest marches, and rallies, Alcoa agreed. On July 5 and 14, Adesh Surajnath, a technical engineer hired by Alcoa to do preliminary drilling, attended public meetings at the Chatham Community Center and answered questions. Chatham is the site of the industrial estate where Alcoa proposes to build the smelter.

Community leaders and residents alike expressed anger and distrust. One of the more than 300 attendees demanded to know how much compensation he would receive for the loss of the farming land that supports his family. Others in the small, crowded hall raised health and environmental issues.

When Surajnath said he was unable to answer the questions, furious residents demanded an audience with ministers who could–including Minister of Energy and Petroleum Lenny Saith. According to Beache, the government should make its plans clear and initiate meaningful fora where the public can voice its concerns.

Alcoa’s Wade Hughes told Corpwatch that the company will work with the government to ensure relocation of families living on the industrial estate, and will give “fair and prompt compensation” to displaced farmers.

The company’s reassurances–vague and not legally binding–are not appeasing residents who fear losing land that is both home and livelihood. On its website, Cedros Peninsula United points out that although Alcoa’s environmental application is supposed to list the names and addresses of adjoining property owners, it omits the hundred families that the smelter will displace.

Despite Alcoa’s reassurances that it will be a good citizen and an environmental steward, the company has a history of environmental violations. The US Department of Commerce released a statement that Alcoa had violated more than 100 regulations on the export of potassium fluoride and sodium fluoride between 1991 and 1995. According to the New York Times, Alcoa’s New York state Massena aluminum smelter was fined $7.5 million in 1991, the largest criminal penalty at the time for hazardous waste violations. The US Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency released a statement in March 2000, reporting that Alcoa paid out an $8.8 million settlement after complaints that the company illegally expelled waste into the Ohio River from its Warrick County, Indiana plant; that the waste was highly toxic to fish; and that the smoke, dust, and ash expelled from furnaces exceeded Clean Air Act limits.

The problems of toxic waste and pollution are also foremost for Trinidad’s activists. Alcoa’s CEC application estimates that the proposed smelter would have an annual output of 600 metric tons of domestic solid waste as well as 50 cubic meters of waste water per day.

The most voluminous solid waste is spent potlining (SPL), the corroded material removed from the steel shells or “pots” that hold molten aluminum. According to the Alcoa website, SPL has been classified as hazardous waste because of its toxicity and explosive nature. Asked what Alcoa plans to do with Trinidad’s SPL, Hughes replied that it “will be shipped to our processing facility in Gum Springs, Arkansas.” Yet shipping potlining is a violation of the Basel Convention, an international agreement administered by the United Nations.

***
A recent flow of Pentagon contracts to the Pittsburgh-based corporation is fueling Alcoa’s search for increased capacity and, like many US corporations, it is outsourcing manufacturing to countries with relatively lax environmental laws.

In 2004 Alcoa won an initial $1.2 million contract from the US Army. The next year the US Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command signed a $12.5 million deal with Alcoa for ground combat and tactical vehicles. That same December 2005, Alcoa also signed a five-year, $30 million contract with Klune Industries to manufacture aluminum structural castings for the US Navy’s Tactical Tomahawk Missile Program.

On July 22, Alcoa chose Bechtel as its primary partner in conducting feasibility studies for the proposed smelter. Bechtel, a private company with close ties to the Bush administration and the Republican party, was awarded a $680 million contract in Iraq through a process of secretive biddings in April 2003, with the possibility of contracts worth billions of dollars.

One of the leaders of the campaign against the smelter is a small, young Indo-Trinidadian mother of two.

“The issue is preserving ourselves,” she said, sitting on the verandah of her two-storey house in Chatham. “We are aware of the health problems, the cancer, the asthma. We’ve seen the destruction of our coastlines with the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Plants. People don’t catch fish here now, you know? People don’t get chip-chip or catch-e-come anymore.” Over the last six years, the government of Trinidad and Tobago has worked with Bechtel to construct four LNG plants in Point Fortin to liquefy natural gas for export. Since the arrival of the plants, local fishermen have noted that fish such as chip-chip and catch-e-come, also known as sea tattoo, are becoming scarcer.

“They want to convert the entire southwest peninsula into an industrial belt. If we don’t move as a result of Alcoa, it will happen with some other industry,” she said. “I have two little daughters. What is their future? The air they are breathing will be polluted. As a mother and as a parent, how am I supposed to deal with this? Alcoa will break all the rules to see that this proposed smelter goes ahead, but what do we have to benefit? Some temporary employment at minimum wage, but who gains all the profit? The people have nothing to gain from this.”

 http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=…

Barclays Bank
Already fund the notorious Narmada dam project in India – and have played a ‘key role’ in financing the dam by arranging a $400 million loan to Landsvirkjun, the Icelandic power company that will run the dam.

Impregilo

 

Dodgy Italian construction conglomerate, in charge of building most of the dam . One of Impregilo’s consultants has already been found guilty in 2003 of offering bribes to a Lesotho hydro-electric firm, and the company itself will face another hearing before the Lesotho courts in April 2005. Impregilo were also involved in building the Argentina’s Yacyreta dam, which went almost $10 million over budget and was labeled byPresident Carlos Menem ‘a monument to corruption’ . Impregilo were also one of the firms planning to build the infamous Ilisu dam.

Invest In Iceland
Part of the Icelandic Ministry of Industry and Commerce. Promotes investment in Iceland, and seem to be one of the quasi-governmental agencies that has been pushing for the hydro dam.

National Power Company of Iceland (Landsvirkjun)
This is the company that will run the Karahnjukar dam. Initially set up to explore hyro-electric power opportunities, Landsvirkjun now supplies electricity to the whole of Iceland. Owned jointly by theIcelandic State (50%) and the two biggest towns Reykjav í k (45%) and Akureyri (5%). Landsvirkjun also take part in greenwash operations with Alcoa, such as ‘The Alcoa/Landsvirkjun Sustainability Group’, which co-oprdinates projects such as spreading hay to stop soil erosion – which won’t, however, stop the massive erosion caused by the dryung out of dammed river beds. More on greenwash in the Alcoa section. You can track the progress on the dam, day by day, on this part of their website: http://www.karahnjukar.is/en/

Alcoa
The US company that will run the aluminium smelter. Alcoa is the world’s largest producer of aluminium, serves the most industries as well as producing ‘bacofoil’. It is very influential in US as well as Icelandic poltics: Ethical Consumer described Alcoa’s operations as ‘a near textbook example of how to win friends in high places’, counting the US Treasury Secretary, Paul O ’ Neill, as one of its former CEOs. While a major polluter, Alcoa undertakes greenwashing exercises such as the ‘Alcoa forest’ project, which claims to plant ‘ten million trees’. However, in Western Australia Alcoa have simply planted trees on top of the blasted and mined remains of former forest land; the new growth cannot compensate for the loss old eco-system, resulting in substantial erosion of topsoil.

Mott McDonald
The civil engineering company that designed the Newbury Bypass and the destruction of Twyford Down. Mott McDonald have also designed power stations for Indonesian dictator Suharto and airstrips in Iraq under Saddam, and was also involved in the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline.

Bechtel

The company that will build the Alcoa aluminium smelter , ‘along with its partner, Icelandic engineering consortium HRV (Honnun, Rafhonnun, VST), with support from K-Home Engineering’. Bechtel is already known as a war profiteer, having been given a $680 million grant to ‘reconstruct’ Iraqi infrastricture, and was also involved in (unsuccessfully) privatising the water supply in Bolivia and building nuclear power stations. A fuller list can be found at http://archive.corporatewatch.org/news/boomtime_for_bechtel.htm

Corporate Watch news, December 8th 2004, ‘BOYCOTT BARCLAYS – HERE’S WHY’, http://archive.corporatewatch.org/news/barclays_boycott.htm

‘EXPOSING THE EQUATOR PRINCIPLES’, briefing by International Rivers Network and Friends of the Earth January 2004, http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/barclays_karahnjukar.pdf

The Guardian, November 29, 2003,’Power driven ‘, Susan De Muth, IndependentOnline (South Africa) November 14/2004, ‘Italian firms in Lesotho dam corruption case’, Estelle Ellis, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/item.shtml?x=52182

Ilisu Dam Campaign, ‘Company Profile: Impregilo’, http://www.ilisu.org.uk/impregilo.html

‘Energy Resources’, http://www.invest.is/page.asp?Id=603

Landsvirkjun home page: ‘Role and Ownership ‘, http://www.landsvirkjun.com/EN/category.asp?catID=276

‘The Alcoa/Landsvirkjun Sustainability Group’, http://www.karahnjukar.is/EN/xml_display.asp?CatID=398&xml=landsvirkjun

Alcoa website, ‘Fjarðaál: setting a new standard in aluminum production’, http://www.alcoa.com/iceland/en/home.asp

EthicalConsumer , September/October 2002, ‘bacofoil bandits’, http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/magazine/corpwatch/alcoa.htm

Western Australia Forest Alliance, ‘Alcoa Forest Destruction’, (includes pictures) http://www.wafa.org.au/articles/alcoa/alcoa2.html

Earth First Action Update, Spring 1998, http://www.eco-action.org/efau/issues/1998/efau1998_12.html

Bectel home page, ‘March 2004 Milestones’, http://www.bechtel.com/Briefs/0304/Milestones.htm

‘Alcoa taps Bechtel, HRV, to build Iceland smelter’, Reuters via Climate Ark, June 9, 2003 http://www.climateark.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=23391

CorpWatch, ‘Bechtel: Profiting from Destruction’, June 5th, 2003, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=6975

Corporate Watch

“Nobody can afford to allow the divine Icelandic dragon of flowers and ice to be devastated by corporate greed”

People in Iceland are calling for an international protest against the building of a series of giant dams, currently under construction in the eastern highlands of Iceland. The dams are designated solely to generate energy for a massive aluminium smelter, which will be run by the US aluminium corporation Alcoa and built by Bechtel.Not a single kilowatt of energy produced by the dams will go for domestic use. Alcoa is seizing the chance to relocate to Iceland after costs of producing aluminium in the US soared.

The pristine environment – which campaigners say should be designated as a nature park – will be destroyed. Protected areas will be flooded, and rare and endangered plants and animals will be submerged and lost. Equally infamous aluminium corporations such as RTZ are lining up for future hydro-electric projects.

The Icelandic government is actively supporting these corporations. Environmentalists and local people opposed to the dams have been threatened and professionally persecuted.

However, say the Icelandic protestors, it is not too late to stop these projects. Which is why they are inviting international environmentalists and activists to gather in Iceland in July 2005 to oppose what they describe as an “environmental apocalypse”. The gathering will take place in the dam affected area.

“Most people have no idea how primary aluminum is made, how rivers figure into the process, and who suffers as a result of damming. They do not connect their daily can of Pepsi with the mercury contamination of fish in James Bay rivers or the threatened extinction of wild salmon in tributaries of the Fraser River in British Columbia. They have not considered whether the aluminum siding on their houses might be responsible for the wholesale relocation of indigenous peoples from Egyptian Nubia to the Amazonian rainforest, or for the spread of diseases such as schistosomiasis and river-blindness along the Egyptian Nile and the Volta River basin in Ghana. ”
International Rivers Network www.irn.org

WHAT ICELAND CAN EXPECT

ALCOA (Aluminium Company of America)

Alcoa (also known as Alcoa-Reynolds) is a global corporation which operates 228 facilities in 32 countries. It is one of the world’s largest aluminium manufacturers, producing aluminium for industry as well as household products like Baco (TM) foil. In 2000, its chairman and former CEO, Paul O’Neill, was invited to join the Bush administration as Secretary of the Treasury.

The company also has a long-term track record of toxic pollution and social destruction.

•In 2003, it was found guilty by the United States Justice Department and the EPA of violating the Clean Air Act at its Rockdale Aluminum smelter near Austin, Texas. The Rockdale smelter was producing 260,000 tons of aluminum a year, while emitting the largest amount of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide of any single source in the country, with the exception of electric utilities. One hundred and four thousand tons of emissions (calculated from Alcoa’s own estimates) were pouring annually from the plant; including 40,000 tons of smog-producing nitrogen dioxode and 60,000 tons of acid-rain-generating sulphur dioxide, as well as highly toxic metals such as mercury, copper, lead, and others, which eventually accumulated in Texas lakes and rivers.

•Alcoa’s aluminium smelter at Massena, New York, was one of three plants which poisoned the St Lawrence river – a river which for centuries sustained the Mohawk indigenous community of Akwesasne. After being used as a dumping ground through much of the twentieth century, the river and its ecosystem became so contaminated that in 1986, the Mohawk community was advised to eat a minimal amount of fish from the river. Their traditional economy collapsed.

In addition, the PCBs, dioxins, heavy metals, and other pollutants left the Mohawk community with birth defects, miscarriages, and cancer. Mothers are advised not to breastfeed their children because of industrial contaminants in the food chain.

The slow process of environmental litigation and cleanup eventually revealed some of the scope of corporate abuse of the St. Lawrence. The Alcoa refinery eventually received a $3.75 million fine, the largest criminal penalty ever assessed in the history of the United States, for a hazardous waste violation.

•In the period between 1987 and 1999, more than 47 Alcoa facilities were cited by US state and federal anti-pollution regulators. In March 1999, Alcoa agreed to an $8.8-million settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency after being charged with illegally discharging inadequately treated wastewater from its Warrick County plant into the Ohio River between 1994 and 1999. In September 1999, Discovery Aluminas Inc., an Alcoa subsidiary, agreed to plea guilty to similar discharge violations and to pay more than $1 million in fines.

•On May 2, 2002, it was reported that Alcoa Inc. had offered to pay nine Australian workers $A350,000 each (US$187,337) in compensation for injuries allegedly caused by exposure to pollutants while working at the firm’s Wagerup plant. The workers allege that their illnesses were caused by exposure to heavy chemicals and chemicals while working at the facility. Injuries alleged include multiple chemical sensitivity, reactive airways dysfunction and renal failure. Alcoa offered the settlement on the condition that the workers drop their lawsuits seeking compensation and damages. Eight of the workers accepted the settlement offer.

•In November 2004, Alcoa reported the eighth waste spill at its Western Australian Kwinana refinery in the space of five months.

•In Surinam, 6,000 people were recently forced to move from their ancestral communities in the tropical rainforest to make way for an Alcoa/Billiton dam and smelter. A proposed new dam for a smelter in Sarawak, Malaysia, could force the resettlement of 10,000 indigenous people. Dr. Kua Kia Soong, head of a non-governmental coalition in Sarawak asks: “Why do we want toxic and energy-hungry industries such as aluminum smelters? Aluminum smelting is one industry that the developed countries want to dump on suckers like us because it is environmentally toxic and it consumes voracious amounts of energy.”

SMELTERS AND DAMS
“With the exception of those who work in or study the aluminum or hydroelectric industries, almost no one is aware of the connection between aluminum production and the damming of free-flowing rivers.”
International Rivers Network

Dams and smelters go together. And the use of both is increasing. The World Wildlife Fund report, Rivers at Risk, published in June 2004, shows that over 60 per cent of the world’s 227 largest rivers have been fragmented by dams, which has led to the destruction of wetlands, a decline in freshwater species – including river dolphins, fish, and birds – and the forced displacement of tens of millions of people.

The report concludes that the benefits that dams provide – such as hydropower, irrigation, and flood control services – are often overtaken by negative environmental and social impacts. For example, much of the water provided by dams is lost, mainly due to inefficient agriculture irrigation systems – which globally waste up to 1,500 trillion litres of water annually. This is equivalent to 10 times the annual water consumption of the entire African continent.

“Dams are both a blessing and a curse – the benefits they provide often come at high environmental and social costs,” said Dr. Ute Collier, head of WWF’s Dams Initiative. “Those most affected by dams rarely benefit from them or gain access to power and clean water.”

According to the report, downstream communities suffer most from dams, with rivers running dry and fish stocks decimated. Dams disrupt the ecological balance of rivers by depleting them of oxygen and nutrients, and affecting the migration and reproduction of fish and other freshwater species.

The dams are often built purely to supply aluminium smelters, which aggregate around sources of “cheap” energy because 45% of the cost of aluminum smelting is electricity. In small countries like Tajikistan, Bahrain, and Ghana, smelters consume a third or more of the national power supply.

The industry also exacts steep tolls from surrounding communities and ecosystems. Fluoride emissions from the Nalco smelter in India plague local villagers with brittle bones, tooth and gum diseases, and lumps of dead skin. Their cattle, more prone to fluoride contamination, commonly suffer from bone deformities and rising death rates. In one village within a kilometer of the plant, the local herd of cattle dropped from 3,000 to 100 head in a ten year period. Similar symptoms of fluorosis are apparent in villages around the world’s fourth largest smelter, in Tursunzade, Tajikistan.

According to the American environmental scientist, Philip Fearnside:
‘It’s a question of who is profiting. If that profit, and the costs, were evenly distributed, it wouldn’t be happening. It wouldn’t be worth the candle for anyone individually. The fact is that influential people are making money and poor people are paying the price. It’s all perfectly logical – from the point of view of the people who are making the money.’

 http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/news/ic…

Senator Bob Brown will bring his Franklin River experience to help stop a huge dam being built in eastern Iceland.

Announcing in Sydney today Greens backing for the global campaign to stop the Iceland Energy Authority’s huge Karahnjukar Dam and the Alcoa smelter it will feed, Senator Brown said the scenario is very similar to Tasmania’s Franklin River experience.

Senator Bob Brown

“Karahnjukar will destroy 1000 kilometres of wilderness and wild rivers, home to pink-footed geese, reindeer, harbour seals, rare invertebrates and lush highland vegetation.

“The scheme parallels Tasmania’s Franklin River experience, with an island state going after hydro-industrialisation, promising cheap energy and destroying the potential for a clean, green future based on nature, landscape and wildness.

Senator Brown also attacked the international aluminium company involved, Alcoa, for its hypocrisy in opposing Australia’s ratification of the Kyoto Treaty whilst claiming hydro power will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Big dams like Karahnjukar release huge amounts of greenhouse gases from rotting vegetation,” he said.

“The presentation by Iceland’s National Energy Authority at the World Energy Congress today is titled ‘sustainable generation’. They and Alcoa need to explain how destruction of wilderness and wildlife is sustainable.

“Alcoa is a company that likes to present a ‘green’ image. If it is truly committed to a sustainable future then it must change its policy on Kyoto and withdraw from the Karahnjukar dam project,” Senator Brown said.

The project involves construction of the 690 megawatt Karahnjukar Power Station by Iceland’s National Energy Authority to provide energy for Alcoa’s Fjardaal primary aluminum smelter. The company claims the Fjardaal smelter will be, “the most environmentally friendly aluminum production facility in the world.” Construction on Fjardaal will begin in 2005 and the plant is scheduled to start production in 2007.

Alcoa is the world’s leading producer of primary aluminum, fabricated aluminum and alumina.