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Major Impoverishment Risks in Displacement
Expropriation of land removes the main foundation upon which Despite the enormous diversity of project-specific situations, the empirical findings of many resettlement researchers reveal the presence of several basic regularities. Clear patterns emerge from this evidence. Comparing these empirical findings, we have identified eight common processes and constructed a general risk-pattern. The convergent and cumulative effect of these processes is the rapid onset of impoverishment (Cernea 1990, 1995b). Before displacement actually begins, these processes are only impending social and economic risks. But if appropriate counteraction is not initiated, these potential hazards convert into actual impoverishment disasters.
These risks threaten not only the people displaced, they are risks incurred by the local (regional) economy as well, to which they may inflict major loss and disruption. Depending on local conditions, the intensity of individual risk varies. But pattern identification makes it possible to predict that such risks are typical and are likely to emerge in future comparable displacement situations.
A concise description of each fundamental risk follows, illustrated by some empirical evidence.[7]
Landlessness
People's productive systems, commercial activities, and livelihoods are constructed. This is the principal form of de-capitalization and pauperization of displaced people, as they lose both natural and man-made capital.
Unless the land basis of people's productive systems is reconstructed elsewhere, or replaced with steady income-generating employment, landlessness sets in and the affected families become impoverished. Nayak (see this volume) documents in detail how the Kisan tribe of Orissa, India, has been deprived of its lands, how land compensation failed to restore its land basis, and how landlessness not only set in, but also snowballed into other risks and losses to the tribe. From India's Rengali project, Ota (1996) reports that the percentage of landless families after relocation more than doubled-from 4.6 percent to 10.9 percent; while Reddy (1997) documents that in the coal mining displacements around Singrauli, the proportion of landless people skyrocketed from 20 percent before displacement to 72 percent after. A sociological study of Kenya's Kiambere Hydropower project found that farmers' average land holdings after resettlement dropped from 13 to 6 hectares; their livestock was reduced by more than one-third; yields per hectare decreased by 68 percent for maize and 75 percent for beans. Family income dropped from Ksh. 10,968 to Ksh. 1,976-a loss of 82 percent (Mburugu 1993; Cook 1993). In Indonesia, a survey by the Institute of Ecology of Padjadjaran University (1989) around the Saguling reservoir found that resettled families' land ownership decreased by 47 percent and their income was halved. Similar evidence is available from Brazil (Mougeot 1989). Findings from anthropological field studies show that loss of land generally has far more severe consequences for farm families than the loss of the house.
Joblessness
The risk of losing wage employment is very high both in urban and rural displacements for those employed in enterprises, services, or agriculture. Yet, creating new jobs is difficult and requires substantial investment. Unemployment or underemployment among resettlers often endures long after physical relocation has been completed.
The previously employed may lose in three ways: In urban areas, workers lose jobs in industry and services. In rural areas, landless laborers lose access to work on land owned by others (leased or sharecropped) and also lose the use of assets under common property regimes. Self-employed small producers-craftsmen, shopkeepers, and others-lose their small business. In the Madagascar Tana Plain project in 1993, for example, those displaced who operated private small enterprises-workshops, food-stalls, artisan units-were not entitled to compensation and lost their place of business and their customers. A survey carried out among tribal households in five villages at Talcher, Orissa (Pandey 1996) found an increase in unemployment from 9 percent to 43.6 percent, accompanied by a large shift from primary to tertiary occupations (when available). Reported reductions in levels of earnings were between 50 percent and 80 percent among tribes and scheduled castes. Vocational retraining, offered to some resettlers, can provide skills but not necessarily jobs. Similar findings come from developed countries. In the Churchill-Nelson Hydro project in Manitoba, Canada, the economic activities of resettled indigenous people-fisheries, waterfowl capture, fur processing-were curtailed; field studies found a significant increase in nonproductive time in the community.
Joblessness among resettlers often surfaces after a time delay, rather than immediately, because in the short run resettlers may receive employment in project-related jobs. Such employment, however, is short-lived and not sustainable. Evidence compiled from several dam projects[8] shows that the "employment boom" created by new construction temporarily absorbs some resettlers, but severely drops toward the end of the project. This compounds the incidence of chronic or temporary joblessness among the displaced.
Homelessness
Loss of shelter tends to be only temporary for many resettlers; but, for some, homelessness or a worsening in their housing standards remains a lingering condition. In a broader cultural sense, loss of a family's individual home and the loss of a group's cultural space tend to result in alienation and status-deprivation. For refugees, homelessness and "placelessness" are intrinsic by definition.
In the Cameroon-Douala Urban project, more than 2000 displaced families were hindered in their efforts to set up new permanent houses; less than 5 percent received loans to help pay for assigned houseplots. According to reports from China's Danjiangkou reservoir project, about 20 percent of those relocated became homeless and destitute.[9] Violent destruction of shelters belonging to people labeled squatters is used in some places as a means to speed up evictions (e.g., in Uganda in the Kibale Park area). When governments initiate compulsory villagization schemes and force people to resettle, families lose natural and man-made capital assets and tend to experience a lasting sense of placelessness (see evidence from South Africa reported by de Wet 1995; see also Low and Altman 1992, for the concept of "place attachment"). Resettlers' risk of worsening housing conditions increases if compensation for demolished dwellings is paid at assessed market value rather than replacement value.
Resettlers often cannot incur the labor and financial costs of rebuilding a house quickly and are compelled to move into "temporary" shelters. These resemble the condition of refugee camps, set up overnight. The "emergency housing centers" and "temporary relocation camps" used by some projects as a "temporary" backup (e.g., the Upper Krishna dam and irrigation project in Karnataka, India) often make homelessness chronic rather than temporary. At the Foum-Gleita irrigation project in Mauritania, only 200 out of the 881 displaced families successfully reconstructed their housing; the rest lived precariously for two years or longer in tents or under tarpaulins. In the Kukadi-Krishna irrigation subprojects in Maharashtra, India, 59 percent of the displaced families were found living in temporary/semi-permanent houses 10 to 15 years after their relocation (Joseph 1998). Yet resettlers' risk of homelessness-related closely to joblessness, marginalization, and morbidity-can certainly be avoided by adequate project financing and timely preparation.
Marginalization
Marginalization occurs when families lose economic power and spiral on a "downward mobility" path. Middle-income farm households do not become landless, they become small landholders; small shopkeepers and craftsmen downsize and slip below poverty thresholds. Many individuals cannot use their earlier acquired skills at the new location; human capital is lost or rendered inactive or obsolete. Economic marginalization is often accompanied by social and psychological marginalization, expressed in a drop in social status, in resettlers' loss of confidence in society and in themselves, a feeling of injustice, and deepened vulnerability. The coerciveness of displacement and the victimization of resettlers tend to depreciate resettlers' self-image, and they are often perceived by host communities as a socially degrading stigma.
The facets of marginalization are multiple. The cultural status of displacees is belittled when they go to new relocation areas, where they are regarded as "strangers" and denied opportunities and entitlements. Psychological marginalization and its consequences (see Fernandes 2000) are typically overlooked in resettlement planning. Yet, cultural and behavioral impairments, anxiety and decline in self-esteem, have been widely reported from many areas (Appell 1986). Relative economic deprivation and marginalization begins prior to actual displacement, because new investments in infrastructure and services in condemned areas are discontinued long before projects start. Partial but significant loss of farming land (e.g., to roads or canals) renders some small farms economically nonviable, even though physically they may seem to survive. High-productivity farmers from fertile valley-bottom lands tend to become marginalized when moved uphill to inferior soils. Marginalization also occurs through the loss of off-farm income sources, as found in the Nepal Kulekhani Hydroelectric project (Bjonnes 1983, Pockharel 1995) and in Sri Lanka's Kotmale project (Soeftestad 1990).
For urban resettlers, marginalization is sometimes gradual and may occur after relocation, when, for example, resettlers receive temporary jobs (instead of land) that, in the long term, turn out to be unsustainable as income sources. Government agencies also tacitly accept lasting marginalization of resettlers when they consider it "a matter of course" that the displaced cannot restore their prior standards of living.
Food Insecurity
Forced uprooting increases the risk that people will fall into temporary or chronic undernourishment, defined as calorie-protein intake levels below the minimum necessary for normal growth and work.
Food insecurity and undernourishment are both symptoms and results of inadequate resettlement. During physical relocation, sudden drops in food crop availability and incomes are predictable. Subsequently, as rebuilding regular food production capacity at the relocation site may take years, hunger or undernourishment tends to become a lingering long-term effect. Green (2000) provides an extensive overview of the food-related risks for both refugees and resettlers, notwithstanding significant differences between them. In turn, Hakim (2000) documents these risks and consequences in her insightful analysis of the resettlement of Gujarat's Vasava tribe, which was compelled to shift from food crops to cash crops. Convergent findings are reported from virtually all sites. The adverse effects of the Manantali Dam and water-regime management in Senegal were described precisely with the concept "development-induced food insecurity" (Horowitz and Salem-Murdock 1993). At Sri Lanka's Victoria dam project, some 55 percent of resettled families were still receiving food stamps even after a long period (Rew and Driver 1986). Because the area of cultivated land per capita in the Bailiambe reservoir in China decreased from 1.3 mu to only 0.4 mu after relocation, local food production became insufficient, and 75,000 tons of annual food relief had to be provided for several years. Nutrition-related risks reinforce morbidity and mortality risks (see further) and largely depend on whether the primary risks of landlessness and joblessness are effectively counteracted.
Increased Morbidity and Mortality
Massive population displacement threatens to cause serious declines in health levels. Displacement-induced social stress and psychological trauma are sometimes accompanied by the outbreak of relocation-related illnesses, particularly parasitic and vector-born diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis. Unsafe water supply and improvised sewage systems increase vulnerability to epidemics and chronic diarrhea, dysentery, etc. The weakest segments of the demographic spectrum-infants, children, and the elderly-are affected most strongly.
Empirical research shows that displaced people experience higher levels of exposure and vulnerability to illness and severe disease than they did prior to displacement. An unintended byproduct of large infrastructure programs is often increased morbidity also among area groups that are not displaced.[10] Overall, in the absence of preventive health measures, direct and secondary effects of dislocation include psychosomatic diseases, diseases of poor hygiene (such as diarrhea and dysentery), and parasitic and vector-borne diseases caused by unsafe and insufficient water supplies and unsanitary waste systems. In Sri Lanka, an outbreak of gastroenteritis occurred along the Victoria dam reservoir (Rew and Driver 1986), and in Mahaweli's System C resettlement site the incidence of malaria rose from 8.9 percent to 15.6 percent (Jayewardene 1995). In the Akosombo area in Ghana, the prevalence of schistosomiasis rose from 1.8 percent prior to resettlement to 75 percent among adult lakeside dwellers and close to 100 percent among their children, within a few years after impoundment in the 1960s. The Foum-Gleita irrigation project in Mauritania exceeded its anticipated increase of schistosomiasis, reaching 75 percent among schoolchildren; farmers' health also worsened from drinking contaminated water. At Nam Pong reservoir in Thailand, monitoring confirmed that local rates of morbidity-from liver fluke and hookworm infection-were higher than provincial levels, the result of deteriorated living conditions and poor waste-disposal practices.
The interaction between two processes included in the risk model-decrease in health and loss of shelter-has been long established empirically. Research has documented that more vulnerable groups, such as the aged, suffer increased morbidity and mortality rates as an effect of losing their prior homes (Ferraro 1982, Borup and assoc. 1979). Exposure to the "social stress" inherent in forced relocation was highlighted as having differential consequences on mental health across age, gender, and marital and occupational status (Scudder and Colson 1982, Scudder 1985; Turner and Associates 1995; see Appell 1986, for original suggestions on measuring social stress).
Increased mortality rates are reported also as a result either of accidents associated with new reservoirs or epidemic outbreaks around new bodies of water. Lack of proper information and precautionary measures resulted in more than a hundred deaths by drowning at Saguling Dam Lake (Indonesia) during the first 14 months of operation. At Cirata reservoir (Indonesia), 10 people drowned in the first 10 months after impounding (Padjadjaran University 1989).
Loss of Access to Common Property and Services
For poor people, particularly for the landless and assetless, loss of access to the common property assets that belonged to relocated communities (pastures, forested lands, water bodies, burial grounds, quarries, etc.) results in significant deterioration in income and livelihood levels. Typically, losses of common property assets are not compensated by governments. These losses are compounded by loss of access to some public services, such as school (Mathur 1998; Mahapatra 1999a, 1999b), losses that can be grouped within this category of risks.
Kibreab (see this volume) offers a documented conceptual analysis of the linkages between common property resources (CPRs), poverty, and impoverishment risks. Given typical power structures and the vulnerability of the displacees, Kibreab demonstrates that the loss of CPRs has ravaging long-term consequences on their livelihoods and social standing. Empirical evidence shows that in all regions a significant share of the poor households' income comes from edible forest products, firewood, common grazing areas, and public quarries. Loss of these resources leaves a big gap. For example, in semi-arid regions of India, between 91 and 100 percent of firewood, between 66 and 89 percent of domestic fuel, and between 69 and 80 percent of poor households' grazing needs are supplied by lands held under a common property regime (Sequeira 1994). A study of seven projects causing displacements between 1950 and 1994 in Orissa, India, has found that no compensation has been paid for common properties by any of the projects (Pandey and Associates 1998). In the Rengali Dam area in India, prior to displacement all families had access to common grazing lands and burial grounds; after relocation, only 23.7 percent and 17.5 percent, respectively, had such access.
When displaced people's access to resources under common property regimes is not protected, they tend either to encroach on reserved forests or to increase the pressure on the common property resources of the host area's population. This becomes in itself a new cause of both social conflict and further environmental degradation.
Social Disarticulation
Forced displacement tears apart the existing social fabric. It disperses and fragments communities, dismantles patterns of social organization and interpersonal ties; kinship groups become scattered as well. Life-sustaining informal networks of reciprocal help, local voluntary associations, and self-organized mutual service are disrupted. This is a net loss of valuable "social capital," that compounds the loss of natural, physical, and human capital (discussed previously). The social capital lost through social disarticulation is typically unperceived and uncompensated by the programs causing it, and this real loss has long-term consequences.
Dismantled social networks that once mobilized people to act around common interests and to meet their most pressing needs are difficult to rebuild. This loss is greater in projects that relocate families in a dispersed manner, severing their prior ties with neighbors, rather than relocating them in groups and social units. A detailed sociological study by Behura and Nayak (1993) on a dam project in India found various manifestations of social disarticulation within the kinship system, such as the loosening of intimate bonds, growing alienation and anomie, the weakening of control on interpersonal behavior, and lower cohesion in family structures. Marriages were deferred because dowries, feasts, and gifts became unaffordable. Resettlers' relationships with non-displaced kinsmen were eroded and interaction between individual families was reduced. As a result, participation in group activities decreased; post-harvest communal feasts and pilgrimages were discontinued; and common burial grounds became shapeless and disordered. A monograph on the Hirakud dam in India found that displaced households whose "economic status had been completely shattered as a result of displacement" did not become "properly integrated" in host villages for many years after relocation (Baboo 1992). "The people may physically persist, but the community that was-is no more" (Downing 1996a), because its spatial, temporal, and cultural determinants are gone. Historians of migration have also concluded convergently that the costs of population relocation generally go much beyond "simply the financial costs": among the "heaviest costs of all are the severing of personal ties in familiar surroundings, to face new economic and social uncertainties in a strange land" (Sowell 1996). Poverty becomes not just an absence of income and assets-such as land, shelter, food: The loss of reciprocity networks directly worsens the corollaries of poverty-powerlessness, dependency, and vulnerability.
Differential Risk Intensities
The major impoverishment risks, identified and described above, must be seen in their interconnectedness, as a pattern of variables. They affect populations frequently described as being risk-averse. Yet this heavy knot of risks is forced upon them beyond their choice. Affected people must deal with these risks virtually simultaneously, as a patterned situation, not just one at a time. The result is a crisis.
Depending on site circumstances, sector (urban or rural), and season when displacement occurs, the intensity of the individual risks varies; at times, one or another risk may even not be experienced by a particular subgroup. Conversely, other risks, site-specific, may emerge. The individual situation is always richer and somehow different from the general pattern. But the general model is present in all situations, despite variations. What is fundamental for positing the problem theoretically and in policy terms is that forced-displacement situations intrinsically contain a basic risk pattern.
To exemplify variance, we note that gender-oriented analysis revealed that women suffer more severe impacts (Feeney 1995, Koenig 1995, Pandey 1998). Agnihotri (1996) signals blatant discrimination against women in compensation criteria: For instance, entitlement to land compensation for unmarried individuals is set in Orissa at age 18 years for men, but age 30 for women! A comprehensive review of the worldwide evidence on indigenous and tribal groups affected by forced resettlement (Colchester 1999) has demonstrated definitively that such vulnerable groups are much more prone than the general population to impoverishment hazards of the kind discussed above. And insightful field research has empirically documented why this is happening by explaining the causes of the particular vulnerability of these populations (Fernandes 1991, 2000; Mahapatra 1994; Nayak 2000).
Children, as an age category, are subject to particularly perverse consequences. Elaborating on the risks and reconstruction model in light of evidence from India, Mahapatra (1999a) suggests that "to the eight-fold impoverishment risk model one may add the educational loss affecting children." Relocation often interrupts schooling and for some of these children it means that they never return to school. After displacement, as a result of drops in family income, many are drafted into the labor market earlier than what would have otherwise been the case. Differences characteristic to particularly vulnerable groups clearly call for directly targeted responses.
Risks to Host Populations
Host populations are a major actor with a stake in good resettlement, particularly within mass displacements by either development programs or conflicts. Recognizing the specific risks to hosts is integral to using the risks and reconstruction model and approach.
Obviously, risks to hosts are not identical with the risks to displacees, in substance or intensity, but are related to them and may also result in impoverishment implications. The inflows of displacees increases pressure on resources and scarce social services, as well as competition for employment. Prices of commodities tend to rise and health risks in the host area increase. Cultural clashes (in non-homogeneous areas) are quite likely, and social tensions tend to endure long. Secondary adverse effects on the environment hurt both the hosts and the displacees.
The most effective safeguard for the hosts' interests is an adequately designed and financed recovery plan for the resettlers. The project-planning stage, when relocation sites and host-area populations are identified, is the appropriate time for considering not only the risks to displacees but also the risks to hosts. Experience has proven that, when special opportunities are made available to displacees, it is wise to allow hosts as well, whenever possible, to share such opportunities. This minimizes tensions and competition between the two populations.
In sum, the IRR model captures a broad range of hazards-not only the economic risks, but also the social and cultural ones. It introduces a view on resettlement that reveals the causal mechanisms of impoverishment, its main processes and dimensions. These include income and non-income dimensions of impoverishment, such as assets impoverishment, housing impoverishment, health, nutrition and educational impoverishment, loss of organization, and powerlessness. During displacement, people lose capital in all its forms-natural capital, man-made capital, human and social capital. Actions to safeguard against such capital losses[11] are indispensable, but more than only safeguarding is required. We conclude therefore that reconstructive strategies must be multidimensional, taking the form of a comprehensive and systematic resettlement program. This is reflected in the second part of the IRR model, which reverts and converts the risks-pattern analysis into a reconstruction-pattern strategy.
Forward to The Basic Processes of Livelihood Reconstruction
Backward to Four Basic Functions of the Model
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[7] The empirical evidence for each of the model's variables is enormous and abundantly available in the resettlement literature. For each variable of the model, I will refer only to selected significant field findings.
[8] For example, the China-Gezhouba dam, Brazil-Tucurui dam, Turkey-Ataturk dam, Togo-Benin Nangbeto Hydropower dam, and Korea-Chungju dam.
[9] China's tragic experiences with Danjiangkou and Sanmenxia Dam displacements in the 1960s-1970s led to the adoption of new and better resettlement policies, policies that attempt to transform resettlement into an opportunity for development.
[10] This is due largely to the appearance of "boomtowns" and uncontrolled labor camps, in which sanitary services tend to be deficient.
[11] The implications of the impoverishment risks and reconstruction model in terms of a typology of capital losses during forcible displacement have been recently explored and developed by Juliette Hayes in her dissertation at the London School of Economics (1999). This perspective on impoverishment processes contributes to the argument for multisided post-displacement reconstruction and adequate resettlement financing for restoring the various types of capital loss.
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