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Lobby the World Bank to accept the Extractive Industries Review recommendations

Important news from the World Bank! The Bank's own review of the oil, gas and mining sectors, the Extractive Industries Review (EIR):

• Finds that countries with a heavy reliance on oil, gas and mining are less likely to achieve economic growth and meet social development goals;
• Recommends that the Bank to obtain the "free, prior and informed consent" of affected people, particularly indigenous people, before starting projects;
• Recommends that the Bank to adhere to its own Safeguard Policies and international law obligations, and to "mainstream" human rights into all areas of practice;
• Recommends that the Bank reverse its current energy investment portfolio, so that instead of 94% of money going to oil and gas projects and only 6% to renewable energy projects, renewables should get the vast bulk of funds;
• Recommends that the Bank get out of oil projects altogether by 2008.

The World Bank, the UK's Department for International Development (DfID) and the other Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline funders had a draft of this report on their desks as they considered funding the pipeline - yet still they approved the BTC pipeline without taking the report's findings into account.

And now DfID is lobbying the World Bank not to accept the majority of the review's recommendations, while a leaked Bank report indicates that they will collude with DfID in sidelining the EIR report.

Take Action! - Lobby DFID:

Please write to your MP - ask them to contact DfID and convey your concerns that the EIR recommendations should be adopted in full. You can use the sample letter below, or even better, write a letter in your own words, to have more impact.

(If you don't know who your MP is, you can find out here. Or you can fax your MP for free by visiting Fax Your MP)

Sample letter:

____________ MP
House of Commons
London SW1A OAA

Dear _____ MP,

I write to express my support for the recent findings of the World Bank's Extractive Industries Review (EIR) and urge you to convey to DFID my concern that the UK government should support the EIR recommendations in full.

It is refreshing as well as important to see an experienced and senior development expert such as Emil Salim get to grips with the realities of global energy policy in the twenty-first century. Dr Salim's report makes it clear that hundreds of millions of dollars of World Bank money - over which DFID has responsibility - has already been misspent on mining, oil and gas projects that have failed to yield poverty alleviation benefits. On the contrary, their tendency has been to exacerbate the so-called "resource curse": the tendency of states reliant on oil revenues to become more corrupt, more impoverished and less democratic.

The EIR recommends that a number of preconditions - including good governance and the free, prior informed consent of affected communities - must be met if the extractive industries are to contribute to sustainable development. I strongly support this view and would also fully back the EIR's recommendation that the World Bank cease to fund oil and gas projects after 2008, in favour of renewables.

It is the coherence of the EIR's recommendations that is their strength. It is therefore extremely disappointing to learn that DfID is minded to reject the majority of the recommendations, ignoring the fact that they form a package whose effectiveness will inevitably be undermined if "cherry picked" for political convenience. Given the appalling social and environmental record of the extractive sector, we believe that DfID's approach directly conflicts with its duty to ensure that its funding promotes poverty alleviation.

The publication of the EIR also raises important questions over the approval of public funds for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. I am aware that DfID, the World Bank and the EBRD were all in possession of a draft copy of the EIR while deliberating over whether to award hundreds of millions of pounds in public funds to the BTC project, which has attracted immense controversy over its human rights, environmental and political impacts.

I am therefore shocked that none of the bodies deciding whether to fund the BTC pipeline appear to have taken the EIR's recommendations into account when considering a project which prima facie goes against virtually every single suggestion made by the report. To the best of my knowledge, none of the published decisions to support BTC even mention the EIR. Instead, they trumpet the potential poverty alleviation and democratisation benefits of BTC, benefits which, the EIR makes abundantly clear, the World Bank is not currently in a position to deliver through the oil and gas projects it funds.

In short, surely the EIR vindicates and amplifies the concerns expressed by environmentalists and others over the BTC project and its fitness for public funding. I hope you will voice my concerns to the Secretary of State for International Development, and I wait with interest to hear how the UK Government felt it possible to reconcile the recommendations of the EIR with their decision to support BTC.

Yours sincerely,