Farmers and NGOs Monitor World Bank in Indonesia, Get Results

	Farmers seek less toxic alternatives to the pesticides they receive from the World Bank. Here an NGO worker guides farmers in ecological field studies of coconut pests.

"This was the first time for many government and World Bank officials that they were outnumbered by articulate farmers."

As the World Bank pours millions of dollars into water and agriculture projects world-wide, a Bay Area organization -- with the help of rural farmers -- is ensuring that the projects abide by their own health and safety regulations.

In an Indonesian development project designed to improve dams, increase food and tree crops, and build and rehabilitate roads and drinking water facilities, rural farmers trained as monitors by San Francisco-based Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) found several glaring problems.

Of the pesticides used in the World Bank-financed project, 78 percent of those on the island of Sumatra and 48 percent on Kalimantan were classified as hazardous by the World Health Organization, according to Nila Ardhianie, director of the Indonesian grassroots organization that partnered with PANNA on the study.

The monitors found that farmers were not informed about the health effects of pesticides or the existence of alternatives. They also discovered decreased crop diversity and the illegal sale of World Bank project pesticides in local markets.

The community uncovered a host of other problems too, including the exclusion of women from agricultural training, poorly constructed or unfinished irrigation systems that caused flooding, lack of transparency regarding terms of loan repayment, and widespread corruption.

The farmers developed a list of recommendations for project reform, which they presented to government and World Bank officials at precedent-setting provincial and national seminars in 1998. But a year later, little had changed.

So PANNA and their partners pressed on. They worked together to expose inaccurate claims by World Bank and government officials that the farmers' concerns had been resolved. By publicizing farmers' own evaluation of the project -- through both Indonesian and international media -- the coalition pushed the Bank to reopen investigation of the project and begin implementing farmers' recommendations.

"As we learned from our experience in Indonesia, a good policy is no guarantee that World Bank projects will reduce reliance on [dangerous] pesticides in the field," said Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, coordinator of PANNA's World Bank Accountability Project. "We were only able to fix problems by working with farmers to monitor the project on the ground and by applying pressure on the Bank and government officials."

By the end of 2000, the World Bank hired and placed "community organizers" in the field to respond to farmers' concerns, and many of the corrupt practices by local agricultural extension workers were stopped.

"This was the first time for many government and World Bank officials that they were outnumbered by articulate farmers, relentlessly presenting their grievances and calling on the officials to correct the problems," said Ishii-Eiteman.

For more information, contact Jessica Hamburger at jah@panna.org, or Monica Moore at mhm@panna.org: (415) 981-6205.