Following the earlier post on Africa’s reOrientation, Nature has a news article, Tide of censure for African dams (Nature 440, 393-394 2006), Jim Giles writes that Chinese-built dams in Africa are expected to have devastating consequences for local communities.

…The billion-dollar Merowe project will more than double the amount of electricity that Sudan can produce, and is just one of a dozen new dam projects being built across Africa using Chinese money and expertise.

But scientists and environmentalists who have studied the dam say that poor local people will suffer because necessary precautions are not being taken. According to the first independent review of the dam plans, a copy of which has been seen by Nature, inadequate thought has been given to the environmental and social consequences of flooding hundreds of square kilometres of land. That is far from unusual when it comes to Chinese investment in Africa, environmental groups allege. They say that China, which has a dire domestic environmental record, is repeating the mistakes of previous big dam projects, and that rural African communities will pay the price.

“Chinese companies will ignore social and environmental impacts to the extent that local governments are willing to ignore them,” says Thayer Scudder, an anthropologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who has spent decades studying hydropower projects. “If governments don’t care, or are corrupt, why will the Chinese engineers worry?”

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Critics of Merowe say the project also looks set to repeat perhaps the most severe social mistake of previous dam schemes, which have seen the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of resettled people suffer. Mutaz Musa Abdalla Salim, director of financing at the Merowe Dam Project Implementation Unit in Khartoum, denies this. He points out that 35% of the 10,000 affected families have been resettled and US$700 million will eventually be spent on new homes, clinics and other facilities. But when staff at the International Rivers Network, an environmental group in Berkeley, California, which part-funded the Swiss study, visited the resettlement sites in February 2005, they catalogued many problems. The group say sanitation was already poor owing to cramped conditions in the new towns, and that soil quality was in some places too low to support agriculture. Salim angrily denied these assertions when Nature put them to him.

Experts are concerned that the problems identified at Merowe will affect other Chinese-built dams. Press reports suggest that China is considering, or has already started work on, at least a dozen dam projects in Africa. These projects tie in with investments in many other African projects, some in countries with poor human-rights records, in a strategy that Western political commentators say is designed to secure access to the continent’s oil and other natural resources.

For more on Merowe Project see the International Rivers Network’s campaign, and wikipedia’s article on Merowe Dam