| World Bank’s failure to implement the agreed process in its Principles for a Code of Conduct for the Management and Sustainable Use of Mangrove Ecosystems |
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11 May 2005 Ronald D. Zweig Dear Mr. Zweig, Re: The World Bank's "Principles for a Code of Conduct for the Management and Sustainable Use of Mangrove Ecosystems" We just found out about the inclusion of the World Bank's “Principles for a Code of Conduct for the Management and Sustainable Use of Mangrove Ecosystems” which you, or someone from your group, plans on presenting at the upcoming Ramsar regional meeting to be held this week in China. We are very disappointed that the agreed upon process which civil society had recommended, and which you had accepted in Washington, DC in 2003 was never initiated to ensure wider-scale involvement and comment by local and indigenous peoples who live and work in mangrove zones. You have missed an important opportunity in initiating what should have been an imperative from the very beginning of this process. The recommended workshops with the participation of indigenous peoples and local communities to be carried out at the local level in Asia, Africa and Latin America never were given a chance to happen. So the chance for more inclusively representative comments and relevant inputs to the final draft has not been allowed to transpire. We understand that the translation of the draft document into Spanish and French has finally been produced, but no information about it has been disseminated to NGOs and indigenous and local community organizations. There seems to be no process in place to gather informed input and to promote a wider involvement of local stakeholders, and that instead you are going to the Ramsar regional forum held in preparation for the 9th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Ramsar Convention (COP9) as the next step in your obviously top-down process. We still will not accept your prior statement that the World Bank could not afford to support the workshops for local community involvement and input. This local and indigenous community input is vital for the "Principles...", otherwise the document is not representative of the vast majority of persons living in and utilizing the mangrove resources. And, if you maintain that the World Bank which has access to billions of dollars cannot afford the meager funds needed to implement a representative, bottom-up approach, then we again demand that the Bank undertake its own internal structural adjustment, as obviously there is need to better manage the available funds there! We are cc'ng this letter to the Ramsar forum and others whom we feel need to hear this protest denouncement, hoping that there is still a chance to right this tragic short-coming via awakened "peer pressure." Sincerely, Alfredo Quarto Edem Edem Ashraf-Ul-Alam Tutu Eliah Gowri Zakir Kibria Andrianna Natsoulas Juliette Williams |
