Relocation and Resettlement in Ceará - Houston Advanced ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Homelessness: Morbidity: Food Insecurity: 12 FRC, PAGE 12 for either Ubaldinho or Sitios Novos PAPs. To assist the PAPs in making the transition from tenant farmer to independent agriculturist, SRH and IDACE are providing some training courses. In Pecem, some structural unemployment will result from moving those engaged in fishing away from the coast into interior resettlement areas where they will be resettled as agriculturists. It will take these PAPs longer to make the transition, and they will require more intensive training. In some cases, employment opportunities for women in the form of household work with their patrons have been eliminated after the patrons relocated following appropriation of their lands. On the other hand, better education, infrastructure and transport may eventually increase job opportunities outside the agrovilas. Recommendations: Ensure provision of irrigation to resettled communities; continue and refine training initiatives. This is an extremely unlikely outcome of resettlement in Ceará. All tenant farmers and small holders are provided houses in the resettlement agrovilas and agricolas. Larger holders get fair market compensation, which is enough to enable them to purchase a replacement house if necessary. In the case of Castanhão, all urban PAPs are provided a house in Nova Jaguaribara, which is at least the size of their original dwelling. Urban PAPs who rent their homes are being provided a 35 m² plot and building material to construct their own house. Homelessness could result if the tenant farmers and small holders fail in their agricultural pursuits and be forced to sell their house and move to the city. Agencies are taking precautions to ensure that PAPs do not liquidate their resettlement awards. In the case of the Ubaldinho Dam, for example, project agency personnel delayed providing titles to the PAPs resettled in the Ubaldinho agrovila so that they would first get used to the idea of living in the agrovila and settle down rather than cash in their awards immediately. Recommendation: Monitor PAPs for a period of two to three years to determine whether there is outmigration and liquidation of their assets. There is no evidence to suggest increased morbidity resulting from the displacement in Ceará. In most cases, health care infrastructure and standards have been significantly raised in the projectaffected communities. In addition, better community infrastructure and living conditions, such as the provision of running water and electricity, have translated into a greatly improved quality of life. A few anecdotal claims were made to the HARC team that the anxiety provoked by the Castanhão Dam and the impending displacement resulted in the death of older members of Jaguaribara. Recommendation: Monitor PAPs for a period of two to three years to determine trends in health care and morbidity. Ceará is currently going through a very bad drought. This has severely curtailed most agricultural activities and negatively affected peoples’ diets. However, the state government, as part of its drought relief programme and the project agencies provide food baskets with the minimum necessities. Satisfaction with the quality of the baskets is generally low. There are no indications that the dam projects themselves have caused any food insecurity.
Recommendation: Consult with PAPs to make improvements in the food baskets. Loss of Access to Common Property: 13 FRC, PAGE 13 Community spaces and common property is being satisfactorily replaced in the resettlement sites in Ceará. Generally, the quality of public infrastructure and spaces is better in the postresettlement areas. Recommendation: Continue successful community planning efforts. Social Disarticulation: Social support networks play a critical role in providing essential services such as childcare and short-term credit in economically challenged areas. Displacement often results in the dismantling of these networks and a consequent loss of social capital. Once dismantled, these networks are hard to rebuild. Social capital loss is therefore higher in projects that disperse communities rather than resettling them within pre-existing groups and social units. In Ceará, resettlement has, in most cases, preserved family and social units as the entire communities have been moved together. Very few PAPs refused resettlement and this further maintained the integrity of the community and preserved local social capital. Indeed, in the few cases where such good planning was not followed—that is, in the case where PAPs were hurriedly relocated from the actual construction site of the Castanhão Dam and family and social units were disrupted—resettlement has been unsatisfactory (See First Interim Report for details). Recommendation: Continue practise of preserving community structures and cohesiveness. II. Policy Recommendations Resettlement Agencies should develop comprehensive income restoration programmes that are based upon increasing the capacity and capabilities of project-affected persons. Income restoration is the most important metric by which resettlement programmes are measured. Project-affected populations must at least regain their pre-displacement levels of income for the resettlement to be considered satisfactory. Income restoration plans must therefore be prepared and refined even before the populations are relocated. Attempts to restore incomes through government grants and make-work programmes should be strictly avoided because these tend to perpetuate themselves and create dependency amongst the PAPs. Income restoration is one of the weaker links in the Ceará resettlement programmes, because comparatively greater attention is paid to the planning and construction of the physical infrastructure of the resettlement areas rather than on the replacement of income-generating assets, which are critical for restoring incomes. Greater attention should be paid to replacement agricultural land for farmers and ranchers than their living accommodations and residential arrangements. In the case of tenant farmers, land provided must be an adequate replacement for the lands upon which they were working for their patrons. According to many studies and evaluations performed by the World Bank, income restoration efforts have been most successful when PAPs have been able to share in the immediate benefits
Page 1 and 2: Relocation and Resettlement in Cear
Page 3 and 4: Center for Global Studies, Houston
Page 5 and 6: 5 FRC, PAGE 5
Page 7 and 8: Authors’ Note 7 FRC, PAGE 7 The F
Page 9 and 10: Available details on training and c
Page 11: Landlessness: 11 FRC, PAGE 11 Ceare
Page 15 and 16: 15 FRC, PAGE 15 operational evaluat
Page 17 and 18: Women are not being adequately cons
Page 19 and 20: 19 FRC, PAGE 19 page should present
Page 21 and 22: 21 FRC, PAGE 21 due to the size and

Relocation and Resettlement in Ceará - Houston Advanced ...

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?