Bingo!

An interesting critique of NGOs.
"The focus of the big international NGOs (BINGOs) has been frequently directed to economic development activities that are occurring in the newly industrialising countries, commonly in Asia. But the well documented origin of many of the world’s major environmental problems is from the already developed countries in Europe and North America. For example, BINGOs have relentlessly attacked the palm oil industry in Asia. Greenpeace mounted a vigorous campaign against Nestle for using Indonesian palm oil, which resulted in Nestle dropping the use of the product and replacing it with alternative oil suppliers from developed nations. There is ample peer-reviewed research that is supportive of the palm oil industry in Indonesia. The market benefit is shifted from Indonesia to a rich nation. After the Asian financial crisis a decade ago, the new Indonesian democratic government was encouraged by the World Bank and IMF to develop a palm oil industry because it is a large employer. Rural employment was critical to Indonesia then, and remains so today. The population of Indonesia is approaching 240 million people with about 100 million of them living on less than US$2 per day. By 2050, the population is expected to grow to 300 million. The country can expect to lose as much as 20% of its land mass with predicted rising sea levels in the coming decades. The problem is that Indonesia is very good at growing palm oil, effectively shifting the economics of the world edible oil market. Palm oil is an incredibly productive crop, yielding substantially more oil per hectare than other oil-seed plants. Palm oil also has the advantage of being a long-term plant – a palm oil tree will produce seeds for almost 70 years. The long-term carbon sequestration opportunity of palm oil is well documented, compared to the negative carbon characteristics of other oil crops such as soya, corn or canola, which need to be stripped back to bare earth each harvest cycle. These crops are grown mostly in Western or developed nations. Recent research describes these crops as environmenally unsustainable. The demise of the palm oil industry in Asia is a human tragedy supported by Western-dominated BINGOs. Unless palm oil is being sourced from places like Indonesia, more land in Europe and North America will be cleared for soya, corn and or canola fields that are harvested using massive equipment employing very few people. If BINGOs were serious about sustainability and communities they would be looking to help develop a sustainable palm oil industry, not maintain poverty."

From here by Phillip Lawrence

Capitalism rips us off, NGOs soothe the pain

It's always a fine time to be an expatriate aid worker in Cambodia, where several thousand NGOs and aid organizations operate. By day, swarms of foreign do-gooders clog the streets of Phnom Penh in their company-provided SUVs, and by night they fill bars, restaurants, and nightclubs. Collectively, NGO workers represent a privileged caste, isolated and detached from the people who serve as the objects of their benevolence.

Scan the world's hot spots and disaster areas, and you'll invariably find NGOs and advocacy groups living high off the hog from donor money and hyping their causes with artfully presented information designed to prompt people to reach for their checkbooks. NGOs rushed in after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, but one survey of 60 U.S. relief organizations found that they had spent less than 40 percent of the $1.4 billion they raised during the first year. Many major projects are still stalled, and around 1 million Haitians live in squalid tent settlements.

Many billions of dollars of international aid have flowed into Cambodia since the U.N.-organized elections held in 1993, after a long civil war that followed the fall of the Khmer Rouge. The large sums provided by the United States and other Western donors is delivered through and controlled by international aid agencies and NGOs. Over the years, NGOs in Cambodia have cleared landmines and implemented programs to prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS. There are many excellent international and local NGOs working in Cambodia. Yet many Cambodian NGOs have followed a path familiar to observers in other parts of the world. After arriving to provide immediate relief, they gradually transform themselves into survival-focused grant-proposal-writing shops chasing dollars and holding PowerPoint-heavy workshops on "empowerment," "governance," "capacity-building," and other empty buzz phrases.

A 2006 story in the Australian charged that a great deal of Australia's aid to Cambodia was wasted, because as much as 80 percent of it "goes straight out again in the form of high expatriate salary packages and running costs." The story said that country directors of prominent international charities in Cambodia received compensation packages worth as much as $250,000, which included large villas in Phnom Penh's upscale "NGO-ville" area, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and an assortment of other perks. A 2005 report by Action Aid said that in a single year, 700 top international consultants in Cambodia were paid an average of around $100,000. Their combined haul was roughly as much as the entire annual wage bill for 160,000 Cambodian civil servants. "Instead of transferring skills to Cambodian staff, their time is spent writing reports or doing jobs which they should be training local staff to carry out," the report said.

Lower-level NGO staffers, who often rotate through on short postings and spend a good chunk of their time partying, also do reasonably well. "Aid work is often much less about noble self-sacrifice and much more about getting hooked up with a dank salary and some pretty sweet perks," says a post at a website called Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like. "By 'dank salary,' we are talking by Western standards. By local standards, we might just call that a 'small fortune.' "

Among the more prominent (and best-paying) NGOs in Cambodia are the mainstream green organizations. They are also among the most powerful because government ministries dealing with environmental issues are typically underbudgeted and understaffed, so NGOs effectively fund and manage key agencies. During recent years, the Cambodian government has sold off vast swaths of land, some publicly owned, including protected areas, and some seized from the urban and rural poor. In the process, hundreds of thousands of people have been forcibly evicted from their homes. These deals have been a goldmine for Cambodian oligarchs and foreign investors, who have bought up some of the country's most beautiful areas and prime urban real estate. You'd expect that international green groups might have a lot to say about this tragedy. You'd be wrong. "The major environmental organizations have kept a near absolute silence over the ongoing land crisis, both in terms of human impact and impact on the protected areas they are working in," says a longtime consultant in Cambodia. Conservation International lauds the Cambodian government on its website for "investing in research and monitoring of protected areas." This was about the same time that Hun Sen's regime was awarding an Australian mining company exploratory rights to more than half of the park, one of Cambodia's two ASEAN Heritage Parks. Earlier this year, the government awarded another chunk of the park to a private company for a rubber plantation. In February, the government awarded a big concession in an environmentally sensitive area of Koh Kong province to a private company exploring for titanium. "Realistically, if it's economically really valuable, we should support it and make it happen in the best way possible," said David Emmett, CI's regional director.

Wildlife Alliance says on its website that it works with villagers who "once were forced to roam the forest as hunters and loggers, diminishing Cambodia's environmental heritage, and who now have legal jobs as guides and operators of sustainable trekking, mountain-biking, and river boat tours." In other words, people who once lived in the forest now hold low-paid jobs serving at the beck and call of foreign tourists who float down waterways and hike in woods that the villagers have long called home. "The wholesale destruction of Cambodia's environment is an important issue, but hunting and poaching by people eking out an existence in the forest isn't the problem," says a Western expatriate with extensive experience in land issues. "The primary causes are the government issuing massive land concessions to developers and wide-scale logging." Another WA mission involves protecting the rain forest of the Southern Cardamom Mountain Range. As part of that effort, the group's staffers have swooped in by helicopter with Forestry Administration officials who kick out destitute peasants living in the woods and in some cases dismantle and burn their homes. "They are not people-friendly," the longtime consultant says of WA, "but the trees and animals are all safe."

WA has herded peasants into community agriculture projects linked to its ecotourism ventures. Peasants at one community called Sovanna Baitong benefited with access to education and health care, but some told the Phnom Penh Post they felt "trapped in a state of indentured servitude" and had been threatened with expulsion if they refused to work on plots they had been allocated. "I experienced three years and eight months of the Khmer Rouge regime, and this is similar because they ordered us to work like we are in a totalitarian state," said one. "It is really miserable to live there."

In Sihanoukville, a coastal town whose beaches and islands have been sold off by the government to developers allegedly planning eco-friendly luxury hotel and condominium projects. "Those who lived or worked there were turfed out—some jailed, others beaten, virtually all denied meaningful compensation," said a 2008 story in the Guardian. The newspaper quoted a British property developer, Marty Kaye, who said, "Nowhere else in the world could you create your own kingdom from scratch. … It's fantastically exciting, the opportunity to zone a whole island, to see where the luxury exclusive villa plots will be, for the Brad Pitts, etc."

In 2008, a Hong Kong-based investment company called Lime Tree Capital was awarded a 99-year lease on an island near Sihanoukville called Koh Rung Sangleum, which it plans to fully develop with resorts and hotels. The only problem was that the island was home to a fishing village with 92 families. Lime Tree hired Fauna and Flora International and the NGO dispatched several staffers to the island. FFI provided Lime Tree with a development-friendly report, because the company subsequently filed a master plan saying there was little biodiversity on the island and hence not much to conserve. FFI staffers made a later trip to the island and told villagers they would be restricted to a tiny 12.3-hectare piece of land and ordered them to immediately stop cutting down trees and constructing any new buildings. Eighty villagers signed a document demanding the removal of FFI's lead staffer on the project, saying he had lied to them about how much forest and village land would be conserved under Lime Tree's proposal.

http://www.slate.com/id/2296334/pagenum/3
See also here http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/jul00/ngo.html