by Gráinne Ryder
Editors Note 2nd Edition
This book is an updated and expanded edition of Damming The Three Gorges: What Dam Builders Don’t Want You To Know, a critique of a Canadian government-World Bank feasibility study of China’s Three Gorges Dam. Originally published in September 1990, this book exposed the flawed analyses and compromised calculations evident in the official justification of a large dam project. Since the first edition was published, others have discovered the same defects in other justifications of other large dam projects.
Foreword 2nd Edition
by Dai Qing
Foreword 1st Edition
by Niu Kangsheng
About the contributors
About the Editors
Gráinne Ryder worked as an engineer in Thailand on village water supply projects for three years before joining Probe International in 1987 as a water resources researcher. She headed an international effort to stop the Three Gorges Project until 1990 when she returned to Thailand to coordinate a campaign against a series of dams on the Mekong River.
Acknowledgements
We wish to give special thanks to Patricia Adams for her rigorous editorial assistance, and her unflagging enthusiasm for the book. Special thanks also to Lawrence Solomon, for his patience and guidance throughout preparation of the book, for his expert help with writing and editing, and for his humour when driving a point home.
Chapter 14 – Corruption in high and not-so high places
(March 19, 2009) A year after phillipine President Marcos and his first lady were forced from office, the U.S.
Chapter 11 – The business of the state
(March 19, 2009) Few know with confidence how the universe came into being but if God had said `let there be light’ while in Colombia, He would not have had enough money left for the rest of creation. Because the truth is that in a country where there are projects which have cost a lot, few have cost as much as the expansion of the electric sector during the last ten years.
Chapter 9 – Givers and takers
(March 18, 2009) Most taxpayers in the rich industrialized countries believe, as the Pearson Commission inquiry into foreign aid believed, that "it is only right for those who have to share with those who have not." Much of the Western World’s sharing, though, has been in the form of loans, not gifts. The Third World has borrowed about one-third of the $400 billion in foreign aid that it has received from the rich countries’ national aid agencies.
Chapter 8 – The new mercantilists
(March 18, 2009) ONE YEAR BEFORE MEXICO touched off the Third World’s debt crisis by suspending payments to foreign creditors, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher rose proudly to announce in the House of Commons that her government had just committed millions to the Mexican government to build the $2 billion Sicartsa steel plant:
Chapter 3 – The Economy
(March 18, 2009) The Environment Strikes Back: The Economy
Introduction – The Tragedies of the Commons
The Tragedies of the Commons
Acknowledgements
(March 18, 2009) Friends and colleagues have been exceptionally generous in helping me finish this book. Margaret Barber deserves special thanks for her painstaking research, and for her good cheer throughout. I am also especially grateful to Susan Fitzmaurice for her artistic judgement and for her commitment to the complicated task of producing this book. Both made an otherwise stressful job a joy.
Odious Debts: Loose Lending, Corruption, And the Third World’s Environmental Legacy
(March 18, 2009) We’ve all heard of the Third World’s debt crisis, of hopelessly poor nations unable to pay their debts, and of the human suffering and environmental consequences of their desperate predicament. Amid emotional calls from some to forgive the debt outright come the sober solutions from bankers and bureaucrats, with their seemingly unending stream of Brady and Baker Plans, and bewildering variants of them.
With increasing water needs, will China dehydrate India?
(March 10, 2009) China—and not Pakistan—is a bigger threat to India simply because it does not have enough water.
Patricia Adams
Dai Qing
Fan Xiao
Lawrence Solomon
Mu Lan
Probe International
Lisa Peryman
Probe Media
Other News Sources
Probe International 