148 Poverty and Hunger
As for refugees, in 2003 there were, in the world, some 20 million persons
identified by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) as
‘people of concern’ (UNHCR, 2003). Of these, 12 million were refugees. The
remainder included internally displaced persons, stateless persons, asylum seekers
and returnees. Refugees were concentrated especially in Africa, Thailand, Iran and
Pakistan. Earlier, during the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of thousands of refugees
had been established on agricultural settlements, notably in Tanzania at Mpanda
and Ulyankulu. But during the early 21st century, almost all refugees were either
dispersed among host populations or held and supported in camps. New agricul-
tural small farming settlement projects for refugees and displaced people followed
the global trend and had become rare.
‘Oustees’, rights and ease of exit
The retreat from agricultural settlement during the 1970s and 1980s was paral-
leled by neglect by governments of responsibilities for people displaced by dams,
roads and other infrastructure projects. In 1994 and subsequently, those displaced
were estimated to number worldwide about 10 million a year (World Bank, 1994;
Mehta, 2002). With dams, the word ‘oustee’ came to be used. Earlier, during the
1960s, Nuba and others who lost homes and livelihoods to Lake Nasser, created by
the Aswan Dam in Sudan, were given the option of resettlement on the new irriga-
tion project of Khasm-el-Girba; and some 80,000-odd people displaced by the
Volta Dam in Ghana were offered resettlement in new communities, which a
majority of them took up (Chambers, 1970). But no such responsibilities were
similarly discharged in India on any scale, despite the building of many dams and
the displacement of hundreds of thousands of marginal and politically impotent
poor people. Over four decades in India, 20 million people were displaced by
development programmes and forced into involuntary resettlement. Seventy-five
per cent of them were without ‘rehabilitation’, and the vast majority were impov-
erished by the process (Cernea, 1997). Michael Cernea and his colleagues at the
World Bank, and Thayer Scudder and others outside it, showed how damaging
displacement was to lives and livelihoods, how widely ignored were the rights and
interests of those displaced and how much more numerous they often were than
was acknowledged in project documents. As a vigorous and committed group,
they were instrumental in drawing up and gaining agreement for the World Bank’s
policy on involuntary resettlement, issued in 1980. This major step forward was
influential both inside and outside lending and donor agencies, though less so with
governments. At the same time, internationally networking activists made lenders,
donors and, to a lesser degree, governments, more aware of the human costs of
dams and other projects that displaced people and more cautious about funding
them (Brown and Fox, 2001). Evaluation and research have improved understand-
ing of involuntary resettlement and of what could and should be done (e.g. Cernea
1997, 1999; Picciotto et al, 2001). The World Bank code, international network-
ing and lobbying by civil society, the new human rights agenda, and predictable