Discordant Development

Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh

Katy Gardner

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780745331492
• eBook ISBN: 9781849647076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

What happened when Chevron, a multinational mining company, opened a gas plant right next to densely populated villages in rural Bangladesh? This book reveals contradictory ways that local people attempt to connect to, and are disconnected by, foreign capital. Commentators on the situation have different frameworks, whether of dispossession and scarcity, the success of Corporate Social Responsibility, or imperialist exploitation and corruption. Yet as Gardner argues, what really matters in the struggles over resources is which of these stories are heard, and the power of those who tell them. Based on the narratives of dispossessed land owners, urban activists, mining officials and the rural landless, Discordant Development shows the real picture behind the effect multinational capital has on indigenous communities.

1

Discordant Developments: An Introduction

A field, a few kilometres away from the Kushiara River in Habiganj District, north-east Bangladesh: a small group of foreign men stand under the hot sun taking measurements from the damp soil. They have travelled here in a gleaming four-wheel drive, bumping along the dirt track that branches from the Sylhet to Dhaka Highway, past a seemingly endless vista of electric green paddy fields and small hamlets, the mud and thatch homes occasionally interspersed by the brick houses that characterise this Londoni (UK migrant) area. Bundles of straw lie drying across the road; the jeep’s progress has been frequently interrupted by the bleating goats and runty cows that have wandered in its path. Now that they are finally here the men work quietly, studiously ignoring the small crowd of children who have followed them from the road, and, amidst much hilarity, are calling laal bando! (red monkey!) from the safety of the path. It is not the first time the men have visited the area and, judging from the results of these early explorations, it will not be the last. They work for the company Occidental, and are prospecting for natural gas. It is the late 1980s.

March 2007: The rice fields have gone. In their place is a large gas plant, spread over 50 acres and connected to the newly metalled road by a grid of steep banked highways that cut across the surrounding agricultural land with industrial precision. Known as the ‘South Pad’ this is linked to the ‘North Pad’ a few miles away, as if both sites involved a mission to the moon. The North Pad was constructed by Occidental in the late 1990s at Dighalbak, close to the Kushiara River. But it is the completion of the South Pad in 2007 that heralds the opening of what becomes known as ‘the Bibiyana Gas Field’. Constructed and operated by the American oil giant Chevron, this is to be the smartest and most technologically advanced gas field in Bangladesh and is inaugurated with a fanfare of publicity. By 2010, it is predicted, it will be the biggest supplier of natural gas in Bangladesh, producing energy for the next twenty to thirty years. Included among the guests at the opening ceremony are government ministers, the US ambassador and the President of Chevron Bangladesh. Speeches are made, congratulations extended for the efficiency with which the project has been completed, corporate backs patted. In the national context of acute power shortages, where only a year earlier, farmers’ frustrations at the irregular supply of electricity boiled over into violent protest leading to the death of six people in Shibjanj,¹ and where industrial growth is held in check by limited and faltering energy flows, the country’s newly discovered natural gas reserves are the cause of significant optimism. If there have been national protests concerning the details of profit-sharing arrangements between Chevron and the government and rumours of a pipeline that will export the gas to India, not to say local agitation at the loss of land, now is not the time to mention it. In the four villages that surround the plant, glimpsed distantly across the shimmering fields, life appears to go on as normal.

Nadampur, December 2008: half a mile from the South Pad. I watch as the harvested paddy is threshed in the homestead yard. This year, for the first time, the crop is fed to a mechanical thresher rather than spread on the earth and trampled by circling bullocks, the traditional way. About half a mile away, towards Karimpur, I can make out the gas flare through the haze. At night we hear the thump of the drills; where a decade ago a car moving along the track towards Enatganj was a rare occurrence, today the traffic on the road is constant.

On the other side of the old house, built with British remittances back in the 1970s, Shuli prepares the evening meal, feeding the open flames of the earth chula with fuel sticks that are rolled in cattle dung, dried in the sunshine then stored in the bamboo walled kitchen. In the section of the house that is owned by her now long-departed British cousins, there is another sort of kitchen. Built only a few years earlier, it is furnished with the utensils that the British contingent is accustomed to: a stainless steel sink rather than the pond, wooden shelves rather than the floor, a gas cooker. The room has, however, never been used for its original purpose. Instead, it has become a storage area, filled with sacks of betel nut and rice. Thick dust covers the sink and the cooker. When I ask Shuli why she doesn’t use the latter, she laughs. There’s no gas supply, she says. The village has never been connected.

Natural gas: drawn from the depths of the earth and pumped along a network of pipelines to distant processing plants and power stations, it is both intensely localised and, in the act of its extraction, spatially dispersed, released from underneath the fields, then channelled to far-away destinations where it is converted to fuel, a commodity to be bought and sold, a prerequisite of industrialisation and modernity, a cause of celebration and of dispute. ‘Under our fields is gold’, Amma tells me. Savvy entrepreneurs that the locals are, everyone is aware of the economic potential of the gas that the foreigners discovered. Local people would get rich, some said; there would be industrial development around the field, a fertiliser factory or a power plant. Best of all, Chevron would offer jobs and development. Poverty would be a thing of the past.

What people hoped for in these early days of the gas field was connection, not simply to the gas supply that was now being pumped out at a rate of 250 million cubic feet a day, or even to Chevron, but more generally to the sources of global capitalism and industrial development that had the power to transform a person’s situation from poverty to prosperity. This possibility, of transformation gained through links to foreign capitalism, is not new to the area, for since the 1960s men have grown rich by migrating abroad; the two- or three-storey houses of successful Londonis, with their TVs, fridges and spacious rooms are testimony to the power of such links, if only one could access them.

Such connections have always been inherently social. To get work, visas or airfares for travel abroad, land or business opportunities, one has to be connected to the right people: relatives, village patrons, politicians, government officials, nothing can be achieved without knowing someone (or failing that knowing someone who knows someone). Just as the gas is both located in the desh (homeland) and pumped to bidesh (foreign places: in this case, anywhere outside the immediate locality), local connections – to social networks, sources of credit and, of course, land – go hand in hand with global connections. It is migration to the UK, after all, that has enabled some families to accumulate large amounts of land and build themselves the smart brick houses. The opposite state, disconnection, is as disastrous as connection is desirable. Those disconnected, cast out from their families or severed from their land, become untethered from the desh, drifting from village to village in search of alms or casual work. Meanwhile in Dhaka deals are brokered, connections made between foreign multinationals and the government, money channelled and moved around, just as the pipelines connecting the gas field to the often failing, but economically vital national grid, pump the gas outwards, and away.

* * *

Today, the South Pad takes up an area of around 50 acres of what was once prime agricultural land situated between four villages in Habiganj, Sylhet: Kakura, Karimpur, Firizpur and Nadampur (see Figure 1.1). Joined to the North Pad by a single road, both sites, and the road that links them, involved the loss of agricultural land and are distinguished by their proximity to human habitation. At the South Pad site, for some homesteads in nearby Karimpur and Firizpur the flaring of the gas is so close that the occupants complain of the increased heat, not to mention the smell. Safety issues are foremost in everyone’s mind: a ‘blow-out’ like those which took place at the nearby Magurcchara and Tengratila gas fields in 1997 and 2005 are a nightmarish spectre which, as we shall see in Chapter 7, provide the content for stories that have attained almost mythical status: dark allegories of violent disconnection and death that speak volumes about people’s fears of the risks and ruptures of the new economic order.

Figure 1.1 Location of villages and the Bibiyana Gas Field

A second distinguishing feature of the Bibiyana Gas Field, involving stories of a very different nature, is that, like many transnational extractive companies but unlike any other gas plant in Bangladesh, Chevron has a programme of ‘community engagement’ in the surrounding villages as part of its policies of corporate social responsibility (CSR). As we shall see in the chapters that follow, two forms of ‘development’ are therefore taking place. The one that is desired by local people is that which is most elusive: reliable infrastructure, a transparent and accountable state, and secure employment: inclusion, in other words, in the benefits of neoliberal capitalism. In contrast, the ‘development’ that is on offer from Chevron’s CSR programme draws on the work of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as the Grameen Bank, much lauded in the development industry but, as we shall see, less attractive for many locals: micro-credit, income generation, training programmes.² ‘Development’ is thus a slippery and elusive character in the story, its meaning shifting according to who is using it and in what context.

What can the social relations that encircle the gas field teach us about the connections and disconnections that people in different places have with global capitalism? How might we analyse and write about them? What follows is neither a case study of CSR nor, indeed, a simplistic tirade against multinationals. Instead it is an ethnography of globalisation which interrogates the complex layers of morality and practice that surround industrial development and foreign corporations in Bangladesh, whether in the villages adjacent to the gas field, their transnational communities or the domains of global capital which are materialised at the gas field. What we see is how these different moralities are utilised in the claims that people and corporations make over material resources.

Story telling and narrative play an important role. The chapters are based around various stories, some authored by me, others by those involved in the complex contestations around what ‘economic development’ ought to be, and what it actually is. All are ‘true’, in that they narrate lived experiences and observations, yet all too often are constructions of reality drawn from particular personal and political locations (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). Central to my account is the argument that just as stories can be read as claims or political statements, so can other forms of claim-making (for example, promotional literature published by Chevron) be analysed as stories, which frame the world in a particular way, propagating various messages and moralities while editing out others. Whose stories are heard, whose believed and whose dismissed is of course crucial: story telling as social practice cannot be understood aside from its political context. This book is as implicated in these processes as slick narratives of corporate benevolence, told through artistically presented PowerPoint slides or glossy brochures, or indeed, lamentations of dispossession and loss, told by landless women. My use of fictional or ‘creative’ writing styles at points in the narrative deliberately reveals my authorial presence and power: this is my version of events, edited, stylised and shaped according to my own beliefs and claims. I make no pretence at ‘giving voice to the poor’, though it is my intention that some of their experiences and preoccupations will be revealed.

Naming is an important element of story telling, especially when these stories are linked to political and economic claims. While the names of actual villages and towns in this book remain unchanged, rather than referring to the area that surrounds the South Pad as ‘Bibiyana’, I refer to it by the fictionalised name of Duniyapur (‘World village’). My reasons are political. While the Bibiyana Gas Field is indeed a gas extraction plant operated by Chevron, naming the geographical space that extends beyond the perimeters of the plant’s high wire fence as ‘Bibiyana’ is more problematic. Based on the name of a small river that runs past Nadampur, Firizpur and Karimpur, ‘Bibiyana’ is used by Chevron to refer not only to the gas field, but also what officials are apt to refer to as ‘our communities’. The name thus creates a territorial field as well as a site for gas extraction, an area in which the company’s discursive practices produce particular relationships and moral orders. The name is also contested. Indeed, since the inauguration of the Bibiyana Gas Field at the South Pad in 2007, residents at the overlooked North Pad have claimed that the site should be known as the ‘Dighalbak Gas Field’. Their story, which took place in the days of Occidental rather than Chevron, is significantly different from those of the villages surrounding the South Pad and is not detailed in the pages of this book. In order to protect the identity of our informants I have also changed the names of everyone we spoke to, scrambling some personal characteristic to further disguise their identities. For a few well-known public figures who would be instantly recognisable, I have not done this.

In writing the book, my motivations are both professional and personal. Since my doctoral work I have been interested in the engagements that Bangladeshis have with globalisation and neoliberal capitalism, whether manifested as industrialisation, migration abroad or ‘development’. My first book, based on fieldwork in the late 1980s, examined the transformations associated with prolonged migration from Sylhet to the UK (Gardner, 1995). Subsequent work has traced the ongoing role of place, movement and connections in shaping economic hierarchy, poverty and transnational ‘habitus’ (Gardner, 1993, 2006; Gardner and Ahmed, 2009). Fieldwork among elders and children in London has led to perspectives on the relationship between the life course, gender and place (Gardner, 2002; Gardner and Mand, 2012). Moreover, an early postdoctoral stint as a junior social development adviser at the Overseas Development Agency (now Department for International Development, DFID) led me to reflect upon the ambivalent and morally charged relationship between anthropology and the development industry (Gardner and Lewis, 1996, 2000). In a context where the mantras and practices of development are increasingly being taken up by multinational corporations in the name of corporate social responsibility Chevron’s ‘community engagement’ programmes are a prime example of what some might hail as ethical business conduct, offering developmental rewards in return for their use of local resources, and others, more cynically, might label ‘greenwash’.

More importantly, the gas field in particular, and the presence of Chevron and other multinationals in Bangladesh in general, have much to teach us about the workings of global capitalism via the endless seeking out of new territories and profits by energy companies, their ambivalent relationship with the states and populations of the places where they work, and their peculiarly twenty-first-century requirement for good publicity, or ‘reputation’. The book is not, however, an institutional ethnography, though the enterprise of ‘studying up’ is vital (Guterson, 1997; Marcus and Fisher, 1986; Nader, 1974), as is the attempt to ‘see it like an oil company’ (Ferguson, 2005).³

Instead, the chapters that follow are largely based on the perspectives of people who either live in the vicinity of the gas field or in the area’s transnational communities in the UK. By listening to them, one gains insight into ‘the grips of worldly encounters’ which Anna Tsing calls ‘friction’: ‘the awkward, unequal, unstable and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (2005: 4). It is these worldly encounters, not so much between the binaries of ‘local’ and ‘global’, or ‘the villagers’ and ‘the corporation’, but between a range of actors who are both localised and global yet who have vastly different types of connections and entitlements, which are my primary focus. To this extent, what follows is an ethnography of twenty-first-century capitalism, or, as the Comaroffs would have it, ‘Millennium capitalism’, which: ‘appears to both include and to marginalise in unanticipated ways: to produce desire and expectation on a global scale’ (2000: 298). How some people are included and others marginalised, and the desires and expectations that they have, lie at the heart of the book.

Since anthropological methodology is largely based upon experiences during fieldwork, the distinction between the personal and professional is somewhat fuzzy. Having said this, I do have more of a personal interest in the Bibiyana Gas Field than if it were elsewhere in South Asia, for it is adjacent to Nadampur, the village where I carried out my doctoral fieldwork in 1987–8, which I have been visiting on a regular basis ever since. It was on such a visit in 2005 that I first saw the Chevron traffic safety billboards that line the road from Syedpur. There was a new road too, cutting across the fields just outside Nadampur. As we approached the village we passed trucks filled either with mud, or with labourers sporting yellow safety helmets of the type common to British or North American building sites, but not Bangladeshi ones. As the road broke away from Kakura, a village a mile or so to the north of Nadampur, I saw where the trucks had originated: a vast industrial site, spread over what had previously been an uninterrupted vista of rice lands. I was accustomed to changes taking place in the area; every time I returned there were new or rebuilt houses, and over the twenty or so years since my doctoral fieldwork the small area of tea stalls that had somewhat optimistically been referred to as ‘the bazaar’ had grown so much in size and variety of shops that it was virtually a mall. But this was different: not caused by the individualised wealth of Londoni migrants, who for generations had used their remittances to build smart houses, mosques and roads, but a huge multinational, whose logo was emblazoned on billboards, the health clinic we had just passed and the t-shirts of the children who lingered by the road. Something exceptional was happening.

Friends in Nadampur soon filled me in. Foreigners had discovered gas, they said. The District Commissioner had informed them that they would have to give up their homes and fields; the ‘Chairman’ (of the local union, like a local council) had been negotiating with the company to make sure that they were paid compensation; no-one knew what was going to happen, or where, if they were to lose their homestead land, they would go. There was a resistance campaign, I was told; people from Dhaka had come to assist in the fight.

My visit that time was a short one. A week later I was back in Britain, trying to find out more. From what I could gather from t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Series Preface
• 1 Discordant Developments: An Introduction
• 2 Histories of Connection: Colonialism, Migration and Multinationals
• 3 Material Connections: Resources and Livelihoods in Duniyapur
• 4 Our Own Poor: Social Connections, ‘Helping’ and Claims to Entitlement
• 5 Claims of Partnership and Ethical Connection: Chevron’s Programme of ‘Community Engagement’
• 6 Rumour and Activism: Politics Break Out
• 7 Blow-out! Stories of Disconnection and Loss
• Appendix: The Chevron Way
• Notes
• References
• Index