Effect of Forced Relocation on Household Income and Consumption Patterns: Evidence from the Aynak Copper Mine Project in Afghanistan

Abstract

In 2011, the government of Afghanistan and a Chinese mining company relocated an entire village near the Aynak copper mine, where they developed a mining site. This paper investigates the impact of this displacement on affected households’ income and consumption patterns using a difference-in-differences approach and primary household-level data from the villages around the mine in two periods: one just before relocation in 2011 and another in 2015. In 2011, all households of the Wali Kali village, one of the seven project-affected villages, were involuntarily relocated. Project-affected families (PAFs) claim that their traditional earning sources have been inadequately replaced by mine-related earnings and that, being separated geographically, they now face difficulty maintaining social networks that are necessary for their survival. Once lost, rebuilding social networks is not easy in war-trampled Afghanistan. This paper clarifies these shadowy effects of forced relocation and demonstrates that traditional daily labour income was reduced significantly and only partially replaced by income from mine-related activities among those who were relocated and that relocation significantly discouraged the participation in community life, reflecting the losses of social capital among the PAFs due to separation.

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Corrigendum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgments

We thank two anonymous referees for constructive suggestions. We also thank Assistant Professor Abidullah Arabzai at Kabul University and Mr. Nematullah Assadullah at Hiroshima University for providing valuable research support. Data and code are available to bona fide researchers upon request by emailing the corresponding author.

Notes

1. Wakefield (2004) summarises the current situation and issues concerning the role of women, both from the view points of household and community participation.

2. See Pereira and Andraz (2013) for an extensive review on the economic effects of public infrastructure investment.

3. The works of Afolayan (1987), Syagga and Olima (1996), Kitula (2006) and Kusiluka, Kongela, Kusiluka, Karimuribo, and Kusiluka (2011) are noteworthy for cases in Africa and that of Webber and McDonald (2004) is relevant for China.

4. Cernea (1997) identified eight impoverishment risks of forced displacement: a) landlessness, b) joblessness, c) homelessness, d) marginalisation, e) food insecurity, f) increased morbidity and mortality, g) loss of access to common properties and h) social distraction.

5. See Price (2009).

6. See Kaur (2012).

7. MJAM stands for MCC-JCL Aynak Minerals, where JCL is Jiangxi Copper Company Limited, another Chinese state-owned enterprise.

8. The agreement between MCC and the government of Afghanistan stipulates that MCC must comply with Afghanistan’s environmental and social protection guidelines and policies in addition to World Bank Environmental and Cocial Safeguard Policies, the Equator Principles and the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights.

9. The rest of the villages were abandoned long ago due to war and conflicts and people have migrated to other parts of the country or even to Pakistan (Kaur, 2012).

10. The commission consists of 18 members from different government agencies and is responsible for assessing and evaluating compensation claims and for identifying the PAFs in the project area.

11. As noted by De Jongh (1994), these are among the relevant pulling factors.

12. The development of the main has been delayed by the danger of Taliban attacks at the mining site, such as those in 2012 and 2013, and by the discovery of large Buddhist ruins immediately above the copper deposit; an extensive archaeological project is now underway at this site. Incidentally, the delay provided time for the archaeologists to excavate artefacts and antiquities that would have been otherwise destroyed or stolen. See Bloch (2015) for an overview of the situation.

13. This is consistent with the Resettlement Action Plan. See Kaur (2012).

14. The Tobagai area consists of three small villages (Halimi, Sadullah Qala and Bawookhel), but in this study, the name Tobagai is used for simplicity.

15. The rest of the households consist of those missing from government records and those for which the head is deceased.

16. The Appendix provides more detailed descriptions of each item.

17. Given that some of our outcome variables are zero for either the treatment or control group, one may consider truncated regression as an alternative. However, to avoid any stronger assumptions, such as normality of the error distribution, we utilise ordinary regression in the following analyses.

18. The source is the Aynak Archaeology Project Authority of the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum; however, data about the workers cannot be disclosed due to security reasons.

19. See Bloch (2015).

20. According to the investigators’ information, the mining site is providing commuting transportation to their workers.

21. Source: Aynak Archaeology Project Report Oct, 2013 Page 2, retrieved from http://mom.gov.af/Content/files/Progress_Update-Oct_2013.pdf.

22. There is local transportation available, and some labourers even stay at the site in tents and go home weekly.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Sumitomo Foundation [#153421];Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan [#16H05704].