Yingluck, Thein Sein to discuss Dawei in New York City

Wednesday, 26 September 2012 12:41 Mizzima News

Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and Burma’s President Thein Sein will discuss the Dawei deep-sea port project in New York on the sidelines of the UN 67^th General Assembly meeting on Thursday.  


The project has been having trouble finding financing to go forward, although both countries pledged in August to back the proposed US$ 60-billion port and special economic zone.

Last week, Reuters news agency reported that Thai banks would keep the project afloat with short-term loans until an expected Japanese loan of up to US$ 3.2 billion can be secured.

Thailand's largest construction firm, Italian-Thai Development Pcl, signed a deal in 2010 to build a deep-sea port and Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in southern Burma’s coastal Dawei region.

But the project foundered, as the Thai builder failed to secure $8.5 billion to finance construction of its first phase – roads, utilities and a port.

“Italian-Thai has had difficulty in mobilizing the funding. So now the Thai government has effectively taken over the project,” Thaung Lwin, chairman of the Dawei SEZ told Reuters. “The next step is to invite Japan,” which he said is committed to seeing the project succeed.

Two trips by Yingluck to Burma have been postponed since she and Thein Sein met in Thailand in August to discuss the project.

Last week, Yingluck met with Thai Finance Minister Kittiratt Na-Ranong, Foreign Minister Surapong Towichukchaikul, Transport Minister Charupong Ruangsuwan and Deputy Transport Minister Chatchart Sithipan to prepare for her possible meeting with Thein Sein in New York, a Government House source said, according to the Bangkok Post. Officials have reportedly been seeking various governments and international lending groups to take a stake in the project.

The Thai construction firm Italian-Thai Development, which singed a MoU with Burma in 2008, initiated the Dawei project. The 10-year project includes deep-sea ports, heavy industries, office buildings and commercial areas.

The company was awarded a contract, the first phase of which was worth about $8.6 billion.

Italian-Thai's contract for developing the industrial estate in the Dawei Special Economic Zone was eventually scaled down from 250 to 200-square kilometers.

Myanmar, Thai govts to gear up Dawei special economic zone

Published on Sunday, 16 September 2012 14:06

1

 

Photo shows the developing project area of Dawei Special Economic Zone

Myanmar and Thai governments will make ‘contract modification’ on the Framework Agreement to accelerate the construction of Dawei Special Economic Zone Project, an official of the Supporting Working Body of the project said.

The Framework Agreement was signed on  November 2, 2010,  and that granted Italian-Thai Development Pcl (ITD) the right to develop and operate over 75 years land lease period for the Dawei Project with an associated deep sea port, industrial estate, trans-border corridor link and supporting infrastructure.

The new contract with amendments will be revised and modified the policy agreement by two governments and ITD.

“Italian-Thai Development Company was hired for a project developer initially. Now both Myanmar and Thai governments will be involving as project developers,” said the official.

Two governments are mainly joining the project as developers to assist the project financially.

The preparation works are expected to complete by the end of 2012 to be able to resume the project urgently.

After completion of project preparation, investment companies involving in the project will sign the contract with relevant government ministries.

Myanmar government on March 2012 permitted a total of 50505.0233 acres of land in Dawei district of Tanintharyi Region to establish the Dawei Special Economic Zone.

President U Thein Sein and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra signed three MOUs on his visit to Thailand last July, including  the Dawei Deep Seaport and Special Economic Zone project.

Myanmar Port Authority as authorized implementing agency and ITD on June 12, 2008 signed a Memorandum of Understanding ( MOU ) relating to the implementation of a feasibility study and comprehensive project site for the Dawei Deep Sea Port and Industrial Estates Development Project.

The project contents will be for the development of a deep sea port, an industrial estate divided into six industrial zones including a residential/commercial zone with related infrastructure within the industrial estate, a connecting road and rail link to Thailand as well as oil and gas pipeline from the Gulf of Muttama to the Myanmar and Thailand border along the road and rail link.

Stop Patronizing Dawei Project, Stop Public Debt Hikes

uesday 18 September 2012 

10.30-11.30 am 

At the meeting room on 2^nd floor | Student Christian Centre

The Italian-Thai Development Public Company Limited (ITD) has been in difficulty re: the Dawei Deep Sea Port and Industrial Estate Project (Dawei Project) since it was contracted to develop this project in 2008. Apparently, it has since failed to make a significant progress as planned. For instance, it is incapable of building infrastructures other than the temporary Thai-Myanmar road link. Or it is unable to secure long-term funding for the entire project development.

 












Thai government now plans to support the ITD in the development of the Dawei Project. Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has scheduled to visit Myanmar from 19-21 September 2012 to follow up progress of the joint development of the Project following the Thai-Myanmar MoU signed during Myanmar President Thein Sein’s visit to Thailand in last July.

The Dawei Project is in certain ways comparable to Thailand’s Map Ta Phut industrial estate which has over the last many years been in deep trouble in term of environmental pollution. Given that the scale of Dawei Project is 8-times larger than Map Ta Phut industrial estate, the extent of its environmental consequence is unimaginable. Moreover, in Myanmar context, there are complicated social issues associated with the Dawei Project such as non-transparency, lack of local participation and human rights violation. Even in context of Thailand, the government’s decision to support the Project poses a serious question about legitimacy for spending public money to shoulder risks associated with this massive investment.

Concerned Thai civil society groups that have monitored the Dawei Project see Thai PM’s visit to Myanmar next week for talk on Dawei Project as inappropriate and unethical. Environmental problem associated with the Project will be massive while the host country lacks legal and institutional mechanisms to cope with it. Besides, exploiting public resources in what can be seen as patronizing private investor is fallacious and will put more burdens on the public in the long run.

In light of the above, concerned Thai groups will hold a press conference on 18 September 2012 from 10.30-11.30 am, at the meeting room on 2^nd floor of Student Christian Centre. The panel speaker will be;

• Mr. Veerawat Dheeraprasart: Chair of Foundation for Ecological Recovery (FER)
• Ms. Penchom Tang:  Director of Ecological Alert and Recovery, Thailand (EARTH)
• Mr. Sulak Sivaraksa: Social Thinker and Public Intellectual

Thai-English translation will be provided.

For more information please contact:

Montree Chantawong (TERRA/FER) 08 1950 0560

Luntharimar Longcharoen (TERRA/FER) 08 9489 9489

Foundation for Ecological Recovery (FER) /

Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance (TERRA)

Website: www.terraper.org

Email: fer@terraper.org

  



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Links : http://www.inebnetwork.org/news-and-media/8-news/387-stop-patronizing-dawei-project-stop-public-debt-hikes

Women and gender in Dawei

By Soe Lin Aung, Guest Contributor 

5 September 2012Posted in: Burma

 

This piece is Part 3 in a three-part series focusing on under-analysed aspects of the Dawei deep-sea port and industrial zone project in southeastern Burma. See here for Part 1, an analysis of the activities of Italian-Thai Development, the project’s lead developer; and see here for Part 2, which looks at the project from a labour perspective.
In a church community centre on the outskirts of Dawei, sunlight filters in through the open windows, throwing long afternoon shadows across the floor. Seated on plastic chairs around a few folding tables, leaders of a Karen women’s CBO discuss their programming, as well as their concerns about gendered impacts from the deep-sea port and industrial zone project. The group has been particularly active with villagers on the east end of the Dawei road link to Thailand. About an hour into the discussion, a few more women join the meeting: leaders of a legal aid network comprising ten young women from the Dawei area, assisting mostly women in the area on various legal issues.[i]
The meeting throws into stark relief a noticeable lack of discussion on women and gender issues in relation to the port and industrial project in Dawei. What, in fact, are the likely gender impacts of the project, and what are women doing to avert those outcomes? And why is it that project discourse has been so silent on gender? To some extent, the scale of the project has generated a keen sense of its vast, far-reaching impacts; but to be widespread is not the same as being uniform, and indeed, project impacts are likely to be very different for women and men. Civil society literature on the project, to be fair, has not been completely absent on gender issues, though one must do a bit of digging to find those discussions. News media, on the other hand, has been almost completely gender-absent.
Part of the explanation for a generalized gender silence is likely that, for groups working elsewhere in the Mekong region as well, teasing out the gendered implications of large-scale industrial and infrastructure projects does not always come easily. A whole range of other issues – e.g. environmental, economic, land-related – come to occupy the analytical foreground fairly quickly, as infrastructure issues like road networks, or trade and investment issues like regional economic integration, are not, generally, considered to be ‘gender issues’ foremost. So a certain amount of discursive reconfiguration becomes necessary to problematize these kinds of projects from a gender standpoint, whereas little such work is necessary to do so from, say, an environmental perspective. Further, for many large-scale projects, NGOs and CBOs have become skilled at working with news media and other actors to project their analysis of an initiative, often against analyses from governments or the private sector. Given that leadership positions in these organizations remain largely male-dominated, there is a tendency for gender issues to become secondary, if they are included at all, in such analyses.[ii]
Still, women-led Karen CBOs and church networks in the Dawei area have not been waiting for outside recognition. Particularly with villagers affected by the road link project component, and certainly not only with women villagers, these organizations have been doing important local-level work. They’ve been leading community participatory research around project impacts (including community mapping of land holdings), supporting citizen journalism-style documentation work in remote areas, running trainings on the environment and land rights, hosting English classes and other classes in their community centres, and arranging for scholarships to support young people in these areas. This work has involved close networking with the women’s legal aid network noted above, as well as a host of other actors in the area, including NGOs, other CBO networks, and local government officials.
Through their various activities, these organizations have begun to call attention to a number of concerns related to women’s and gender issues in the area. Gendered wage hierarchies have been one area of concern, whereby better-paying jobs go to men and lower-paying jobs to women, while these groups note as well that sometimes women are paid less than men for the same work. In addition, and not unrelated, livelihood effects from the project are not the same for men and women; differential effects in this area are being watched closely. In terms of displacement issues, women activists note that a lack of transparency in compensation processes has meant, in practice, that individuals who are essentially louder, or simply better-connected, have secured better compensation. This dynamic disadvantages women, who – according to women activists and community leaders in the Dawei area – may be less likely than men to insist or speak out on compensation issues. Local women’s leaders also stress that, in relation to compensation and a host of other issues, women’s prior knowledge of relevant matters will probably also be less than men’s. Without this kind of knowledge, standing up to claim one’s rights, or the rights of a community, becomes a more daunting task.
To some degree, concerns identified by women leaders in the Dawei area have been amplified by organizations based in Rangoon. In a brief set of discussion points on gender in Dawei compiled by the Gender Equality Network (GEN),[iii] a network of local and international NGOs and CSOs who are active on gender issues in Burma, potential gendered impacts in Dawei are considered in reference to gender issues in comparable areas – in special economic zones (SEZs), for example, and in extractive industries and export sectors. Since elements of all of these are included in the Dawei project, they help shed light on what to expect for gendered impacts in Dawei. The GEN paper notes, for example, that in SEZs elsewhere, despite women often constituting the vast majority of the labour force, ‘there are often disparities between men and women with regard to hiring practices, wages, benefits, and employment and training opportunities.’ In terms of lessons from export sectors, the paper highlights the prevalence of gendered wage hierarchies in Burma’s export industries, lack of job security in ‘low-skilled’ positions dominated by women, and differential labour mobility when women are expected to balance family responsibilities. In extractive industries, meanwhile, formal employment and impact compensation are more likely to go to men than women, ‘while the costs, including family and social disruption, and environmental degradation, fall most heavily on women’ (GEN 2012: 1).
In many ways, of course, the GEN paper – to date, possibly the only document that focuses directly on gender issues in the context of the Dawei project – is (unfortunately) spot-on in its analysis. In thoroughly liberalized export-oriented economies, in which SEZs are often a major vehicle for capturing and maintaining foreign direct investment (FDI), women workers face gendered hierarchies, and wages and working conditions, that locate them in the most precarious positions in factories and other workplaces. Indeed, the race to the bottom in Asia is largely the story of the erosion of women’s labour rights, as women account for a vast majority of Asia’s export-oriented factory labour forces. In Thailand, for example, the rise of labour-intensive factory production and linkages to global supply chains coincided with the feminization of the most precarious positions in labour hierarchies throughout the economy, setting the stage for clearly (and severely) gender-differentiated impacts in the early stages of the downturn that began in late 2008 (cf. Pollock and Aung 2011).
It is important to recognize, however, that the direction of the Dawei project differs in key respects from Shenzhen-style SEZs, however much Shenzhen may have been a point of reference for Burmese policymakers supporting the Dawei project.[iv] Foremost, as noted in Part 2 of this series, the industrial zone in Dawei will include some limited light industry, but the emphasis is very much on middle and heavy industries, which while linking to extractive industries and export networks, will not be labour-intensive – nor highly feminized – in the way that classic SEZs in the style of Shenzhen certainly are. Rather, there is reason to believe that, on balance, the Dawei project as a whole – that is, including its reservoir and road link components – will be labour-shedding rather than employment-generating, as the ‘farm to factory transition’ fails to hold: local people are already losing substantial pieces of land and related livelihoods, but the project’s lack of labour-intensive industry means only small portions of newly landless workers will be absorbed into the project (cf. Li 2011).
In fact, for indications of potential gendered impacts from the project, rather than looking to SEZs and the extractive-export nexus, researchers and scholars might more fruitfully turn to working conditions in informal economies. Rendered landless through project-related land concessions, and without viable employment opportunities through the project itself, a resulting surplus population will likely need to find its way in an expansion of informal economies in the area. This informalization dynamic has been known to produce very gender-differentiated impacts.
According to Martha Chen, a leading expert on informal economies, there exists a strong linkage between gender and poverty in the informal sector, as well as gender and vulnerability. Chen highlights that women in the informal sector tend to be own-account traders and producers, or casual and subcontract workers – as opposed to being employers who hire workers for pay. She also notes that even within the same trade, women and men are often engaged in different activities: men tend towards larger operations dealing in non-food items, while women tend to work in smaller operations dealing with food. Meanwhile, while average incomes are lower for both women and men in the informal sector, the gendered wage gap is higher in the informal sector than in the formal sector; and segmentations of the informal sector tend to find men in positions of comparatively high wages (as informal employers or, moving down the hierarchy, informal employees), while women are a strong majority in occupations with lower wages (at the bottom of the hierarchy, as casual wage workers or industrial outworkers/homeworkers) (Chen nd and Chen 2007, cited in Arnold and Aung 9, 43-44).
In the Mekong region, researchers and scholars note as well that, with a scaling up of trade and investment in a given area, economic spaces in which women predominate – such as small-scale trading through informal networks, or even certain roles within rural smallholder farming operations – tend to become narrower or more restricted, driving women’s descent down labour hierarchies to increasingly precarious occupations (Kusukabe 2008, Mekong Migration Network 2012 [forthcoming]). This trend has been identified as being of particular concern where border economic zones (BEZs) in Mekong countries are reorganizing trade and production in rural areas in ways that favour larger-scale actors, closing down spaces where, sometimes over generations, women have worked hard to carve out trade niches for themselves.
While the Dawei project is not a textbook BEZ in the way of economic zones in Myawaddy and Mae Sot on the Thai-Burma border, or other BEZs on the peripheries particularly of Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, these gender dynamics that arise in the reconfiguration of economic activity in rural areas will very likely be in play in Dawei. Moreover, they emerge not only in processes, especially displacement, driven directly by the establishment of the industrial zone and road link themselves, but also in relation to a secondary investment wave that has been driving up land prices and incentivizing land concessions near the seafront industrial area and along the road link to Thailand. Investors seeking proximity and access vis-à-vis direct project components may increase the number of people who are dispossessed of or expelled from their land in coming years, increasing standing estimates of upwards of 20,000 people. Again, impacts will be widespread and far-reaching, but certainly the same for women and men. Particularly as labour-shedding trajectories set in, and newly landless labourers seek out employment in the informal sector, these women and men will find very different conditions in informal economies.
In Swahili the informal sector is named for where it takes place: jua kali, under the burning sun. Will women workers in and around Dawei increasingly find themselves walled in at the bottom of jua kali? If so, what kind of organizing initiatives could mitigate against exploitation there, and create opportunities for workers to raise their voices, claim their rights? Or will women activists and community leaders in the Dawei area largely avert this scenario through their continued work with local communities and other stakeholders? To create more space for the latter possibility, the gender-silence on Dawei should be broken. For activists and NGO networks, as well as for researchers, scholars, and journalists, this may well be the first task at hand.
Soe Lin Aung is a researcher and consultant based in Rangoon. He can be reached at thant.soelin@gmail.com
Works Cited
Arnold, D. and Aung, S.L. (2011) ‘Exclusion to Visibility, Vulnerability to Voice: Informal Economy Workers in the Mekong Countries.’ Discussion paper, Oxfam-in-Belgium (Oxfam Solidarités). January.
Chen, M. (2007) ‘Rethinking the Informal Economy: Linkages with the formal economy and the formal regulatory environment.’ DESA Working Paper No 46. Geneva: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Available at http://www.un.org/esa/desa/papers/2007/wp46_2007.pdf (last accessed 21 July 2012).
Chen, M. (nd) ‘Women in the Informal Sector: A global picture, the global movement.’ Available at http://info.worldbank.org/etools/docs/library/76309/dc2002/proceedings/pdfpaper/module6mc.pdf (last accessed 21 July 2012).
Desmond, M. (2011) Crossing the Hills: The Dawei Development Project. Paung Ku Background Paper. Rangoon: Paung Ku. December.
Gender Equality Network (GEN) (2012) ‘The Dawei Development Project: Some Possible Gender Impacts.’ Rangoon: GEN. January.
Kusukabe, K. et al (2008) ‘Gendering Border Spaces: Impact of open border policy between Cambodia-Thailand on small-scale women fish traders.’ African and Asian Studies 7.
Li, T. (2011) ‘Centering labor in the land grab debate.’ Journal of Peasant Studies, 38:2.
Mekong Migration Network (MMN) (Forthcoming) Migration in the Greater Mekong Sub-region: Resource Book: Border Economic Zones in the GMS. Chiang Mai: MMN. 2012.
Pollock, J. and Aung, S.L. (2010) ‘Critical times: Gender implications of the economic crisis for migrant workers from Burma/Myanmar in Thailand.’ Gender and Development, 18:2. Available at http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/critical-times-gendered-implications-of-the-economic-crisis-for-migrant-workers-131727 (last accessed 21 July 2012).

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[i] I have not explicitly sought nor gained permission to give the names of specific organizations or individuals in this series, so given remaining sensitivities and security concerns for local activists and organizations working in the Dawei area, here and elsewhere in this series I will not reveal full names or titles of individuals and organizations.

[ii] This challenge, of course, is not only a challenge in Dawei. Migrant labour organizations in Thailand, for example, have highlighted the reality that, when organizing initiatives in migrant communities become more formalized, more structured, women’s participation at leadership levels tends to decrease. Organizing efforts that have built community networks in the Dawei area have likely reflected this tendency, which would account, at least in part, for the limited discussion of gender issues in relation to the project.

[iii] GEN was formerly known as the Women’s Protection Technical Working Group. Some readers may know it by the former name. GEN is a network that consists of national and international NGOs, civil society organizations and networks, UN agencies, and technical resource persons.

[iv] See for example Desmond 2011 for an analysis linking the Dawei project to the Shenzhen SEZ.

 

Academics: Revise Dawei plan

The Thai government and contractor Italian-Thai Development should revise their plan for the Dawei port and industrial complex in Myanmar to reflect the impact on residents of both countries, say academics.

• Published: 24/08/2012 at 05:26 PM
• Writer: Achara Ashayagachat

The Dawei megaproject, they say, will affect people in Myanmar as well as Thai people along the route of a 328-kilometre highway to Dawei from the Laem Chabang and Map Ta Phut industrial zones via Kanchanaburi province.

The Council of State, the government's legal adviser, is still studying a proposed bill to create a special economic zone in Kanchanaburi, said Pojanee Artarotpinyo, director of the Spatial Development Planning and Strategy Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB).

As well, she said, the Finance Ministry is looking at ways to help ease the financial burden ITD is facing with the Dawei venture.

The SET-listed contractor has been struggling to raise funds for the project amid concerns that Myanmar's new reformist government appears less enthusiastic about Dawei than the former military junta that awarded the concession to ITD.

"Whether the Thai company is involved or not, (deep sea port) development will be created anyway, so we should help support the Thai venture," said Ms Pojanee.

"And since the government has already pledged strong support to the project, all agencies are now coordinating closely with their Myanmar counterparts to concretise and finalise the project."

She made the comments on Friday at a seminar on "Thai-Myanmar relations: From Map Ta Phut to Dawei" at Mahidol University's Faculty of Environment and Resource Studies. It was the second time Thai civil society groups had gathered to discuss the issue; the last time was in late July in Chiang Mai. No business representatives attended either session.

Issues that the two governments had to renegotiate included project sites, features or characteristics, and financing methods, said Ms Pojanee.

In any case, she added, the promoters of Dawei should consider all the lessons learned from the Eastern Seaboard development in Thailand, including environmental and health problems.

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra will visit Myanmar again next month to follow up progress on Dawei, after the leaders of the two countries agreed last month in Bangkok that obstacles would be cleared to facilitate the multi-billion baht project.

A highway from Bang Yai in Nonthaburi via Nakhon Pathom and Kanchanaburi would help connect the Dawei port to the Greater Mekong Sub-region Southern Corridor, said Somsak Boonpratanporn, director of the assessment work group at the Highways Department.

The 98-kilometre tollway would cost 45.9 billion baht, said Mr Somsak, adding that compensation for the acquired land would cost 4.85 billion.

The motorway would be linked to the 70km Kanchanaburi-Ban Phu Nam Ron (Ratchaburi) route, now under feasibility study. Design work has been completed on the final 160km route from Ban Phu Nam Ron to Dawei, said Mr Somsak.

Veerawat Dheeraprasart, chairman of the Foundation for Ecological Recovery, warned that the post-development problems at Dawei could be 10 times serious than what Map Ta Phut and Laem Chabang experienced.

The reason, he said, was that environmental and health regulations in Myanmar were very weak, so the rights and benefits of the Dawei communities would be compromised in the name of foreign investment.

"The ITD-initiated project has yet to take into account core principles mentioned in the Asean Charter including respect for human rights, cultural identity and diversity and sustainable development and environmental conservation goals," said Mr Veerawat.

He also called for the Highway Department to conduct a new environmental assessment of the planned motorway.

Dr Khanat Kruthkul of Ramathibodi Hospital said there should be a serious study of the potential health and social impacts that would accompany freer cross-border movement, industrialisation and environmental depletion.

Consumerism that inevitably emerges from industrialisation would change people's way of life, said Dr Khanat. They would become fatter, while communicable diseases such as malaria would become more resistant to medication, while viruses and parasites would also adapt and be difficult to deal with.

Suphakit Nuntavorakarn of the Healthy Public Policy Foundation said Thai civil society organisations did not oppose development. However, they want to see industries that best match the environmental and cultural characteristics of the Dawei region as well as Kanchanaburi.

For example, he said, there could be high impact from heavy and frequent loads of chemical substances and other materials being transported along the highway.

"Based on the initial form of investment, Myanmar's emissions of greenhouse gases will increase five times after the Dawei project's completion," he said.

Mr Suphakit said water consumption would be greater at 5.9 million cubic metres per day, with more waste water, industrial wastes and accumulated household and industrial garbage.

"Therefore, the investing company cannot simply do separate environmental impact assessments but needs to look at the overall picture as there is enormous impact on the people and the environment on both sides of the border," he said.


Links:  http://daweiprojectwatch.blogspot.com/

The Company in Dawei

By Soe Lin Aung, Guest Contributor

3 September 2012Posted in: Burma, Thailand

This piece is Part 1 in a three-part series focusing on under-analysed aspects of the Dawei deep-sea port and industrial zone project in southeastern Burma. This piece focuses on Italian-Thai Development, the lead developer of the Dawei project. Part 2 looks at the project from a labour perspective, while Part 3 focuses on women’s and gender issues in Dawei. Both are forthcoming.  
From the crest of a hill some two hours’ drive from the town of Dawei, a mocha-brown ribbon of earth can be seen winding its way over the hills to Thailand. This road link connects the Dawei project’s planned beachfront seaport and industrial zone area to a semi-official border crossing at the edge of Thailand’s western Kanchanaburi province. On this hilltop on a morning in May, rumours about the project’s imminent cancellation seem the far-away stuff of idle newsrooms, reaching for a story without the energy to get beneath the surface. Here, by contrast, there is a certain vitality. Bulldozers are eagerly carving road into hillside, while pick-up trucks with a famous logo are busily ferrying workers and goods to and from projects sites and the Thai border. At the dam site up the river valley and in and around the industrial zone area as well, the message is similarly clear: the project, for now at least, is still going forward.
The logo on the trucks, of course, is the logo of Italian-Thai Development (ITD), Thailand’s largest construction company and the lead developer on the Dawei deep-sea port and industrial zone project.[i] Along with labour and gender issues – which, respectively, will be the subject of parts 2 and 3 of this series – the role of ITD in relation to the project has been relatively under-read thus far.[ii] To the extent that it has entered project analyses and reporting, it has been as the outside conglomerate first obtaining the coveted prize (the framework agreement signed with the Myanma Port Authority in November 2010), then struggling to back it up with investment to match. Overwhelmingly, the question has been, ‘What is ITD’s role in the Dawei calculus?’ But answering this important question might actually require turning it around. How, in fact, does the Dawei project fit into the company’s overall profile – its structure and activities, its growth strategy and vulnerabilities?
Beginning with the company on its own ground, rather than relationally through its involvement in Dawei, should bear fruit in terms of gaining an in-depth, situated understanding of the company – not to mention strategic benefits, for campaigners and civil society groups of various kinds. By starting with a holistic analysis of a company, campaigners can then understand where, in a company’s overall structure, its main vulnerabilities lie – at which point building campaigns that target those vulnerabilities becomes possible.[iii] Particularly important in the case of ITD are two elements that have, to date, been little discussed: ITD’s operations model, and its growth strategy. Both emerge fairly clearly in the context of the company’s history.
ITD’s history goes back to its founding in 1958 in Bangkok.[iv] In the company’s early years, the Italian and Thai co-founders – this partnership gave the company its name – oversaw the company’s involvement in highway infrastructure and eventually an emergent tourism industry. Since the death of the company’s Italian co-founder in 1981, the company’s been very much a Karnasuta family affair. Current President Premchai Karnasuta is the son of the company’s other co-founder, Dr. Chaijudh Karnasuta, while Premchai’s younger sister and oldest son are both company directors, with substantial stock holdings to match. President since 1993, Premchai was around for Thailand’s pre-crisis boom years and the depths of the 1997 crisis. By the time of the company’s post-crisis reconsolidation in the early 2000s, heavy infrastructure had moved to the center of their operations and sales structure. Much of the Bangkok Skytrain was the work of ITD, while ITD led the consortium responsible for building Suvarnabhumi Airport – for which the apparently close personal friendship between Premchai and Thaksin Shinawatra surely didn’t hurt, and would help keep the company’s public-sector project backlog pretty well full throughout the early 2000s.
ITD’s operations model dates to the late boom years, when the company shifted towards a more integrated operations model, such that products or services they would formerly get from outside the company – such as prefabricated concrete or the production of beams for railway work – began to be things the company would make or do itself through its own subsidiaries. According to the company, this diversification of operations – also known as ‘backwards integration’ in some trade publications – was due to subcontractors compromising quality and slowing down projects. This was unacceptable during the heady years of the early and mid-1990s. While ITD has pointed to their integration as a key advantage for the company vis-à-vis its smaller competitors, it does also provide challenges for expansion outside of Thailand, where the company is less able to rely on intra-company procurement and supply networks. In Dawei, however, the company has made intensive use of the overland road link to Thailand, meaning labour and construction materials are relatively easily brought in. The company’s integrated operations approach is thus more intact than one might expect for an ‘overseas’ project.[v]
ITD’s growth strategy is predicated on securing more contracts outside of Thailand. First in the late 1990s, then just after 2006, and again after 2008, the trade and business press in Thailand and the region were all writing the same story about ITD: that it was ‘finally’ looking abroad for more contracts. It’s not difficult to see why the company might want to get creative at any of these times – two financial crises and the fall from grace of a certain powerful ally. Infrastructure trade publications also note that ITD’s domestic contracts have long failed to provide stable footing for the company. But while the company’s overseas project backlog increased only modestly after the 1997 crisis and after 2006, since 2008 – this particular cycle of global crisis having sent ITD balance sheets into the red for years – the company’s expansion abroad has had a look of resolve about it. In addition to the 60-year Dawei concession secured in late 2010, in 2010 ITD also locked in a 25-year concession for an elevated highway in Dhaka, and in 2011 signed a long-term deal on a monorail and mass transit system in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC).
Viewed together, backwards integration and a thoroughly international growth strategy are not particularly compatible – except in Dawei, in that the road link to Thailand allows the company to continue a fairly in-house operations approach. And here it is important to note that ITD’s post-2008 overseas contracts represent  dramatic moves for a company that, until now, has done little of substance outside Thailand – investments here and there, some fairly isolated hydropower projects, reclamation work in the Philippines, relatively small-scale construction work in Burma and Saudi Arabia. Even in India, home to ITD’s largest subsidiary by far (a cement company), the company’s expansion strategy involved few resources besides finance capital, as they basically bought an operating company and kept its management structure intact. In this context the scale of the Dawei project is all the more striking, and yet its physical proximity to Thailand – and Bangkok in particular, which is very much the base of ITD – offers valuable continuity vis-à-vis the company’s (at this point) long-standing operations approach.
In other words, ITD’s emphasis on integrated operations is a limiting factory for their growth strategy, but one that is less relevant in the case of Dawei than in, say, Dhaka or HCMC. Nonetheless, it points up the company’s substantial dependence on the overland road link – which is something of a weak link in the company’s implementation strategy. According to Dawei-area activists and community leaders, almost all of the construction materials for the project are brought into the Dawei area through this overland crossing, not to mention workers from Thailand and high volumes of consumption goods for Thai worker camps. The road link passes through a semi-official border crossing, which Burmese authorities could close at any time,[vi] and territory held by the Karen National Union (KNU), the non-state armed group that already very publicly halted construction on the road link for months last year. Lately the KNU has scaled back their opposition to the project, possibly in relation to ongoing ceasefire negotiations with the Burmese government. But if the road link were again blocked somehow, or if the border crossing were closed, project implementation would halt almost immediately. The likelihood of this unfolding at this stage is debatable. As a pressure point, however, ITD’s dependence on the overland road link leaves the company somewhat exposed.
ITD faces further vulnerabilities as well. In the context of local implementation, the project’s current phase is relatively labour-intensive, especially compared to later implementation phases and general long-term project plans. Thus ITD is more exposed to labour mobilization now than it will be in the future – though there are significant obstacles to labour-based actions in Dawei in the near term. This labour question will be covered in more detail in the second article in this series. The other two main vulnerabilities have already been much discussed elsewhere, one financial and one political – namely the company’s sustained investment difficulties on the one hand, and on the other hand, question marks over high-level Burmese political patronage, particularly since the cancellation of the coal-fired power plant plan earlier this year. These need little elaboration here, except to note that they are real, and they will likely remain serious concerns for some time still. The recent withdrawal of Max Myanmar, ITD’s main implementing partner in Dawei, will only more deeply underscore these concerns.
Significant question marks notwithstanding, it remains the case, at least currently, that very powerful political and structural factors are still driving the project forward. Peua Thai electoral victories mean ITD suddenly has powerful partners in Thai politics again, as evidenced by Prime Minister Yingluck’s continual foregrounding of Dawei discussions in her visits to Naypyidaw – not to mention Thailand’s recent decision to commit more than USD 1 billion to projects supporting the Dawei initiative on the Thai side of the border (with an emphasis on highway infrastructure). Meanwhile, the Hlutdaws’ new ‘reformists’ have made clear the centrality of industry and infrastructure development to their liberalization agenda, against the broader backdrop of sustained regional economic integration ahead of 2015, when the ASEAN Economic Community is scheduled to come into force.
One thing missing, then, in articles claiming the imminent suspension of the Dawei project, is a deeper sense of the structural forces in place. Were the project actually to be cancelled, it would be against the grain of some of the most important national and regional trends of the neoliberal era in Southeast Asia. And for a company in the midst of a bold bid to rebuild its revenue base and expand overseas, the stakes are high indeed.
Soe Lin Aung is a researcher and consultant based in Rangoon. He can be reached at thant.soelin@gmail.com.
Works Cited
Bronfenbrenner, K. (Ed.) (2007) Global Unions: Challenging Transnational Capital through Cross-border Campaigns. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Chachavalpongpun, P. (2011) ‘Dawei Port: Thailand’s Megaproject in Burma.’ Global Asia. 26 December. Available online at http://www.globalasia.org/V6N4_Winter_2011/Pavin_Chachavalpongpun.html?PHPSESSID=27e2e5f1eea77f9e245c911358886d55 (last accessed 21 July 2012).
Dawei Development Association (DDA) (2012) Local People’s Understandings of the Dawei Special Economic Zone. Rangoon: DDA. March.
Desmond, M. (2011) Crossing the Hills: The Dawei Development Project. Paung Ku Background Paper. Rangoon: Paung Ku. December.
ITD (2011) Italian-Thai Development: Annual Report 2010. Bangkok: ITD. Available online at http://www.itd.co.th/en/index.php (last accessed 21 July 2012).
ITD (2012) Italian Thai Development: Annual Report 2011. Bangkok: ITD. Available online at http://www.itd.co.th/en/index.php (last accessed 21 July 2012).

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[i] Statements regarding ITD as Thailand’s largest construction company are measuring, it may be helpful to note, by market share. In 2010 ITD’s percentage share of total revenue generated by construction companies listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand was 43.56%, with their closest competitor, CH. Karnchang PCL accounting for just 11.01% of market share (ITD 2011: 35). In 2011 ITD’s market share slipped to a still very strong 40.48%, while Sino-Thai Engineering PCL jumped a spot above CH. Karnchang’s 12.46% market share to their second-place 13.53% (ITD 2012: 37).

[ii] By contrast, overall treatments of the project abound. See for example Chachavalpongpun 2011, Desmond 2011, and Dawei Development Association 2012.

[iii] This broad approach to corporate campaigns was developed through the Strategic Corporate Research program at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. See for example Bronfenbrenner 2007 (Ed.).

[iv] The facts included here are drawn mostly from news databases, trade publications, and ITD’s own company documents. A more detailed explanation of these and other questions relating to ITD’s history, structure, and activities will be included in an in-depth report on ITD to be published later this year.

[v] Indeed, the extent to which the Dawei project actually represents an ‘overseas’ project is debatable, insofar as labour and construction materials are brought in fairly easily overland from Thailand, while the project’s benefits are widely seen as accruing mostly to Thailand rather than Burma. See Chachavalpongpun 2011 (7-8).

[vi] Burmese authorities certainly have a history of closing border crossings, and thus stymying cross-border trade, as a negotiating tactic with Thai counterparts and sometimes border-based armed groups.

Sources : http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/

Workers in Dawei

By Soe Lin Aung, Guest Contributor

4 September 2012Posted in: Burma, Thailand

This piece is Part 2 in a three-part series focusing on under-analysed aspects of the Dawei deep-sea port and industrial zone project in southeastern Burma. See here for Part 1, an analysis of the activities of Italian-Thai Development, the project’s lead developer. Part 3, which will focus on women’s and gender issues in Dawei, is forthcoming.
At first glance, a labour analysis of the Dawei deep-sea port and industrial zone project may seem counterintuitive. To date, critical readings of the project have focused mainly on environmental impacts, displacement and relocation of local people, the marginalization of local voices, and in a wider perspective, the concern that the majority of project benefits will accrue to Thailand rather than Burma, signalling Burma’s rather disadvantageous entry into regional and sub-regional infrastructure networks. These lines of analysis are fruitful and will remain as such. That labour has been absent from them is not, per se, a problem thus far.
Further, early claims that the project would generate substantial job opportunities seem to have faded. ‘We need tons of workers,’ said Premchai Karnasuta in late 2010, when his company secured the project concession. ‘We will mobilize millions of Burmese’ (IHT 2010). Premchai is president of Italian-Thai Development (ITD), Thailand’s largest construction company and the project’s lead developer. Yet almost two years later, the project-specific labour force in Dawei does not approach even the more moderate estimate of ‘tens of thousands’ of workers said (in 2010) to be necessary for the project’s first five years. Instead, Dawei-area activists and community leaders[i] say that the project’s current labour force consists mainly of a relatively small number of migrant workers: about 800 Thai workers and 600 migrant workers from upper Burma. Even when (or if) the project reaches projected capacity some ten to fifteen years from now, the emphasis in the industrial zone is on heavy industry, not medium or light manufacturing industries that would be more labour-intensive. Though China’s much-vaunted Shenzhen special economic zone (SEZ) is considered a model of sorts for the Dawei project, there are no plans for the latter to involve manufacturing or export processing in a way that would require the vast labour force of Shenzhen or other SEZs elsewhere in Asia.
Thus labour analyses of the Dawei project have yet to gather momentum, despite some limited discussion in some circles.[ii] However, reading Dawei through a labour lens does enable some important shifts in perspective, chief among them its ability to underline a particular set of very tangible impacts – namely employment arrangements – for people in and around the Dawei project area, including the road link to Thailand. Following Tania Li’s work on the intersection of land and labour issues, a labour perspective offers added analytical value at two scales: locally, it ‘highlights the jobs generated, and the rewards received’ by communities where large-scale investment takes place; and more broadly, it ‘highlights the predicament of people whose labor is not needed by the global capitalist system,’ as the ‘anticipated transition from farm to factory’ has ceased to be a viable promise in most parts of the global South (Li 2011: 281).
In and around the Dawei area, the labour profile of the project can be broken into at least four main strands:
a)      Migrant workers, currently said to consist of about 800 Thai workers and 600 workers from upper Burma
b)      Local workers, i.e. workers from the Dawei area, working likely for project sub-contractors or on a temporary/casual basis for specific tasks, e.g. clearing land for project facilities or the road link
c)      Informal economy workers, who while not directly attached to project contractors or sub-contractors, may supply secondary services or goods such as selling basic consumption products at ITD worker camps, or other forms of uncontracted labour that relates to the project (e.g. waste collection and disposal)
d)     Rural farmers and villagers, whose work as smallholder farmers, plantation workers, and landless peasants will undergo changes with increasing investment in the area
There is, to be sure, considerable overlap between categories B, C, and D, and to some degree A and C. For example, to the extent that rural villagers have seen any employment opportunities generated by the project thus far, they have been enlisted for basic labour-intensive tasks like clearing land for the road link project and in the industrial zone area. As for agricultural labour, traditional workforce statistics tend to calculate labour forces – e.g. on a national scale – by referring to ‘non-agricultural labour’. However, scholars and activists have, in recent years, highlighted how changes in rural areas have swelled the ranks of certain labour forces, especially in informal economies, as agricultural investment trends have shifted towards labour-shedding technologies that dispossess farmers of their land, driving the creation of a landless peasant class and out-migration from rural areas. As a result, the classical juxtaposition of workers and farmers, as with the more fundamental opposition of the urban and the rural as analytical categories, has become tenuous at best. Instead, cross-sectoral alliances between different types of workers, urban and rural as well as formal and informal, have become central to organizing efforts. In its very explicit combination of road infrastructure through remote highland areas and a large-scale waterfront industrial zone, the Dawei project also highlights the need for an approach that brings together agricultural and industrial labour perspectives.
Activists and community leaders in the Dawei area have emphasized the centrality of migrant labour, both Thai and from upper Burma, to current early-stage implementation activities. Living mostly in ITD worker camps along the road link route and in and around the industrial zone area, these workers are involved in labour-intensive tasks like road construction, the building of the camps themselves, construction of company and project facilities like the ITD project headquarters in the industrial zone area, and relocation sites like the Bawah site on the north end of the industrial zone area. Compared to workers from upper Burma, Thai workers are said to have higher wages and more secure contracts, and sensitive relationships with local communities – especially in remote road link camps where Thai workers have uneasy interactions with Karen villagers, to whose village centres and shops Thai workers come for simple consumption goods, for food, and sometimes for alcohol. Still, Thai workers’ wages are mostly lower than the new Thai minimum wage, which has been a source of discontent, and Thai workers have expressed dissatisfaction with their working and living conditions in the project area, leading to some criticism of ITD in the Thai press. Workers from upper Burma have also voiced dissatisfaction over wages that are both lower than the Thai minimum, and lower than normal wages in the Dawei area. In fact, contrary to expectations, local activists say they have not seen the emergence of a clear project labour hierarchy pitting Thai workers at the top and workers from Burma (local and migrant) at the bottom. While a relatively small management coterie does exist, and it does consist largely of Thai workers, remaining project workers – that is, the vast majority of workers associated with the project – apparently face similar conditions of exploitation, regardless of where they come from.
While the situation of migrant worker communities appears reasonably well known, it is difficult to say the same of local workers and informal economy workers. Local workers from Dawei township itself largely engage and disengage with project activities through the work of the project’s many local sub-contractors, while local villagers are brought in as casual and temporary workers to clear land for the road link and the industrial zone site. This is a shifting workforce, varying by site and from week to week, day to day. Less has been said thus far of informal economy workers, though those who engage in work related to the project are likely to increase as worker camps become better established and larger. Meanwhile the wider question of informal labour applies to almost all workers who interface with the project, insofar as full-time, secure employment arrangements have been reserved only for a relatively small group of management-level ITD employees. In addition, as economic land concessions increase around the road link route and the industrial zone area, more smallholder farmers will be forced to move into largely insecure and precarious employment arrangements, either as workers in the informal sector or as landless labourers on larger-scale plantations and contract farms.
On the level of jobs generated and rewards received – that is, at the first of Tania Li’s two scales – the Dawei project, even just from a labour perspective, can be said to have brought few if any benefits to workers involved (directly and indirectly) with the project. Instead, the prevailing dynamic is a combination of outright expulsion and adverse incorporation of local people and migrant labour. As a reorganization of production, this situation is much in line with high-modernist agrarian transition and industrialization processes elsewhere. Ben White et al gloss the issue as follows: ‘Contemporary forms of agrarian transition involve investments and dispossession that expel people from agriculture without absorbing their labour in manufactures or elsewhere in the economy, and create an “agrarian question of labour” involving large “surplus populations” of the dispossessed’ (White et al 2012: 624).  Li’s second scale, regarding the situation of people and communities whose labour power is systematically foreclosed upon by dominant trends in global capitalism, enters here.
In many ways the Dawei project represents a classical study in the labour-shedding dynamics of large-scale SEZs and infrastructure projects, which in expelling peasants from land and providing limited and unfavourable employment prospects produce reserves, sometimes vast, of under- or non-integrated labour – de facto ‘surplus populations’. In Dawei, estimates of displaced people often exceed 20,000, but little if any of this labour will be incorporated in the industrial zone elements of the project, which focus on heavy and medium industries, while employment prospects along the road link and in plantations and/or contract farms are unlikely to absorb all of this newly precarious labour force. Further, capital flows – such as those gathering in Dawei – have been shown to move in search of flexible, informalized labour, ‘leading to the systematic establishment of anti-labour regimes to lock in comparative advantages based on cheaper, more manageable labour’ (AMRC 2011: 3). So even that labour that is absorbed through the project, directly or indirectly, is likely to be highly unfavourable. Dawei, in this sense, reflects a broader erosion of labour standards in Asia.
SEZs have been a key vehicle for this erosion process. In Dennis Arnold’s useful four-phase narration of SEZ development in Asia, SEZs have moved from being – through the provision of cheap and flexible labour and various kinds of tax incentives – basic FDI-capturing mechanisms for newly export-oriented Tiger economies in East Asia (in the first and second phases), to being outright vehicles for territorial consolidation and capital accumulation (in the third and fourth phases) (Arnold 2010, cited in Wulandari n/d: 7-8). These latter stages involve the state’s re-entry as a formidable actor in and against transnational capital flows, with states using SEZs to concentrate production activities and certain services, while setting up SEZs as nodes in wider infrastructure networks. Dawei, although not providing for labour-intensive production, nevertheless fits well as a latter-phase SEZ, linking up coastal industrial and logistics activities with an extensive overland trade network to Bangkok and beyond.
Dawei, of course, is not the only major industrial initiative in Burma. With 23 industrial zones in and around Rangoon, 18 industrial zones elsewhere (mostly in other central lowland and coastal areas), and two other SEZs ‘proper’ (in Kyaukphyu and Thilawa) (cf. Zaw and Kudo 2011), Burma is much in line with the regional trend of using SEZs and industrial zones as vehicles for capital accumulation. As strategies through which state and capital produce ‘market-adjustable’ societies, SEZs can be seen to represent two theories developed by David Harvey: accumulation by dispossession, and the spatio-temporal fix (cf. Harvey 2003). In short, capitalism at the frontier tends to involve the seizure of assets – notably land, labour, and natural resources – from populations rendered surplus, while capital must be ‘fixed’ in time and space – particularly through physical infrastructure like roads – in order for accumulation at the periphery to be transferred to the core.[iii]
These dynamics are alive and well in Burma. Dawei is one case among many. Border trade zones, such as the long-discussed economic zone near Myawaddy, link closely to these trends; the much-publicized land dispute for the industrial park in Mingaladon fits in here as well; and to some extent the Kyaukphyu and Thilawa SEZs could be good further case studies. Moving beyond SEZs and industrial zones, the picture becomes even more crowded. In Burma’s highlands, new land legislation renders vast tracts of swidden-cultivated land ripe for land grabs, while the National Human Rights Commission has said that, of the 30 or so complaints they field daily, a majority are land-related. Or put differently: at Tania Li’s second scale, it is clear that capital accumulation trends in Burma are creating a critical situation for those farmers and peasants whose labour, by the new rules of the game in Burma, is no longer needed.
For many international NGOs and civil society actors in Burma, the default response to challenges like this has been essentially top-down: a combination of policy work, and engagement with the government and private sector. Refreshingly, the response in Dawei has been far more bottom-up, as local NGOs and related networks have understood, first, the strategic value of local-level organizing; and then they have brought the fruits of those organizing efforts, in the form of targeted demands – backed by groundswells of community sentiment – to the doorsteps of state and capital. This approach is the essence of effective, multilevel community action. Organizations working elsewhere in Burma, and indeed in many other countries as well, could learn a great deal from the response in Dawei.
However, activists and community leaders in the Dawei area have yet to seriously work on labour issues. And certainly, the obstacles are many. Worker camps tend to be isolated and they’re often remote, there are a number of languages in play, issues between local people and migrant workers are sensitive (as is often the case), and the power differential between capital and labour could hardly be higher. More practically, labour rights work in Burma, despite a rich history extending back to the colonial era and the early independence period, has probably returned to a stage that could generously be called nascent, despite a great deal of labour activity in Rangoon-area industrial zones and among farmers and peasants in the countryside. Given limited institutional experience in the relevant corners of contemporary civil society, it is likely that little may happen unless workers themselves begin turning their grievances into action.
Counterintuitively, perhaps, this latter possibility may be the most encouraging: self-organized workers taking the situation into their own hands. Imagine cross-sector alliances between dispossessed peasants and exploited construction workers; imagine linkages between disaffected Thai workers and migrant Burmese workers. The potential is less remote than one might think. In recent years, many grassroots social movements across Southeast Asia have begun to take seriously the need to organize across sectoral divides from a labour perspective, in order to reimagine collective bargaining in contexts where conventional trade union approaches no longer apply (cf. AMRC 2012). Results have been mixed; much progress remains to be made. In particular, there has been a great deal of discussion around how to create spaces for cross- and multi-sectoral organizing – through media, through community centres, through mobile informal exchanges, etc. Opinions vary, but at a recent conference in Bangkok, for example, participants stressed that work of this kind is unlikely to be successful unless workers themselves are already organizing on the ground. Indeed, experienced labour activists argue that solidarity emerges in the course of workers’ struggles, rather than being produced or imposed a priori through external interventions (cf. Campbell 2012 [forthcoming]). In this context, the role of civil society organizations becomes that of strengthening, sustaining, and linking these struggles.
In other words, no shortcuts – just the daily hard work of local-level organizing and alliance-building, with ears to the ground. Thailand-based groups that work with migrant workers from Burma would do well to assist in this work, in Dawei and elsewhere in the country, as these organizations know what it means to open up spaces for organizing in difficult conditions. Admittedly the need for a labour-based approach in Dawei remains largely unrecognized; labour issues are considered peripheral to other approaches thus far. But as a project that remains, for now at least, something of a showpiece initiative for Burma’s liberalization process, Dawei may well set standards for years to come. It could also be read as a harbinger of sorts, a sign or symbol of broader trends in the region. The processes that Dawei represents – informalization of labour, expulsion of rural communities from their land, degradation of labour standards, the production of new surplus communities at the periphery of global capitalism – are signs of dark days to come for working people, in Burma as elsewhere. While the project is still relatively labour-intensive, now is the time for labour mobilization. With the stature of the project still intact, the repercussions could be tremendous.
Soe Lin Aung is a researcher and consultant based in Rangoon. He can be reached at thant.soelin@gmail.com.
Works Cited
Asia Monitor Resource Centre (AMRC) (2011) Capital Mobility and Workers in Asia: Case Studies on Japan, China, Philippines and Thailand. Capital Mobility Research Paper Series. Hong Kong: AMRC. Available at http://www.amrc.org.hk/node/1249 (last accessed 21 July 2012).
AMRC (2012) ‘Editorial: Redefining Collective Bargaining in Asia.’ Asian Labour Update. Hong Kong: AMRC. May. Available at http://www.amrc.org.hk/node/1224 (last accessed 21 July 2012).
Arnold, D. (2010) Administration, Border Zones, and Spatial Practices in the Mekong Region. PhD Dissertation. Department of Geography, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.
Arnold, D. and Aung, S.L. (2011) ‘Exclusion to Visibility, Vulnerability to Voice: Informal Economy Workers in the Mekong Countries.’ Discussion paper, Oxfam-in-Belgium (Oxfam Solidarités). January.
Campbell, S. (Forthcoming) ‘Workplace struggles of precarious migrants in Thailand.’ Paper to be presented at the 2012 International Burma Studies Conference, October 2012.
Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press.
International Herald Tribune (IHT) (2010) ‘An Industrial Project That Could Change Myanmar.’ 26 November. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/world/asia/27iht-myanmar.html?pagewanted=all (last accessed 21 July 2012).
Li, T. (2011) ‘Centering labor in the land grab debate.’ Journal of Peasant Studies, 38:2.
White, B. et al (2012) ‘The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals.’ Journal of Peasant Studies, 39:3-4.
Wulandari, S. (nd) ‘Special Economic Zones in Asia.’ Hong Kong: AMRC. Available at http://www.amrc.org.hk/node/1237 (last accessed 21 July 2012).
Zaw, M. and Kudo, T. (2011) ‘A Study on Economic Corridors and Industrial Zones, Ports and Metropolitan and Alternative Roads in Myanmar.’ In Intra- and Inter-City Connectivity in the Mekong Region, edited by Masami Ishida. IDE-Jetro. Bangkok, Thailand: IDE-Jetro. Available at http://www.ide.go.jp/English/Publish/Download/Brc/pdf/06_chapter5.pdf (last accessed 21 July 2012).

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[i] I have not explicitly sought nor gained permission to give the names of specific organizations or individuals in this series, so given remaining sensitivities and security concerns for local activists and organizations working in the Dawei area, here and elsewhere in this series I will not reveal full names or titles of individuals and organizations.

[ii] One of the main Dawei-area activists has spoken of plans to bring in Rangoon-based labour leaders to establish contact with workers in project camps, but timing and details were unclear. The issue is clearly seen as secondary at best to a host of other approaches: environmental, economic, land-related, etc.

[iii] Researchers and scholars have connected both theories to SEZ initiatives and labour informalization in Southeast Asia. See, for example, Arnold and Aung 2011, and Wulandari nd.

Link:  http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/