The Burma Environmental Working Group

Today, the Burma Environmental Working Group (BEWG) – an alliance of grassroots-based organizations – issues its Benchmarks for Investment in Burma’s Energy, Extractive and Land Sectors to serve as a framework for responsible investment in critical sectors in Burma. The release of the benchmarks comes at a very important time when Western democracies are considering easing or eliminating existing economic sanctions against Burma, and companies and countries are showing renewed interest in investment in Burma despite a high risk investment environment. Adherence to the benchmarks will increase the likelihood that investment in sectors that have been historically linked with human rights and environmental abuses will benefit the people of Burma and does not undermine effective political, social and environmental progress in this emerging South East Asian country.

Press Release in English, in Burmese

Benchmarks Statement in English, in Burmese

Contacts:
For English contact Paul Sein Twa at +66.(0)81.724.7093 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
For Burmese contact Wong Aung  at +66.(0)85.713.3344 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

As investors start flooding in to Burma, a lack of revenue transparency and accountability is set to exacerbate the country’s resource curse, warns a watchdog group today.

According to a report by the Arakan Oil Watch, billions of dollars in revenues from the sale of natural gas have gone unrecorded in Burma’s public accounts and been siphoned off by corrupt military rulers, leaving Burma with some of the worst social indicators in the world and embroiled in conflicts over natural resources.

Natural gas exports are the biggest foreign income earner for Burma, amounting to over US$2 billion in sales per year since 2006. Revenues are set to increase by 60% as new gas exports to China and Thailand begin as early as next year. An additional 41 oil and gas blocks are currently under exploration by various foreign companies.

Despite recent moves by the new government to improve the budgetary process, detailed income and disbursement of oil and gas revenues remain undisclosed. The role of military enterprises in controlling gas revenues is also opaque.

“With new gas projects in the pipeline and more investors pouring in, Burma’s people urgently need to know where the gas money is and how it is spent” said Jockai Khaing of the Arakan Oil Watch. “A new influx of revenues without transparency will simply entrench military dominance of the economy.”

The report calls for the establishment of laws and institutions which will manage oil and gas revenues transparently before further extraction of natural resources by foreign investors. Laws that require impact assessments and the free, prior and informed consent of affected communities are also needed to ensure the protection of rights and the environment.

Press Releases, Briefer and full report, which includes case studies of revenue transparency systems from other oil and gas rich countries, can be downloaded here:

Arakan Oil Watch Burma's Resource Curse - Press Release - English, Chinese, Thai, Burmese

Arakan Oil Watch Burma's Resource Curse - Briefer - English

Arakan Oil Watch Burma's Resource Curse - Report - English, Burmese

Alternative Download Site for all files

The Arakan Oil Watch is a community-based organization monitoring oil and gas projects in Burma.

Contact:  Jockai Khaing +66 82 184 1335 +66 88 157 1328

You are invited to the launch of a new report by Arakan Oil Watch titled ‘Burma’s Resource Curse’ the case for revenue transparency in the oil and gas sector at 10 am on March 22, 2012. Read it here! English |  Burmese

The report highlights the lack of transparency and accountability by successive Burmese governments and continuing military control over the country's natural resources. Arakan Oil Watch suggests alternative models of revenue transparency management from oil and gas rich countries such as Timor Leste, Brazil and Norway, and analyzes key lessons for Burma at this critical time.

The Burma Environment Working Group (BEWG), an alliance of grassroots-based organizations, will also be presenting its “Benchmarks for Responsible Investment in Burma’s Energy, Extractive and Land Sectors”.  Benchmarks have been developed to ensure that growing investment in Burma does not undermine effective political, social and environmental progress in Burma.

1. Introduction

2. ေျမလွန္ပစ္ျခင္း ဒီေရေတာမ်ားဖ်က္ဆီးပစ္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ေဒသခံကမ္း႐ိုးတမ္းလူမႈအသိုက္အဝန္းမ်ားအေပၚ သက္ေရာက္မႈမ်ား

3. တ႐ုတ္ေရနံရွာေဖြတူးေဖာ္ျခင္း၏ ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္မႈကို ခံေနရေသာ မိ႐ိုးဖလာေရနံတြင္းတူးသူမ်ား အာရ္ရကန္ေရနံေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေလ့ေလာေရးအဖြဲ႕

4. ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ ကခ်င္႐ိုးရာတိုင္းရင္းေဆးလုပ္ငန္းအစီအစဥ္ သဘာ၀ပတ္ဝန္းက်င္ထိန္းသိမ္းျခင္းႏွင့္ ဝင္ေငြဖန္တည္းျခင္းအတြက္အခြင့္အလမ္းမ်ားဖန္တည္းျခင္း

5. ဟူးေကာင္းခ်ိဳင့္ဝွမ္း က်ားထိန္းသိမ္းေရး နယ္ေျမရွိ ကခ်င္လူမ်ိဳးမ်ား၏ အခန္းက႑

6. ကရင္ျပည္နယ္ ပတ္ဝန္းက်င္ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး ကရင္ျပည္နယ္ရွိ ဌာေနတိုင္းရင္းသားအသိအျမင္မ်ားႏွင့္ အသက္ေမြးဝမ္းေက်ာင္းမႈမ်ား - ရပ္႐ြာက ထိန္းသိမ္းထားေသာ ေနရာမ်ားကို အထူးျပဳေလ့လာျခင္း

7. ကရင္ျပည္နယ္ေျမာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ ျဖစ္ပြားေနေသာ စားနပ္ရိကၡာလုံၿခဳံမႈအေပၚၿခိမ္းေျခာက္မႈမ်ားႏွင့္ ေဒသဆိုင္ရာ ေျဖရွင္းနည္းမ်ား

8. ပဲခူးတိုင္း၊ ေ႐ႊက်င္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ေ႐ႊတူးေဖာ္ျခင္းလုပ္ငန္း

9. ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ ေရျမႇဳပ္ပစ္ျခင္း တာဆန္းဆည္ႏွင့္ နယ္ေျမေဒသတြင္းရွိ ရွမ္းေက်း႐ြာမ်ားႏွင့္ သဘာ၀ပတ္ဝန္းက်င္အေပၚ ၎၏႐ိုက္ခတ္ခ်က္မ်ား

10. ကရင္ျပည္နယ္ ပတ္ဝန္းက်င္ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး ကရင္ျပည္နယ္ရွိ ဌာေနတိုင္းရင္းသားအသိအျမင္မ်ားႏွင့္ အသက္ေမြးဝမ္းေက်ာင္းမႈမ်ား - ရပ္႐ြာက ထိန္းသိမ္းထားေသာ ေနရာမ်ားကို အထူးျပဳေလ့လာျခင္း and credits

Kachin Accessible Alternative Case Studies in Kachin Language (18M)

Read full statement. Both English and Burmese provided.

Full Burmese version (4 M) |  Text Only Burmese Version (1 M)

Full English version (4.3M) |  Text Only English Version (700k)

Burmese: Executive Summary (65k) |  Press Release (75k)

English: Executive Summary (17k) | Press Release (75k)

Thai: Press Release (75k)

Launch Presentations: Paul Sein Twa (KESAN) |  Naw La (KDNG)

See a listing of all available files related to this publication

Publication Disclaimer: The list on the page 15 is intended as a list of peoples living in Burma. BEWG as a collective does not take a stand on which of these groups are indigenous or ethnic  or simply part of the population living in Burma right now.