EITI Plus Plus gets praise, encouragement

WASHINGTON, April 18 (UPI) -- Watchdogs support a new World Bank program to ensure oil and gas revenue is redistributed but warn against shutting out citizen input.

The EITI Plus Plus initiative, announced this week by World Bank President Robert Zoellick, would give governments of resource-wealthy countries technical assistance for capacity building across the "entire value chain," from contracting to oversight to collecting and spending what international corporations pay.

"Revenue windfalls from high commodity prices must translate into tangible improvements in the lives of poor people living on the fringes of the global economy," Zoellick said. "The EITI Plus Plus will help client countries to build capacities to draw sustainable benefits from their natural resources."

The World Bank said it will "develop national capability to handle the boom in commodity prices, and channel the growing revenue streams into fighting poverty, hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy, and disease."

The program is based on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, aimed at forcing companies and governments to report all exchange of money.

"We welcome the Bank's initiative to extend transparency in the oil, mining and gas sector beyond revenues to look at how concessions are awarded, contracts negotiated, and how the money is spent," said Radhika Sarin, international coordinator for the Publish What You Pay coalition.

She sounded an alarm, however, similar to other organizations this week that feared the EITI Plus Plus initiative will be a government-industry-only club. The fear is that as the price for oil and gas increases, the competition to access the wealth will increase as well. Such a drive has led to human-rights abuses, the concentration of a country's income into the hands of those in power, and opposition from citizens and civil society groups quashed, such as Nigeria and Sudan.

"The World Bank has an important role to play in protecting these activists and promoting their ability to work without fear of intimidation," said Karin Lissakers, executive director of the Revenue Watch Institute.

"Extractive resources need to provide real benefits for the peoples of the countries where these minerals are located," said Haguette Labelle, head of Transparency International's board of directors. TI co-founded EITI.

Next week TI will release its evaluation of the world's Top 42 oil and gas companies on revenue transparency.