E/CN.4/2003/90 page 20 endorsement of the dam, but the project continued. The Philippines’ Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act provides for free and prior informed consent and enables an indigenous community to prevent the implementation of any project which affects its ancestral domain in any way by refusing consent to the project. Though Itogon’s indigenous communities petitioned the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples to suspend the project because free and prior informed consent had not been given, the commissioners declined to act on the petition. Thus, the laws designed to protect the indigenous communities were in fact ignored.67 III. DAMS, DEVELOPMENT AND HUMAN RIGHTS 59. Lack of space does not allow the Special Rapporteur to report on other cases of large-scale development projects impacting upon indigenous peoples. The issues involving the construction of dams are, however, emblematic of the wider picture. Given their importance, the World Commission on Dams launched extensive studies on the matter, and concludes that: “Large dams have significantly altered many of the world’s river basins, with disruptive, lasting and usually involuntary impacts on the livelihoods and socio-cultural foundations of tens of millions of people living in these regions. The impacts of dam-building on people and livelihoods - both above and below dams - have been particularly devastating in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where existing river systems supported local economies and the cultural way of life of a large population containing diverse communities.” 60. Concerning indigenous peoples specifically the Commission’s report states: “In the Philippines, almost all the larger dam schemes that have been built or proposed were on the land of the country’s 6-7 million indigenous people. Similarly in India, 40-50% of those displaced by development projects were tribal people, who account for just 8% of the nation’s 1 billion people. These costs are not balanced by any receipt of services from dams or by access to the benefits of ancillary services or indirect economic multipliers in the formal economy. “… For indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities dam-induced displacement can trigger a spiral of events that spreads beyond the submergence area. A case in point is the situation of the 100,000 Chakma people displaced by the Kaptai hydropower dam in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. The project submerged two fifths of their cultivable land; as a consequence, 40,000 Chakma left for India and another 20,000 were supposed to have moved into Arakan in Burma. “… The Bayano dam in Panama that forced the indigenous Kuna and Emberá peoples from their traditional territories resettled them on land that was less fertile and subject to encroachment by loggers. The Panamanian Government systematically failed to fulfil agreements made with the affected indigenous people at the time of construction, as well as commitments negotiated later. Among the violations was the Government’s failure to compensate adequately for the loss of traditional territories and provide legal titles to the new lands. What happened in Panama in the 1970s is similar to what has happened in