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dam-l Hidrovia Paraguay-Paraná
Environmentalists Are Skeptical Pantanal Waterway Was Killed
Source: Associated Press, July 7, 1998
(Corumba, Brazil) Day after day, a dredger sucks sand off the bottom of the
Paraguay River along Brazil's far western border and shoots it downstream
in a muddy swirl. It's just routine channel maintenance, operators say. But
environmentalists are skeptical. They fear the dredging is part of an
unspoken plan to sidestep ecological protests and build, little by little,
a commercial waterway that could doom the world's largest wetlands and kill
endangered birds and animals.
In March, the Brazilian government announced it was dropping plans for the
"hidrovia," a long-sought shipping route into South America's heartland
that would cut through the vast Pantanal wetlands, which are three times
the size of the Florida Everglades. Eduardo Martins, head of Brazil's
Environmental Protection Agency, said at the time that the hidrovia "does
not have much strategic value and would put the Pantanal at risk." But as
months have passed and dredging goes on, the cheering of environmental
activists has given way to dismay.
"Our big fear is they've abandoned the mega-project only to have it done in
stages," says Alcides Faria, president of the environmental group Ecology
in Action. "It's easier to do in stages. It will just take longer to get it
all done." Everything was "mega" about the hidrovia -- a $2 billion,
five-nation project designed to open the center of the continent to the
Atlantic Ocean. The original plan was to link the Paraguay and Parana
rivers in a 2,134-mile-long waterway stretching from Caceres, in western
Brazil, to the Uruguayan seaport of Nueva Palmira. For landlocked Bolivia
and Paraguay, as well as western Brazil, the hidrovia would give farmers
and miners a cheaper route to get their goods to market. Bolivia estimated
its soy exports could quadruple to eight million tons a year. Downriver, in
Uruguay and Argentina, the project promised millions of dollars in shipping
business and port fees.
The problem was the hidrovia would have to go through the Pantanal, a
56,000-square-mile, nearly pristine wetland on Brazil's western frontier.
It is home to thousands of types of plants and animals, including
endangered species like jaguars, marsh deer and giant anteaters.
Today, barges can navigate the waterway only during eight or nine months
each year because of the Pantanal's seasonal flooding and draining. Making
the hidrovia navigable year-round would require deepening, straightening
and broadening the rivers to as much as three times their current width at
some points. A series of studies, including one by the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, warned that the hidrovia would drain large areas of the
Pantanal, upsetting the delicate ecosystem and possibly affecting migration
patterns and even the weather.
When ecologists complained, Brazil's government announced it would scale
back the original project to a $120 million version that eliminated the
most radical change -- the straightening of a northern section of the
Paraguay River. That idea is little better than the original plan, says
Stephen Hamilton, a scientist at Michigan State University who has studied
tropical flood plains and who contributed to the Pantanal study financed by
the Inter-American Development Bank. He says that merely deepening the
Paraguay River would be enough to throw the Pantanal's ecosystem out of
whack. And if the waterway is pushed through piecemeal, environmentalists
may become victims of their own success in opposing the mammoth hidrovia
project, Mr. Hamilton says. "Really that's the worst way to go about it,"
he says." The whole system is interdependent, and with no comprehensive
plan -- with Bolivia doing one thing and Paraguay doing another -- it will
be even worse than if there was a carefully planned project that
encompassed the entire river system."
Opposition to even the scaled-down plan led Brazil to announce the hidrovia
was suspended. Yet the dredger still pumps away at the Tamengo Channel, a
tract of the hidrovia in Bolivia near Corumba, a Brazilian river city 1,100
miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro. Faria, the Ecology in Action leader,
points out that while the dredger is based in Bolivia, that doesn't stop
the craft from crossing over to the Brazilian side of the river.
Environmental protests are noticeably quieter in other countries interested
in the waterway, and Brazil is sensitive to the pro-hidrovia sentiment
among its partners in the Mercosur common market: Argentina, Paraguay and
Uruguay. Despite its March announcement, the Brazilian government has not
formally communicated its intention to stop the project to the other
countries involved. The Foreign Ministry declines to comment on the
project's final status.
Some Brazilian officials remain openly bullish on the hidrovia. "We want a
waterway and we still don't have it," Jose Alex Botelho Oliva, policy
coordinator for the Transportation Ministry, said at a recent seminar.
"That's what the Intergovernmental Waterway Committee is doing. We are
working and we will continue to work." Shipping companies say failure to
build the waterway would cost the region $1 billion in annual exports. "The
question isn't whether or not there will be a waterway -- the waterway is
already there. Not going ahead with the project is like not fixing a road
that has holes in it," says Michel Chaim, director of Cinco-Bacia, one of
the region's biggest shippers.
Angelo Rabelo, Corumba's secretary of environment and tourism, says the
dredging is not part of the larger waterway project. But he hedges when
asked if the hidrovia is going ahead. "We can't put ecological concerns in
front of commerce. Nor can we put commerce in front of ecological
concerns," Mr. Rabelo says. "If we have to wait another year to make sure
[environmental damage] doesn't happen, we'll wait another year, because
there are enough examples of projects like this that didn't work."
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Glenn Switkes, Director, Latin America Program,
International Rivers Network
1847 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California 94703-1576, USA
Tel. (510) 848 1155 Fax (510) 848 1008
http://www.irn.org
South America:
Tel/Fax/Message: +55 65 791 1313
email: glen@nutecnet.com.br
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