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dam-l Basic stuff on big dams/LS



The following was recently written by IRN campaigns director Patrick
McCully, author of "Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large
Dams" (Zed Books, 1996). It was written for a press agency in Brazil.


>Looking Back at the Big Dam Era
>
>by Patrick McCully
>
>For the past 60 years or so, Big Dams, the largest structures built by
>humanity, have been potent symbols of patriotic pride, "progress" and the
>conquest of nature. Dictators and revolutionaries, Communists and
>Capitalists, writers and engineers, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus have
>all extolled the nation-building virtue of Big Dams. But today, dams have
>lost their sheen. People are coming to realize that far too many big dams
>have been built, that big dams do more harm than good, and that better,
>cleaner, safer, cheaper alternatives are available.
>
>The world's rivers are obstructed by more than 41,000 large dams (a 'large
>dam' is usually defined by as one at least 15 metres tall). Almost half of
>all the world's large dams have been built in China. The US is the second
>most dammed country followed by the ex-USSR, Japan and India. When it comes
>to the Really Big Dams - the 300 or so behemoths around the world defined
>by the industry as 'major dams' - Brazil is in fourth place in the world,
>behind the US, ex-USSR, and Canada.
>
>All these dams together generate around one-fifth of the world's
>electricity. Brazil is one of the world's most hydro-dependent countries,
>with 95 per cent of its electricity generated by dams. Fifty other
>countries are dependent on hydro for 70 per cent or more of their
>electricity, all but two in the "Third World" and former Communist bloc.
>
>Only 20 per cent of the world's large dams produce hydropower. The majority
>of dams are built to supply water for agriculture,
>although-big-dam-and-canal irrigation systems are notoriously expensive,
>inefficient and unsustainable compared to other types of irrigation.
>Another important reason for building dams is flood control - yet despite
>the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars dams seem in fact to
>have made flood damage worse. One example is on the lower Parana and
>Uruguay Rivers in Argentina and Uruguay where the destructiveness of floods
>seems to have increased greatly since the building of Itaipu on the Parana
>and Salto Grande on the Uruguay.
>
>An estimated 1.5 million square kilometres - the area of Amazonas state -
>have been inundated by reservoirs worldwide. The one per cent of the global
>land surface which has been consumed by reservoirs represents a much
>greater loss than the raw statistic implies - the floodplain soils which
>reservoirs inundate provide the world's most fertile farmlands, their
>marshes and forests the most diverse wildlife habitats. In Brazil,
>Eletrobras data shows that by 1987 more than 85,000 square kilometres of
>land had been flooded by dams.
>
>Freshwaters, because of a host of human assaults, but especially because of
>dams, are the most degraded of major ecosystems. A dam tears at all the
>interconnected webs of river valley life. Dams are the main reason why more
>than one-fifth of the world's freshwater fish are now either endangered or
>extinct.
>
>The human consequences of the damming of the world have been as dramatic as
>its ecological ones. Although the dam builders have not bothered to keep
>count, the number of people flooded off their lands by dams is certainly in
>the tens of millions - 60 million is a reasonable guess. The available
>evidence suggests that very few of these people ever recovered from the
>ordeal, either economically or psychologically. In Brazil, at least a
>quarter of a million people have been displaced by dams.
>
>Diseases spread by vectors such as mosquitoes which thrive in irrigation
>canals and along the edges of reservoirs have taken an inestimable human
>toll. Dams can be lethal too because they break. Around 1,000 people were
>killed when the incomplete Orós Dam in Ceará was swept away in a flood in
>1960. A calamitous series of dam bursts in the Chinese province of Henan in
>August 1975 left as many as 230,000 dead. Hundreds have also died because
>they resisted eviction to make way for dams. In Guatemala in 1982, 369
>Mayan Indians, mainly women and children, were tortured, shot, stabbed,
>garrotted and bludgeoned to death in punishment for their community
>demanding they be properly compensated for the loss of their homes to the
>Chixoy Dam.
>
>The suffering of dam victims dates back mainly to the glory years of the
>big dam era, the 1950s and 1960s, when mass evictions to make way for dams
>first began on a worldwide scale. The rate at which dams are being built
>today, however, is far below its peak - - on average 5,400 large dams were
>completed every year in the 1970s, compared to around 2000 dams per year in
>the 1990s.
>
>The main reason for the slow down in dam-building has been the growing
>strength of dam opponents around the world, groups like the Movimento dos
>Atingidos por Barragens (MAB) in Brazil and the Grupo de Accion por el
>BioBio (GABB) in Chile. These atingidos and activists are making it
>increasingly difficult to build dams, especially in those countries which
>are relatively democratic and tolerant of dissent.
>
>One result of the worldwide opposition to dams has been that the World Bank
>- historically the major single funder of dams around the world - was
>forced to establish the independent World Commission on Dams (WCD) to
>investigate whether dams have actually produced the benefits their
>promotors claims and to make recommendations on alternatives.
>
>In the US and some other Northern countries, not only have opponents
>succeeded in stopping new dams being built but they are also leading
>campaigns to 'decommission' dams, to tear down old dams and restore rivers.
>Dam decommissioning is just of the important issues on which the WCD is
>mandated to make recommendations. Another is that of how to ensure
>reparations are paid to those who have lost their homes, lands, jobs,
>livelihoods, or health to dams.
>
>The issue of reparations is a theme in many of the presentations -
>including one by MAB - - to be made to the WCD's public hearing on dams and
>alternatives to be held in Sao Paulo on August 12-13. Presentations from
>Colombia, Panama, Paraguay, and Chile will also discuss the urgent need to
>ensure that those who have built dams are held accountable for the
>suffering they have caused. The 20th century has been the big dam century.
>The 21st may well be the century of cleaning up the mess of the
>dam-building nation-builders.

end

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      Lori Pottinger, Director, Southern Africa Program,
        and Editor, World Rivers Review
           International Rivers Network
              1847 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California 94703, USA
                  Tel. (510) 848 1155   Fax (510) 848 1008
                        http://www.irn.org
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