By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 30 1996 (IPS)

Former Brazilian tycoon Eleizer Batista da Silva sees the creation of two extensive development zones along the Atlantic coast as the key to improving economic integration in South America.

Announcing his plan this month, Batista said an infrastructure network needed to bne established to cover energy, telecommunications and “logistics” – the collection, storage and transportation of agricultural and manufactured products to consumers. The network’s hub would be a series of “development beltways” based on maritime transportation along the coast of the contintent.

Batista retired as President of the giant Compania Vale do Rio Doce – acclaimed as a rare example of efficiency among state-owned companies.

He proposed establishing one such seaborne beltway, from Cartagena and Barranquilla in Colombia, to Salvador, capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia. Another would run between the port city of Vitoria, in the eastern part of Brazil southward to Bahia Blanca, Argentina.

Beginning in the port cities on the Atlantic, there would be a series of “logistical tributaries” towards the interior, made up of river routes, highways, railroads, gas pipelines, and other lines of transportation and communication, forming a network that would serve all development projects in South America, Batista said.

In revealing his vision for the future, Batista said the northern beltway was a good illustration of the new development paradigm that sought integration at the lowest possible economic and environmental cost, a concept which Brazilians called “eco-efficiency.”

Surplus oil, natural gas and electricity in Venezuela, and coal from Colombia, would be the basis for development in the northern Amazonian region and northeastern Brazil, covering the region’s energy deficit.

Liquid natural gas, a new technology with advantages for storage and transportation, could come from either from Venezuela or Trinidad and Tobago, Bataista said. In exchange, Brazil would offer high-quality minerals from Carajas, for the development of a more internationally competitive steel industry.

These complementary strategies would also pave the way for several development projects in agriculture, forestry, fishing, and industry.

Beginning in Colombia, there would be land routes to Peru and Ecuador; and starting in the southeastern part, there would be roads, river routes and railroads towards Chile, Paraguay and Bolivia.

Batista advocated transportation by sea because of lower costs and a lower impact on the environment compared to highways and railroads.

Eco-efficiency has great potential in South America, because of its population and economic concentration on the coast, he said. In Brazil, “a strip 150 kilometers wide along 8,000 kilometers of coast produces and moves close to 80 percent of the national economy.”

His ideas and proposals are contained in a report entitled “Infrastructure for Sustainable Development and Integration in South America,” sponsored by such institutions as the Andean Corporation for Development, the Vale de Rio Doce, and the Bank of America.

The region must adopt a new development paradigm, Batista argued. The retired executive now devotes most of his his time to studying economic planning.

“In the past, South American countries developed their infrastructures in the context of central planning and investments controlled by the government,” he stated. The objectives then were geopolitical, the occupation of territory, and national self-sufficiency. The results were often inefficient investments as well as environmental and social disasters.

Substituting that paradigm with a “geo-economic perspective,” sustainable development, and physical and economic regional integration, combining the different components in those “logistical axes,” would contribute towards economic and ecological efficiency, Batista said.

“Development beltways” would synthesize that proposal and other similar mechanisms could also be designed for the continent, such as the development of a similar model on the Pacific coast of South America, he said.

Based on his experiences at Vale do Rio Doce – the largest exporter of iron in the world – Batista said he did not believe in the efficiency of a land route to the Pacific for countries on the Atlantic.

There is difference between “physical distance and economic distance,” he argued. Transporting soya from western Bolivia, crossing over the Andes, and then crossing the Pacific in small boats to Japan was much more costly than doing it through a Brazilian port and then on large 200,000-ton ships.

Brazil, which had the possibility of using three “super- ports” for ships over 18 meters in the northeast and central-west for ships, could become “an instrument for economic competitiveness” for the South American economies, Batista argued.

The low level of development of infrastructure could also become an advantage for South America, because it offered the opportunity to make it more competitive and sustainable while foreseeing environmental costs. This would be more profitable than intervening later, as had happened in the case of industrialized countries, Batista concluded

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