DEVELOPMENT-VENEZUELA: Expanded River Route to Develop Hinterland

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Luis Córdova

CARACAS, Sep 20 1999 (IPS) - The Orinoco and Apure rivers are the focus of a major project to spur the development of Venezuela’s hinterland, by providing the possibility of year-round navigation by barges capable of carrying up to 3,000 tonnes of goods.

The government of President Hugo Chávez has made the Orinoco- Apure river route a top priority, in order to bring “progress” to Venezuela’s sparsely inhabited interior, rich with untapped agricultural, mining, forest, oil and fishing potential.

The Andean Development Corporation (CAF) plans to disburse, starting next month, 10 million dollars to complete years of studies, and to begin work next year on making the rivers maneuverable by large flatboats – a phase expected to take five years.

In July, an outcry was triggered when the Transport Ministry diverted funds away from a new branch of the Caracas subway system to the Orinoco-Apure project, arguing the need to enable access and transportation to and from the isolated regions of central and southern Venezuela, where there are currently few economic opportunities.

A full 80 percent of Venezuela’s 23 million inhabitants live in towns and cities, most of which are located along or near the country’s north coast.

The idea of the river project is to provide the conditions for the emergence of businesses in villages located along the Orinoco and Apure rivers, enabling them to grow into towns and cities, in order to settle the rest of the country.

The powerful Orinoco river runs from Venezuela’s southern border with Brazil, north along the Colombian frontier. It then turns northeast and runs across Venezuela into the Atlantic ocean. The Apure completes the east-west line across the country, running from the border with Colombia in the west into the Orinoco.

Through dredging and other works, barges will be able to carry goods from the mouth of the Orinoco on the Atlantic to the confluence of the two rivers in central Venezuela, and then continue along the Apure to the Colombian border.

Also being studied is the possibility of extending the route along the Orinoco to the extreme southern part of Venezuela, and into Brazil. Yet another possibility is connecting the river route with means of transportation in Colombia.

CAF, a financial institution that promotes development in the Andean Community of Nations – a trade bloc comprised of Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – will finance studies evaluating the need for dredging, the regulation of water flows, and the creation or expansion of jetties and river ports.

The government says the waterway will be complemented by investment in highways, as well as in railways, in a country where trains are virtually non-existent, in order to generate a continuous, expanded transportation network.

The Orinoco-Apure river system has long drawn the attention of Venezuelan planners. But the project only started to take shape last decade, when making the waterway navigational for large barges began to be considered essential to the development of the hinterland, and a more even distribution of Venezuela’s over- concentrated population.

Those in favour of the expanded waterway through central and southern Venezuela argue that the possibility of transporting products will draw investment, make possible a range of economic activities, and give rise to a network of towns throughout a vast, relatively unpopulated region.

“Our goal is to try to get all of the villages to forge stronger links with the river,” said Gilberto Buenaño, an adviser to the Planning Ministry.

In an interview with the local daily ‘El Mundo’, Buenaño underlined that the government project was a comprehensive one that foresaw the need for investment in health, communications, education, housing and infrastructure to attract new settlers.

But some are sceptical that creation of a navigational river route will automatically have an impact on the region’s economic potential.

Also pending is the challenge of drawing in private investors by convincing them that the project – above and beyond the calculations, projections and feasibility studies – is good business.