ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Court Pulls Plug on Waterway Mega-Project

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 3 1999 (IPS) - Waterways once seemed to be the answer for reducing transportation costs in Brazil, but a recent legal challenge indicates that the mega-projects have lost support due to their social and environmental costs.

The current battle involves the Araguaia-Tocantins waterway, named for two large rivers originating in central Brazil that join and then flow into the Atlantic Ocean near Belém, the state capital of Pará in the country’s north, after crossing part of the Amazon region.

The project is part of a large public works programme launched by the national government for the 2000-2003 period.

The authorisation process for work on the waterway was suspended after two court decisions were handed down in response to challenges by the Public Ministry of Goiás, one of the states affected, and by the Xavante indigenous communities.

The two challenging parties accuse the companies responsible for the project, the Tocantins-Araguaia Waterway Administration and Docas de Pará Company, of falsifying the environmental impact statement required for initiating work on the waterway.

The observations of four of the seven anthropologists who participated in the study were altered or eliminated, according to the legal charges. The four social scientists emphasised the project’s negative effects, saying it was a threat to the survival of 11 indigenous groups living along the two rivers.

In addition, parts of a report by biologist Afonso Pereira Filho were suppressed. He had predicted a major reduction in the region’s fish population as a consequence of the dredging and excavation using explosives planned in order to make the rivers navigable.

“The professionals themselves made the accusations, which were not denied be the company implicated,” pointed out Fernando Baptista, representative of the non-governmental Social- Environmental Institute, and attorney in the legal case on behalf of the Xavante communities.

Judge Cesar August Bearsi, of Cuiabá, capital of Mato Grosso state, complied with the request to suspend the project’s licensing process after verifying the falsification of the environmental study, which he characterised as a cover-up of the scientists’ observations.

“Frankly, a project of this magnitude cannot be based on a sham,” declared the judge in explanation of his decision, which also brought an end to local public hearings, another requirement for public works that are potentially harmful to the environment and local populations.

The waterway project is also guilty regarding the objective which justified it in the first place, stated Washington Novaes, journalist and former environmental secretary of Brasilia. The project is supposed to cut transportation prices for the soya produced in Brazil’s centre-west and exported via the country’s north-eastern ports.

The mega-project would benefit only the large, export-oriented soya farms, to the detriment of the “natural vocation of the rivers: eco-tourism” and the local populations, including indigenous peoples, argued Novaes.

According to an environmental impact study performed by non- governmental organisations, the cost of transporting one tonne of soya using a combination of waterways, roads and rail to the northern Itaquí port would be 78 percent higher than using the traditional route – via trucks and trains – to southern Brazil.

The Araguaia-Tocantins watershed covers two million square km, 23.5 percent of Brazil’s territory, an area under extensive development involving cattle ranching, mining and logging.

The region’s soil is ill-suited for soya monoculture and would quickly be depleted despite the heavy use of fertilisers and agro- chemicals, warned Mauricio Galinkin, director of the Brazilian Cultural Support and Reference Centre, one of the organisations opposed to the project.

Work on other waterways has been suspended or their expansion blocked as a result of environmental objections. Such is the case of the Paraguay-Paraná project, which would unite western Brazil with Bolivia and the rest of the nations of the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) trade bloc: Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

But it is in the Amazon where environmental groups expend the most effort in their attempts to obstruct the waterway projects.

The original Araguaia-Tocantins project’s 1997 environmental impact statement was rejected for its superficiality. Work on another Amazon region waterway, uniting the Teles Pires and Tapajós rivers, was suspended because it crosses territory reserved for the Mundurucu indigenous peoples.