By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 14 2000 (IPS)

Brazil’s new National Water Agency (ANA) is further complicating an already controversial long-standing project to re-route part of the waters of the San Francisco river to make water available to the drought-stricken northeast.

The first five members of the board of directors of the new agency, which was created by a law enacted in July, are facing a debate in the Senate this week, which must confirm them in their posts.

The ANA’s mission is to regulate the use of Brazil’s water resources, and the agency has the power to grant use rights and establish regulations and controls.

Its main task will be to set up “Basin Committees”, which will decide how the water of each river system is to be used, and determine the rates to be charged.

The new committees are emerging as part of an essential shift in water services in Brazil, based on the idea that abundance invites waste. From now on, consumers will be charged for the water they use.

Up to now, industry and agriculture have obtained the resource directly from rivers. But under the new system, they will have to pay for the water they consume — and the pollution they cause.

Households, meanwhile, which currently pay fees only for the use of the city pipelines and water distribution services, will now see metres installed and their consumption measured.

But the new policy complicates the already controversial plan to re-route part of the course of the San Francisco river, by decentralising decision-making and putting the authority to determine the use of water resources in the hands of the Basin Committees, said Aldo Rebouças, a University of Sao Paulo professor and researcher.

The San Francisco river is born in central Brazil and flows towards the northeast, where it runs into the Atlantic ocean. But it bypasses an immense semi-arid area plagued by frequent severe drought, which forces local residents to migrate en masse to Brazil’s large cities.

The idea is to re-route the San Francisco northwards, in order to fill river basins that dry up at certain times of the year. The project was first conceived of 153 years ago, and since then there have been several abortive attempts to carry it out.

But the plan has taken on new momentum today as part of the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s investment programme, which enjoys broad political support.

In fact, Minister of National Integration Fernando Bezerra has made the initiative one of his top priorities.

Although Brazil boasts 12 percent of the world’s freshwater reserves, the natural resource is poorly distributed, with a full two-thirds of the country’s water concentrated in the Amazon region.

A mere three percent of the water reaches the northeast, a region that is home to 28 percent of Brazil’s total population of 167 million. And of that three percent, the San Francisco river accounts for a full 70 percent, Bezerra pointed out, to underline the urgent need for the project.

A preliminary study by the Ministry of National Integration estimates that the re-routing of the river would benefit eight million inhabitants in Brazil’s poorest region, by irrigating 333,000 hectares and directly and indirectly generating 1.2 million jobs.

The initiative would thus give a strong boost to development in the region, the study adds.

The project currently under discussion is even broader than previous plans. It would involve, for example, works aimed at correcting environmental damage caused by deforestation along the banks of the San Francisco river in the last few decades, which has led to sedminent build-up.

The San Francisco’s flow would also be strengthened by the re- routing of the Sono river, which would no longer run into the Tocantins river, the main artery of a large basin in the eastern Amazon region.

Although the plan to change the course of the Sono river is aimed at neutralising resistance in areas that stand to lose water due to the project, it raises a new obstacle.

Shifting the course of the Sono river would draw at least one additional Basin Committee into the decision-making process, and would entail an environmental impact study of unprecedented dimensions, focusing on two extensive regions of the country with sharply contrasting characteristics — the tropical Amazon basin and the arid northeast, said Rebouças.

In addition, it would drive up the cost of the project, a previous, more modest version of which was estimated at 4.1 million reals (around 2.3 million dollars).

The heaviest opposition to the plan has come from the eastern state of Bahia, which fears future shortages of water for its fast-growing irrigation-based agriculture sector.

The project’s economic and environmental viability has not yet been proven, complain Bahia Governor Cesar Borges and Senate chairman Antonio Carlos Magalhaes, the state’s most powerful political leader.

If the San Francisco river is split in two, there will not be enough water for its dams to continue generating electricity and to supply the entire range of potentially cultivable land on the banks of its current course, Joao Suassuna, with the Joaquin Nabuco Foundation, argued at a geotechnology conference.

Rebouças, meanwhile, maintained that while the project to change the course of the river should not be ruled out, it must not be considered a top priority either, because it would only benefit large landowners, who have already been favoured by the construction of dams, whose waters are poorly exploited and mainly lost to evaporation.

The researcher is in favour of expanding and improving the use of groundwater in the northeast, the focus of one of his studies, which argues that tapping underground aquifers would have a greater social effect in the region by providing water for 10 to 15 million people in small communities and farms.

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