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SOUTH AMERICA: Cross-Border Bridges in Amazon – Double-Edged Swords

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 11 2004 (IPS) - A bridge inaugurated Wednesday in southwestern Amazonia on the border between Bolivia and Brazil will have a limited environmental and economic impact. But that is not true in the case of another to be built not far away on the border between Brazil and Peru.

The former, the Wilson Pinheiro Bridge, will simply bolster trade between Cobija, a Bolivian city in the northern department (state) of Pando, and Brasileia on the Brazilian side, giving a boost to the local economy.

The inauguration of the bridge brought presidents Carlos Mesa of Bolivia, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Alejandro Toledo of Peru to Cobija on Wednesday morning.

The three leaders then headed 100 km to the west to lay the first stone of the Integration Bridge to be built between the Brazilian city of Assis Brasil and Iñapari in the southeastern Peruvian department of Madre de Dios.

Although the bridges are not major construction projects, the presence of the presidents was explained by the importance given by regional policy-makers to the question of physical integration among South American countries.

However, the bridge between Brazil and Peru will have strong repercussions on the Amazon jungle, because it will pave the way for roads connecting the western Brazilian state of Acre, where Brasileia and Assis Brasil are located, and Peru’s Pacific coast, said Professor Irving Foster Brown at the Federal University of Acre.

The bridge will foment ”interaction between Acre and Madre de Dios,” which will gradually extend westwards to Peru’s Andes highlands region, while wider highways will then be built to the Pacific coast, he said in a telephone interview with IPS.

That ”depends on investments in Peru, but it will be inevitable in the next few years,” predicted the geochemist who came to Acre from the United States in the early 1990s, invited to take part in a research project, and has stayed on as a professor in the Federal University.

A route to Peru’s Pacific coast would turn southwestern Amazonia into a passage for the enormous production of soybeans and grains in west-central Brazil.

It would also lead to a large increase in the flow of trade between Peru and Brazil, facilitating mutual access to markets that up to now have been separated by the Amazon jungle and the Andes mountains.

But roads, which facilitate access and transportation, inevitably lead to deforestation in the Amazon, by drawing activities like farming, stockbreeding and logging, said Michael Schmidlehner, president of the environmental organisation Amazonlink, which is based in Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre.

That is seen clearly in satellite images which show that deforested areas are concentrated along paved highways in Acre, he told IPS. ”A plan to prevent the destructive impacts is needed,” he underlined.

The Madre de Dios-Acre-Pando (MAP) initiative, a movement of activists, universities, non-governmental organisations and municipal governments from Peru, Brazil and Bolivia has for years been seeking ways to prevent a repeat of the environmental and social disasters seen in other parts of the Amazon jungle region.

Highways overcome isolation, facilitating access to towns and cities and to health services, said Brown, an active participant in the MAP initiative.

But at the same time, he noted, they can lead to a rural exodus to urban areas, and to unplanned, chaotic urbanisation that is not accompanied by the provision of basic public services, while driving up the price of land, making it the object of speculation among those interested in turning a quick profit.

The challenge is ”to create mechanisms to maximise the benefits and minimise the damages,” which requires planning and joint efforts, said the professor.

The MAP movement demands respect for two basic human rights: access to relevant information, and the right to participate in collective decisions.

It organises periodic meetings to discuss the best ways to manage the local ecosystem and plans for the sustainable development of the ”MAP region” in southwestern Amazonia.

The joint administration of the Upper Acre River basin, which is shared by the three provinces of the three countries, is one of the main concerns, because the demand for water in local cities and towns is growing, said Brown.

The sixth MAP Forum, held in August 2003 in two cities in Acre, drew 600 participants from 164 institutions, including 92 from Brazil, 47 from Peru and 25 from Bolivia.

Examples of recommendations approved by the MAP initiative are the creation of a tri-national programme for sustainable forestry production, university courses based on ”the local reality, in direct contact with nature and the local populations,” and the need to encourage farming with native plant species instead of slash-and-burn agriculture and monoculture using outside crops like genetically modified soybeans.

The fifth MAP Forum will take place Sep. 16-19 in Puerto Maldonado, Peru.

The state of Acre is on the verge of a major ”mutation”, and within the next few years will undergo significant changes, due to the large inflow of investment, said Brown.

He pointed out that stockbreeding is rapidly expanding, by an average of 200,000 new head of cattle per year, in a state that already has more cattle than people, who totalled 557,000 in the 2000 census.

Brazil’s entire Amazon jungle, as well as the MAP region, are facing transformations that ”in the next few decades will be greater than the changes seen in the entire past century,” Brown predicted.

Society will have to choose the direction that the inevitable process should take, said the activist, because the short-term economic benefits it could bring for some could represent ”the waste of resources and natural riches” that would have damaging effects that go far beyond the Amazon jungle.