ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Resistance to Plan for Regulating Water Use

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 12 1999 (IPS) - The Brazilian government is facing heavy resistance to its plan for the creation of a National Water Agency (ANA) to regulate, control and charge for the use of water resources as of next year.

Although Brazil is rich in water, distribution is irregular and insufficient in the most populous regions. The government’s aim, through the ANA, is to discipline the use of water.

A law creating a National System of Management of Hydro Resources was approved two years ago. But its implementation is still pending regulations and the creation of the ANA, to be debated by Congress before year’s end.

We must put an end to “the law of the hydro jungle, the chaotic use of rivers,” President Fernando Henrique Cardoso said at a recent seminar, presenting the draft law for the creation of the regulatory body.

Brazil is already bogged down in several conflicts over water. States and municipalities, especially in the southeast, the most industrialised part of the country, dispute access to and mutually accuse each other of polluting sources of water.

And the proposal to alter the course of one of Brazil’s major rivers, the San Francisco, to combat the frequent droughts plaguing the northeast has pitted states in that region against each other.

One aspect of Cardoso’s proposal, the projected alteration of the course of the San Francisco river is also one of the priorities of the new Minister of National Integration, Fernando Bezerra.

But the plan is opposed by the northeastern state of Bahia and by Senate president Antonio Carlos Magalhaes, the state’s foremost political leader, who is also considered Cardoso’s most influential ally.

Other states through which the San Francisco runs also fear losing the water that is crucial to their development.

The draft law for the creation of the ANA stipulates that water usage fees in areas where the resource is scarce and competition for its use runs high are to be set in accordance with the relative demands on each particular river basin.

The regulatory agency will be empowered to order rationing of water and control the flow of water through dams. It will also be entitled to overturn authorisation for the construction of hydropower dams, will be in charge of works designed to combat flooding and drought, and will oversee water quality.

Resistance to the project first emerged among the economic sectors that will be taxed, especially industry, which fears a rise in costs and a consequent reduction in competitiveness.

The management of water resources also put the Ministry of Regional Integration, in charge of irrigation in the northeast, at loggerheads with the Ministry of the Environment.

But the Ministry of the Environment won the dispute, which means the task of controlling water use will be governed by environmental conservation criteria, free of the pressures of sectorial interests of users, said reporter Washington Novaes, former secretary of the environment of the government of Brasilia.

But the designation of the five members of the new agency will be the exclusive task of the president, if Congress does not amend the proposal – which could open doors to political and corporate influences, Novaes warned.

The project must also overcome the opposition of state governments, explained the secretary of the environment of the eastern state of Minas Gerais, as it will concentrate power over water in the ANA, at the expense of the decentralised management of river basin committees.

The states, which control the committees, will thus lose jurisdiction over rivers that run through their territory to the sea, which will be considered “national” waterways.

The Sao Paulo Union of Energy Workers joined in the fray by protesting the privatisation of hydropower plants, which it says would give private companies control over the rivers that supply cities, thus subordinating availability of clean water to the energy sector’s drive for profits.