Access stairway to the Tocantins River in the central Brazilian state of Tocantins, which no longer has flowing water since it was dammed to generate electricity, mostly to be used in other parts of the country, and which contributes very little to local development. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
PALMAS and PORTO NACIONAL, Brazil, Jan 12 2018 (IPS)

Tocantins, the newest of Brazil’s 26 states, which was created in 1988 to seek its own paths to development in central Brazil, fell into the common plight of expanding borders, based on soy and hydroelectricity.

The area owes its name to a river that crosses the state from south to north, but which has been converted into a sequence of dams to generate electricity, almost entirely for other states. With no industries and with a population of just 1.5 million, consumption in this state is very limited.

“The lake is beautiful, but it left us without the tourism potential of the river and the electricity is more expensive for us than elsewhere,” complained journalist and writer Edivaldo Rodrigues, editor-in-chief of the newspaper O Paralelo 13, which he founded in 1987 in Porto Nacional.

The Lajeado hydroelectric power plant, with a capacity of 902.5 megawatts and which is officially named after former member of parliament Luis Eduardo Magalhães, who died in 1998, submerged beaches, crops and houses with its 630 square km reservoir, along a 170-km stretch of the Tocantins river.

“We had beaches in the dry season, islands of white sand that attracted many tourists”, and it was all lost when the water level rose, Rodrigues lamented, at his home in the city’s historical district, a few metres from the shore of the lake.

The journalist, who is the author of 12 books, chronicles, memoirs and novels, is a privileged witness to the transformations in Tocantins, especially in Porto Nacional, the cultural cradle of the state, with a population of about 53,000 people.

His historical novels show the violence of old landowners, the “colonels” appointed by the National Guard, a paramilitary militia that was disbanded in 1922, who dominated the region of Tocantins, as well as the advance in education brought by Dominican priests who came from France in 1886 to spread Catholicism from their base in Porto Nacional.

“They brought knowledge from Europe, they created schools, turning Porto Nacional into a cultural centre, and today a university town, with three universities and students from all over the country,” said the journalist who studied Communication and History in Goiania, capital of the neighboring state of Goiás.

Edivaldo Rodrigues, editor-in-chief of the newspaper O Paralelo 13, from Porto Nacional, a cultural and university centre in central Brazil with a population of 53,000 located on the right bank of the Tocantins River. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

The river, which was part and parcel of the city, more than doubled in width when it became a lake, but now it is farther away from the population. Now there are ravines between the coastal avenue and where the water starts, accessed only through two stairways.

Some old families from the city were resettled away from the shore of the lake and indemnified, but most of the displaced were peasant farmers who lived on the other side, on the left bank, where the reservoir was extended the most across the plain.

Anesia Marques Fernandes, 59, is one of those victims.

“We lost the river, the beaches, the tourists, the nearby fish and the fertile lands which we sowed in the dry season,” recalled the peasant farmer, who was resettled along with her mother 21 km from the river in 2000, before the reservoir was filled the following year.

“My mother is the one who suffered the most and still suffers today, at 80 years of age,” after having raised her five children on her own in the flooded rural community, Carreira, because her husband died when she was pregnant with their fifth child, Fernandes said.

In the Flor de la Sierra Resettlement community, home to 49 displaced families, the four hectares of land that were given to them are not even a tenth of what they had before, she said. “But the houses are better,” she acknowledged.

The most important thing, however, was community life, the solidarity among “neighbours who helped each other, shared the meat of a butchered cow. We were one big family that was broken up,” she lamented. In the resettlement community there are only three families from her old village.

Bernardete Batista de Araujo stands in front of the house where she was relocated in Palmas, together with others displaced by the Lajeado hydroelectric dam in central Brazil. The high walls and a street muddy because of the rain make her miss Vila Canela, her old village on an island that no longer exists on the Tocantins River. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

That is the same complaint voiced by Maria do Socorro Araujo, a 56-year-old retired teacher, displaced from Canela, a submerged beach community, 10 km from Palmas, the capital of the state of Tocantins.

“The community was fragmented, it dispersed, it forgot its culture, its unity and its way of live,” said Araujo, who was resettled in 2001 on block 508 in the north of Palmas, with her husband and three children.

“We lost our land, tranquillity and freedom, there were no fences there; here we live behind high walls,” complained her neighbour Bernardete Batista de Araujo, referring to the house where she was resettled in the capital.

She is pleased, however, to have a roof over her head, a solid three-bedroom house, better than her rustic dwelling in Canela, which had been rebuilt after the river flooded and destroyed it in 1980.

In her small yard, she now tries to compensate for the loss of the many fruit trees in the village flooded by the reservoir, planting papaya, mango and pineapple.

“The bad thing here is the dust in the dry season and the mud when it rains because of the unpaved roads,” a long-standing complaint by the inhabitants of La Cuadra, who are demanding that the road be paved.

Palmas, with a current population of 290,000, is an artificial city, planned according to the model of Brasilia, with wide avenues and squares to accommodate large numbers of cars and blocks arranged by numbers and cardinal points.

Founded in 1989, it took years of construction before becoming in practice the administrative capital of Tocantins.

Antonio Alves de Oliveira, 63, is proud to have been “the third taxi driver” in Palmas, when the city, in its second year, “had nothing but dust and huge numbers of mosquitoes.”

“Fried fly” was the nickname given to an improvised restaurant, he recalled.

Where Palmas is located, the Tocantins River now has an 8.4-km bridge which crosses the reservoir – almost eight times the width before the construction of the Lajeado dam, 50 km downstream (to the north).

The environmental impact study carried out by Investco, the company that built the Lajeado hydropower plant between 1999 and 2001 and has a concession for 35 years, registered only 1,526 families, of which 997 are rural, directly affected by the dam and reservoir.

But Judite da Rocha, local coordinator of the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB), believes that the real number is close to 8,000 families.

Many groups were not recognised as affected, such as the Xerente indigenous people, boatmen, fishermen, potters, dredgers who extracted sand from the river and seasonal workers, such as “barraqueros” who set up stands to sell beach products in the tourist season, she argued.

But the “worst and most complex situation” is that of the Estreito hydroelectric plant, inaugurated in 2012 in the north of the state of Tocantins, with an installed capacity of 1,087 megawatts.

There are “almost 1,000 families displaced and without compensation”, scattered in seven camps, so that the total number of people affected could reach 12,000, according to Rocha.

MAB estimates that there are 25,000 families in total who suffer the consequences of the hydroelectric power plants built in the state of Tocantins, four of which are on the Tocantins River. Added to three other large plants built in other states, the Tocantins River has a generation capacity of 12,785 megawatts.

The Paraná river, reduced in size by the concrete behemoth of the binational Itaipú dam. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
FOZ DE IGUAÇU, Brazil , Dec 20 2013 (IPS)

As they build huge hydropower dams, the Brazilian government and companies have run into resistance from environmentalists, indigenous groups and social movements. But the binational Itaipú plant is an exception, where cooperation is the name of the game.

Involved in a total of 65 environmental, social and productive activities, the Cultivando Agua Boa (Cultivating Good Water – CAB) programme is led and supported by activists. Sectors of the government are considering using it as a model to be replicated in other major infrastructure projects, to mitigate impacts and conflicts.

Compared to what is happening in the rest of the hydroelectric dam projects, “it’s a stride forward,” said Robson Formica, head of the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB) in the southern state of Paraná, where the giant Itaipú hydropower complex is located on the border between Brazil and Paraguay.

Itaipú Binacional, the company that operates the hydroelectric plant, decided to guarantee efficient long-term electricity generation by caring for the Paraná river basin to ensure both the quantity and quality of the water. That has paved the way for cooperation with environmentalists.

More than 80 percent of Brazil’s electricity comes from its rivers, which means the country’s energy security depends on rainfall and on the best possible use of water.

Itaipú’s CAB programme was launched in 2003, two decades after thousands of rural and indigenous families were displaced in order to flood their land and fill the 1,350-sq-km reservoir. The dam is the world’s largest hydroelectric power producer.

Formica said CAB’s activities are “important, but limited and isolated.”

“They fail to establish a policy for local development, or for structural changes in the area in question,” added the head of MAB, which estimates that hydroelectric dams have displaced around one million people in Brazil.

The demand that the company take over functions that normally fall to the state has gained force as mega-dams and other infrastructure projects that drastically modify extensive areas of rainforest and other habitats mushroom around the country.

In addition, environmental laws are requiring compensation for damage caused.

In the case of Itaipú, that requirement is particularly justified. It is an unusual company, run by two different national governments, and it brought in revenue of 3.8 billion dollars in 2012.

The land and rivers where the complex operates along the border between Brazil and Paraguay contain the enormous hydroelectric plant, the reservoir, 104,000 hectares of land that is under environmental conservation, the University of Latin American Integration and the Itaipú Technological Park.

The CAB programme is active in 29 municipalities in Brazil covering a total surface area of 8,339 sq km, with one million inhabitants, along a 170-km stretch of the Paraná river and reservoir.

The programme’s 65 activities include assistance to indigenous communities, aquaculture, medicinal plants, biogas and environmental education – a concerted effort connected by the central aim of taking care of the water.

For example, CAB’s sustainable rural development activities revolve around organic agriculture as the top priority, aimed at reducing the pesticides polluting the reservoir.

“We started out with 186 families; today there are 1,180 families participating, and there are 2,000 organic gardens,” said Nelton Friedrich, Itaipú director of coordination and the environment.

The Itaipú Platform of Renewable Energies was also created, to protect the rivers from animal manure. The manure is converted into biogas, which generates electricity, thus creating another source of income for local farmers while curbing pollution of the water.

Family farming is the main livelihood around the reservoir, where there are millions of pigs, barnyard fowl and cattle on 26,000 smallholdings. If allowed to run into the water, the manure would cause excessive build-up of nutrients and the proliferation of aquatic weeds, which reduce the oxygen in the water.

This process is called eutrophication, explained Cícero Bley, Itaipú’s superintendent of renewable energies. “Pollution by organic waste is more common than pollution by toxic agrochemicals,” and in some cases makes constant cleaning of reservoirs necessary, he said.

It takes nearly 30 days to renew the water in the Itaipú reservoir, compared to much shorter time-frames in other dams.

On the Madeira river in the northern Amazon jungle state of Rondônia, where the Santo Antonio and Jirau hydroelectric dams just began to operate, it takes just two or three days to renew the water in the reservoirs, said Domingo Fernandez, Itaipú’s chief researcher on fish.

Clean-up and reforestation are thus clearly necessary along the banks of the reservoir to keep the water healthy and productive. The CAB programme planted more than 24 million trees around the Itaipú reservoir.

The initiatives follow a methodology that is also key, expanding the activities to the entire watershed, “because nature organises itself by watershed,” Friedrich said.

The model followed is based on the concept of shared responsibility, involving all local actors, from public and private companies to civil society and universities, with community participation – a kind of “direct democracy,” he explained.

To that end, management committees were created in the 29 municipalities, made up of an average of 57 representatives of different sectors, after numerous meetings were held for awareness-raising and debate on problems that have arisen.

The so-called water pacts, which are community commitments signed in ceremonies, drive the design and collective implementation of the plans and projects.

These initiatives point out a good path to follow, but are far from filling Itaipú’s social debt, said Aluizio Palmar, founder of the Centre for Human Rights and Popular Memory and a former secretary of the environment and communication in Foz de Iguaçú, the Brazilian municipality where the binational dam operates.

Construction of the hydropower plant between 1975 and 1983 displaced rural families, many of whom did not hold legal title to their land, which they needed to obtain compensation. The families joined the ranks of the people living in the favelas or slums, and the rates of violence in Foz de Iguaçú shot up, Palmar pointed out.

The monetary rewards, such as royalties, mainly benefited the city governments, which used the money to build shiny new government buildings and tourist attractions, while dedicating very little to cover the needs of the local population, Palmar complained.

Nevertheless, the situation at Itaipú stands in contrast with the situation in other parts of the country, especially on the São Francisco river, where there is a national clamour for the river to be cleaned up and revitalised, and where there is only an incipient programme coordinated by the environment ministry.

Five large hydroelectric dams with a total combined output of 10,827 MW – equivalent to 77 percent of Itaipú’s production – harness the increasingly scarce water in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast.

The main portion of the river crosses the impoverished region, and besides the frequent droughts, the São Francisco suffers from sedimentation and pollution caused by human activities, such as deforestation along the riverbank, the dumping of untreated sewage, and agribusiness projects irrigated with water from the river.