Brazil's infrastructure minister, Tarcísio de Freitas, speaks during a videoconference with foreign correspondents, co-organised by IPS, during which he detailed plans to improve roads, ports and airports, build new railways and interconnect them, using private investors in the face of domestic fiscal constraints. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Jun 4 2021 (IPS)

Health, fiscal, environmental and political crises have not prevented Brazil from attracting private capital to expand infrastructure, according to the sector’s minister, Tarcísio de Freitas.

Concessions for airports, highways, railways and port terminals, auctioned in the last two years, total 14 billion dollars in investments, the infrastructure minister announced at a press conference with some twenty foreign correspondents, in which other leaders from the areas of trade and transport also took part.

Accelerating this process from July will allow the country to raise the total investment to 200 billion dollars over the next five years, if resources and services under the management of other ministries, such as power plants and sanitation, are included, he projected.

“It is the largest infrastructure concession programme in our history,” Freitas said in a Jun. 2 video conference with foreign correspondents.

The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to Brazil’s success in drawing international capital, contrary to what might have been expected.

“We forged ahead when many countries pulled back and stopped offering their assets due to the uncertainties of the economic situation,” said Freitas. “We decided to bet on investors’ long-term vision and seek out the excess capital available in the world, as unique sellers.”

The operation of 22 airports was privatised on Apr. 7 for a sum equivalent to 17 times the minimum price set, despite the air transport crisis caused by the pandemic. A French company acquired the 30-year concession for a block of seven airports in northern Brazil. The others are now in the hands of a Brazilian consortium.

The success was due to “Brazil’s tradition of respecting contracts,” the large portfolio of projects and their excellent profitability, said the minister at the virtual press conference, promoted by IPS in partnership with the Association of Foreign Media Correspondents, the National Confederation of Commerce and the Federation of Chambers of Foreign Trade.

Attracting national and international private capital is the way to cover the infrastructure deficit in Brazil, given the “delicate fiscal situation” that limits public investment, the infrastructure minister said.

A passenger train meets a freight train on the Carajás Railway, built for the export of iron ore in northern Brazil. Railways in Brazil are mainly used to transport grains and minerals, accentuating the weight of commodities in the economy. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“The Ministry of Transport had 20 billion reais (about 7.5 billion dollars at the time) for investments in 2014 when it was only in charge of land transport; today the Ministry of Infrastructure has six billion reais (1.2 billion dollars) and oversees ports, airports, roads and railways,” he pointed out, to underscore the need for private capital.

Brazil invested 2.2 percent of its GDP in infrastructure from 2001 to 2014 and “should invest four to five percent to overcome its historical deficiencies,” said José Tadros, president of the National Confederation of Commerce.

That is much less than neighbouring countries such as Chile and Peru invest in infrastructure, and the consequence is high costs, “bad roads and ports, and lack of railways and intermodal connections,” he lamented.

But “it’s a virtuous moment” in the railway sector, with a strong rise in investments expected after the renewal of existing concessions and the future construction of two new major lines, said Fernando Paes, executive director of the National Railway Transport Agency.

The Ministry of Infrastructure’s National Logistics Plan sets a target for railways to carry 36 percent of national freight by 2035, an increase of 70 percent from the current share.

Ferrogrão (part of the plan) is the “most important project in Brazil,” according to Freitas. The 933-kilometre route will mainly serve the export of soy and maize from the mid-north of the state of Mato Grosso, the country’s largest producer of these exports, accounting for 27 percent of the total. The northern Amazonian route will be used instead of the more distant southern ports.

A view of the Brazilian BR-163 highway before its final northern section was paved in 2020. It is mainly used to export soy from the state of Mato Grosso. Now the plan is to build a railway next to it in order to make grain transport cheaper. CREDIT: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

Exports are currently transported via the BR-163 highway, the paving of which was only completed in February 2020, after decades of soybean-laden trucks getting stuck in the mud while crossing more than 900 kilometres of Amazon rainforest to reach the port of Miritituba on the Tapajós River, before the soy is carried over 1,100 kilometres down the river to the Atlantic ports.

The railway serves the interests of the multinational corporations that dominate these Brazilian exports and the global agricultural trade, such as the U.S. companies ADM, Bunge Limited and Cargill.

But Ferrogrão will make transporting these exports cheaper and will help reduce freight costs across the country, by expanding the scale of agricultural exports throughout northern Brazil and establishing a logistical hub between the heart of the Amazon and central Brazil, the infrastructure minister hopes.

Products from the Manaus Free Trade Zone, an industrial park in the capital of the state of Amazonas, will reach major national markets via waterways and the railway, he predicted.

He also said its construction will have beneficial environmental effects by cutting greenhouse gas emissions by trucks and curbing the more intense deforestation provoked by roads.

But environmentalists and indigenous rights advocates disagree.

“It will stimulate the expansion of the agricultural frontier in the Amazon rainforest, where there is a lack of governance, which results in deforestation,” said Sergio Guimarães, executive secretary of the Infrastructure Working Group, in an interview with IPS by telephone from Brasilia after the press conference.

The environmental assessment does not include the indirect impacts of the project over an area wider than the railway route and its margins, he said. Cheaper, largescale transport tends to expand the area of production in a region already affected by huge monocultures on the edges of the Amazon rainforest.

A road in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, with an endless line of trucks transporting soy beans and maize for export. The plan is that by 2035 at least 36 percent of freight transport in this continental-sized country will be by rail. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In addition, more supply and demand studies and comparative analyses of alternatives are needed, the activist said.

Three railway projects have been presented to transport exports of soy and maize from the mid-north of Mato Grosso, which currently stand at 70 million tons per year and will increase to 120 million tons in the near future, according to Freitas.

In addition to Ferrogrão, an isolated line to the north, the Central-West Integration Railway (Fico) will run from the east, connecting to the North-South Railway which is already in operation and has access to ports in the Northeast and Southeast of Brazil.

The third alternative is a proposal by the Rumo company to extend its Northern Network, which now reaches the south of Mato Grosso, to the centre of the soy-producing region. This network has the advantage of connecting to railways with access to Santos, Brazil’s main export port, and crossing the state of São Paulo, the most economically productive and populous state.

But “there is not enough freight to make the three railways viable,” said Guimarães, who is calling for comparative studies on the Ministry of Infrastructure’s Logistics Plan’s other projects and concessions.

Other risks identified by Guimarães regarding the Ferrogrão are the possibility of overloading and accidents on the Tapajós-Amazonas waterway, if most of Mato Grosso’s production is exported via this route, and variations in river flows due to climate change.

Another railway, the West-East Integration line (Fiol), which crosses the northeastern state of Bahia and had a 537-kilometre stretch granted to a mining company controlled by Kazakhstan’s Eurasian Resources Group, also faces environmental opposition for threatening local biodiversity, especially in the area where a port is to be built.

Ports, which were a “bottleneck” for exports, are also undergoing improvements and extensive privatisation, the minister announced.

And waterways, an undervalued resource in Brazil, are also included in the transformations his ministry intends to make. But this is where the effects of climate change are being felt most even now with a severe drought in midwestern and southeastern Brazil. Navigation on the Tietê river, which crosses the state of São Paulo in southeastern Brazil, is expected to be suspended.

View of the Agua Negra border crossing, which connects Argentina and Chile in the Andes mountain range. It is not suitable for trucks and is closed for a good part of the year, because it is 4,800 m above sea level and is often covered in snow. Credit: Courtesy of Rodrigo Iribarren

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 13 2018 (IPS)

Visionaries imagined it more than 80 years ago, as a way to strengthen the integration between Argentina and Chile. Today it is considered a regional need to boost trade flows between the two oceans. Work on a binational tunnel, a giant engineering project in the Andes, is about to begin.

The tunnel will be built at more than 4,000 m above sea level, along the longest border in Latin America and one of the longest in the world. Argentina and Chile share more than 5,000 km of border in the majestic Andes mountain range, which has hindered but never impeded transit of people and merchandise.

In colonial times, products were transported by mule from one side of the Andes to the other.

By the end of this year or the beginning of next year, the allocation of the contract for the construction of the Agua Negra Pass will be announced. The tunnel will be built along the central area of the border, linking the Argentine province of San Juan with the Chilean region of Coquimbo.

The aim is to cut transit time and freight costs.

The cost has been set at 1.5 billion dollars and 23 companies from Argentina, Chile, China, France, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, grouped in 10 consortia, expressed an interest in building the tunnel, and the envelopes were opened in May 2017.

During a special meeting in March, the Agua Negra Tunnel Binational Entity (Ebitan), created by the two governments, completed an evaulation of the background presented by the 10 consortia, and the next step will be to announce which ones may take part in the tender.

The tunnel will take about 10 years to build, and is presented as the largest road work project in Latin America.

“The tunnel will be key to easier traffic to and from the Pacific Ocean, which will give us access to the Asian market,” Maximiliano Mauvecin, a businessman based in Córdoba, the second largest city in Argentina, in the centre of the country, told IPS.

“For that reason, when the project seemed to be failing in 2014, we organised the Central Bi-oceanic Corridor Network, with members of the business community not only from Chile and Argentina, but also from Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay,” explained Mauvecin, director of the Forum of Business Entities of the Central Region of Argentina.

To that end, he explained, “we generated trade missions and business rounds, with which we sought to engage the interest of governments once again.”

Argentina and Chile have 26 border crossings, but most lack adequate infrastructure for truck traffic and are closed for long stretches of the year because of weather conditions, as is the case of Agua Negra.

Bumpy road

The Agua Negra tunnel project has had advances and setbacks.

Momentum seemed to surge in August 2009, during a summit of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), founded in 2004 as a regional forum for coordinating actions towards integrated development among the 12 countries of the region, which are home to a combined total of more than 400 million people.

On that occasion an understanding was reached to build the tunnel, signed by the then presidents of Argentina and Chile, Cristina Fernández (2007-2015) and Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010 and 2014- March 2018).

It was also signed by the then president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), whose participation clearly reflected that it was a “regional integration project”, as the signatory governments described it.

The following year, the details of the initiative were formally shared at a summit of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) with the then presidents of Uruguay, José Mujica (2010-2015), and of Paraguay, Fernando Lugo (2008-2012), which along with Argentina and Brazil make up the bloc, of which Chile is an associate.

The binational tunnel will be a key part of the Porto Alegre-Coquimbo Central Bi-oceanic Corridor, between the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and the Chilean port of Coquimbo, along more than 2,700 km of roads that are mainly paved already.

The Corridor crosses different provinces of central Argentina and can also be used by companies from other countries of the Atlantic Ocean basin keen on access to the Pacific Ocean.

In Chile there is so much anticipation for the arrival of goods to get into the Asian market, that at the beginning of this year a project was presented to upgrade and modernise the port of Coquimbo, to enable it to serve bigger ships, with an expected investment of 120 million dollars.

However, wine growers in the Elqui Valley, formerly known as the Coquimbo Valley, which is along the route after the Agua Negra Pass, have expressed concern about the increase in truck traffic that the tunnel will bring.

“There were always communication routes in the transverse valleys of the Andes mountain range. In the 19th century, cattle began to be brought in from San Juan and provinces of northern Argentina to Chile. And in 1932 or 1933, the government of Coquimbo asked an engineer to study the possibility of building a tunnel,” Chilean researcher Rodrigo Iribarren told IPS.

“Although it has a long history, it was not until the 1960s that it was opened as an international pass for vehicles,” added Iribarren, author of the book “Agua Negra; History of a Road” and head of the history museum of La Serena, the capital of Coquimbo, located on the Pacific coast about 470 km north of Santiago.

The pass was closed in 1978, when the dictators of Argentina, Jorge Videla (1976-1981), and Chile, Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), brought to a point of extreme tension a border conflict at the southern tip of the continent and were about to lead the two countries to war.

Although it was reopened in the 1990s, after the two countries had returned to democracy, it is not suitable for trucks and is closed much of the year, because traffic is blocked due to snow.

After the agreement between Fernandez, Bachelet and Lula, Ebitan was formed in 2010, and in 2013 23 companies expressed an interest in building the tunnel.

Financial solution

The funding problem was solved in April 2016, when the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) announced to the two governments that it would finance the project.

In October 2017, the regional credit agency approved an initial disbursement of 130 million dollars to Chile and 150 million to Argentina, within a credit line expandable to 1.5 billion dollars as the work progresses.

“The objective is to reduce, through the construction of this infrastructure, the transaction costs at the borders, to increase the competitiveness of the countries involved and promote the economic development of the region,” said José Luis Lupo, manager of the IDB’s department of Southern Cone countries.

According to Ebitan, the tunnel will shorten the border crossing by 40 km and three hours. It will also make it possible to keep the pass open year-round.

The road climbs today to 4,780 m, but the tunnel will begin at 4,085 m above sea level on the Argentine side and will descend to 3,620 m on the Chilean side.

There will be two completely separate passages, for the sake of safety, one running in each direction, with two 7.5-m wide lanes each. Of the 13.9 km tunnel, 72 percent will be in Argentina.

Several underused tracks of the North-South Railway near Anápolis, an industrial city in Brazil that can expand its economy as a logistics hub, thanks to the confluence of rail, road and air transport, together with its proximity to Brasilia. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
ANÁPOLIS, Brazil, Jan 6 2018 (IPS)

The rails have been laid – thousands of km of rails deteriorating due to lack of use, to the despair of those who believe that a country as vast as Brazil can only be developed by means of trains.

Brazil built 37,000 km of railways up to six decades ago, but their use has declined since then. Today about one- third of the network is abandoned and another third is underutilised.

This stands out in the North-South Railway (FNS). Its longest stretch, in Brazil’s geographical centre, was inaugurated in May 2014, but it still does not operate regularly in this country of 8,515,770 square km and 208 million inhabitants.

The 855-km FNS, which runs from the north-central state of Tocantins toAnápolis, 130 km from Brasilia, will be extended by an additional 682 km – a project that is in the final phase of construction and will reach Estrela D’Oeste, in the interior of São Paulo, the most developed state in Brazil.

“It’s a mess, a series of errors and bottlenecks,” according to Edson Tavares, former superintendent of the Anapolis Dry Port and transport consultant. With terminals far from the sea, the FNS depends on more railways to become viable, he told IPS.

The Dry Port is an inland port or multimodal logistics centre or terminal connected to seaports by rail.

The chosen route of the FNS includes “curves that make it necessary to cut in half the intended speed of 80 km per hour” and moves away from busy loading areas such as mines and cement factories, complained the expert, who believes it will take “much more time” for the new railway to take off.

Construction began in 1987 and suffered frequent interruptions and allegations of corruption. The first section, to the north,did not start operating until 2013, and the concession is held by VLI, a logistics company controlled by Vale, the world’s largest exporter of iron ore.

Trucks fill the streets of the Anápolis Agribusiness District, in Brazil, loading or unloading products and raw materials, next to the North-South Railway, which is practically unused, waiting for the concession to be granted to an operator in 2018. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

This 720 km-stretch is able to operate thanks to having “right of passage” through the Carajás Railway, which reaches the Port of São Luis, through which Vale ships iron ore from the Carajás range, in the north of Brazil.

This makes it possible to transport to a port soy and other products from Tocantins, a state in the northern region of Brazil, which contrasts with the other six northern states because only nine percent of its territory is in the Amazon rainforest and the rest in the Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna.

But the southern stretch of the FNS has been left unresolved.

“With the railway operating, Anápolis will become the main logistics centre in Brazil, since it is also the kilometre zero (start) of the Belém-Brasilia highway, crossing two other national roads, and it will have an important cargo airport which in its final phase of construction”, said Vander Barbosa, secretary of Development and Agriculture in the city government.

That city in the state of Goiás also has the most important industrial district in the west-central region of Brazil, with a pharmaceutical hub of 20 companies, a car-making and engine factory run bySouth Korea’s Hyundai and food, beverage and construction materials firms.

Many of these companies produce their own heavy and bulky goods for railway transport. The Granolcompany, for example, processes soybeans and was the first of the few companies that used the new railway to sporadically export their bran.

Since its plant is right next to the rails, it can load the trains through a short pipeline that carries the bran directly to the wagons. Biodiesel is another of its products transportable through the FNS.

A plant belonging to the Granolcompany, which produces soy branand biodiesel, next to the North-South railroad, in Brazil, where a pipeline from the factory makes it possible to load the wagons directly. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Anapolisis also set to be a storage and shipment point of grains for much of the central-west, the region with the highest agricultural production, especially of soy, corn and cotton. For this purpose, the FNS Intermodal terminal still has plenty of available space.

The military defense equipment industry is also strong in the city, which has a strategic air base for the protection of Brasilia, 130 km away as the crow flies.

The idea that transport routes, whether roads or railways, “attract development” does not always automatically come true; “it requires other policies in an integrated manner to generate economic growth,” said Lilian Bracarense, a professor of post-graduate studies in Regional Development at the Federal University of Tocantins.

“The Central-West, North and Northeast regions of Brazil have a lack of infrastructure, but that does not always justify private investments in the sector, as occurs in the South and Southeast, where there is an established demand,” she told IPS.

“The vicious circle that without demand infrastructure is not built, and without infrastructure demand is not generated”, according to the researcher who has a PhD in transport, seems to be broken by the government decision to introduce the railway that runs across the centre of the country from north to south.

Tocantins, with a population of 1.5 million, has an agricultural production limited to about 4.5 million tons of various grains, but the state of Goiás, population 6.8 million, recorded a harvest this year of almost 22 million tons, according to the National Supply Company (Conab) attached to the Ministry of Agriculture.

The idea behind the FNS is to create loading and unloading terminals throughout Goiás, especially in Anápolis due to the importance of industry there, and to attract productive investments as well. But that is where rail transport runs into obstacles.

The city and state of Goiás is more integrated with the economy of the Brazilian Southeast, more developed and closer to the port of Santos, more than 1,000 kilometers away by road, than with the northern ports, which are all at least 1,600 km away.

As a railway without an outlet to the sea, but with an “extensive area of influence”, the North-South railway, and the Brazilian rail system in general, need three conditions to operate satisfactorily, according to José Carlos Medaglia, CEO of the Planning and Logistics Company, attached to the Transport Ministry.

“The right of passage”, which allows logistics operators and a railroad concession company to transport cargo by rail from another company, is already legal but has to be fulfilled in practice, that is the first requirement, Medaglia told IPS.

To be effective, the railways must also have “surplus”transport capacity to provide to third parties, and standardised operation, with rails, equipment, personnel and other uniform technical requirements, of the same level of quality and training, so that they can operate on the railways of other companies, he said.

“All that was unimaginable in the past in Brazil”, which has a tradition of a “vertical” railway system, where the company that holds the concession for the infrastructure is its only operator.

This does not prevent competition, said Medaglia, who added that what is needed in any case is “good regulation,” to enforce the right of passage, and investments to expand capacity and modernise the system.

This can be achieved by negotiating with the country’s five railway networks new operating conditions to extend their concessions that will expire in the coming years.

An Atlantic Ocean deepwater oil platform moored at the Astillero Maua (Maua Shipyard) in Niteroi, in southeast Brazil, after being repaired, while awaiting being hired out to resume its activities. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 18 2017 (IPS)

“I have lived through three good periods and two bad ones,” prior to the present crisis in the Brazilian shipping industry, said Edson Rocha, a direct witness since the 1970s of the ups and downs of a sector where nationalist feelings run high.

Now as the president of the Niteroi Metalworkers Union in this city near Rio de Janeiro Rocha has to battle with mass unemployment of shipyard workers, bearing a collective responsibility that he had not faced in previous shipyard crises.

“Out of the 14,500 people employed directly by the shipbuilding sector in 2014, only around 1,500 are left,” the union leader told IPS. He estimates that 2,500 indirect jobs, beyond the union’s control, have been lost out of a total of 4,000 such jobs in that year."Building ships abroad, although it may be cheaper, means paying attention only to shareholders’ profits and not to the overall interests of Brazil. Every job in the shipbuilding industry generates four or five indirect jobs, and domestic costs can be negotiated." -- Jesus Cardoso

For a city of half a million people and few alternative employment opportunities, the impact has been devastating. “This time the decline was abrupt,” with thousands of workers suddenly being made redundant at the 10 large and medium-sized local shipyards when construction of ships and other oil industry equipment stopped.

Rocha joined the shipbuilding sector when it was at its peak in the 1970s, when strong government stimulus policies promoted the production of dozens of ships, mainly for the export of Brazilian iron ore.

Then in the 1980s the industry went broke during the “lost decade” of foreign debt. It recovered slightly in 1993-1994, only to practically disappear in the years that followed.

But it made a strong recovery after 2002, based on the big increase in offshore oil production, Rocha, a qualified project design technician, told IPS.

The discovery in 2006 of vast pre-salt oil deposits in deep Atlantic ocean waters, some 200 kilometres off the Brazilian coast, accelerated national plans to become a new oil superpower.

The dream of reactivating and expanding the shipbuilding industry was consequently renewed. The industry depends on domestic demand because its costs are too high to compete internationally.

Large shipyards were buillt at various points on the Atlantic coast, joining dozens already in existence and under expansion, to provide the ships and equipment needed for exploration, production and transport of fossil fuels.

There was plenty of finance available, as well as a protectionist policy requiring at least 60 percent national content in such equipment.

Ricardo Vanderlei, the president of Maua Shipyard, next to the repairs dock where a dredging platform is moored. The company, located in Niteroi on Guanabara bay, near Rio de Janeiro, is suffering from the serious crisis affecting Brazil’s shipbuilding industry. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The house of cards collapsed at the end of 2014. The fall in oil prices, the domestic economic crisis and the losses sustained by the state oil group Petrobras, owing to corruption and bad management, interrupted projects, contracts and payments to shipbuilding suppliers.

A total of 82,472 workers were employed by Brazil’s over 40 shipyards in late 2014. In November 2016, the National Naval Industry Union had only 38,452 registered members, and the figure is still dropping.

The Maua Shipyard, which has been operating since 1845 in Niteroi, ceased receiving payments in July 2015 and has had to suspend construction of three Panamax ships – the largest that could pass through the locks of the Panama Canal before the canal was enlarged in June 2016 – contracted by Transpetro, the logistical subsidiary of Petrobras.

“Two of the ships are 90 percent finished and the third is half built,” Ricardo Vanderlei, the president of the company since 2013, told IPS during a visit to the shipyard.

The cancellation of the contract forced the immediate redundancy of 3,500 workers. Today the shipyard, which also carries out repairs and other services, employs about 500 people, compared to an average of 350 in 2016.

“Our problem is how to survive until 2020,” when oil extraction is projected to increase, and demand for equipment and transport is expected to recover, in Vanderlei’s view.

The solution for his shipyard seems clear: finishing the three partly built ships in the yard would represent two years’ work and allow for the recall of 1,800 workers, he said.

The Zelia Gatai, one of the three unfinished tankers in the Maua Shipyard in southeast Brazil, waiting for renewal of the contract suspended two years ago in order to complete the remaining 10 percent of its construction. This Panamax ship has a length of 228 metres. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

At the moment there is a surplus of workers available in an economy that has been in recession for three years, he said, but the most highly skilled workers will be lost if the period of unemployment is further extended.

“Most of the workers laid off by the shipyards have resorted to the informal sector, like street sales and occasional services,” said Rocha, whose union is still claiming the labour rights of metalworkers, who are owed wages since they were made redundant two years ago.

A recovery in the shipbuilding industry, beginning by finishing partly built ships, platforms and drill rigs required for oil production, unites the interests of unionised workers and shipyards threatened by economic collapse. At least 12 shipyards are in the hands of the receivers with the courts setting measures such as long-term payment agreements.

There would be many advantages and limited costs in the case of Maua, but the process has been blocked by court procedures and by the paralysis of Transpetro, under new management since the resignation of its former president, Sergio Machado, in February 2015 after 12 years in office.

After being accused of corruption, Machado cooperated with the justice system, recording conversations with several of the political leaders involved. He was given a reduced sentence of only three years’ house arrest, and the return of 75 million reals (23 million dollars) that he had siphoned off from the company.

Transpetro cancelled 17 contracts in 2016 and put a halt to its Fleet Modernisation and Expansion Programme, initiated in 2004 for building 49 ships, more than half of which are completed or nearly completed.

Some, like the three ships being built by Maua in association with Ilha Shipyards S.A., are waiting on court judgments and the weakened decision-making power of Transpetro, Vanderlei said.

Large bore tubes abandoned in the Maua Shipyard, in southeast Brazil, after the cancellation of the contract for building three large ships for transporting fossil fuels on the part of a subsidiary of the state oil company Petrobras. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Losses are accumulating because of the need to maintain deteriorating equipment and the continued occupation of the shipyard’s whole industrial area of 180,000 square metres.

With a length of 228 metres, width of 40 metres and height of 18.5 metres, each Panamax ship is equivalent to a city block bearing six-storey buildings. Those built at Maua have the capacity to transport 72,000 tons.

The shipyards did not participate in “the business of bribery, and they lost market position” in an increasingly complex production sector, without budget add-ons that promoted corruption and recently benefited other large Brazilian projects, Vanderlei complained.

The Maua Shipyard survives thanks to its traditions, the diversification of its services including repair work on various ships and its privileged location at the entrance of Guanabara bay, shared between Niteroi and Rio de Janeiro, and its mooring facilities for large ships, Vanderlei said.

“Shipyards have an assured future as demand is bound to increase after 2020, given that the country has an extensive Atlantic coastline and needs to increase oil production,” he said.

“The initial costs of industrial infrastructure in Brazil have already been paid. We have already delivered dozens of ships to Transpetro, proving our capacity,” he argued. Production in Brazil is more expensive, but meets local requirements that are not satisfied by standard ships built abroad, he added.

Jesus Cardoso, president of the Rio de Janeiro Metalworkers’ Union, told IPS that “building ships abroad, although it may be cheaper, means paying attention only to shareholders’ profits and not to the overall interests of Brazil. Every job in the shipbuilding industry generates four or five indirect jobs, and domestic costs can be negotiated,” he said.

Rio de Janeiro, with 6.5 million inhabitants, has lost 15,000 shipyard jobs since 2015, contributing to the halving of the total number of local metalworkers which had reached a peak of 70,000, Cardoso said.

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx (left) and his Cuban counterpart Adel Izquierdo signed an agreement Feb. 16 in Havana to restore commercial flights between the two countries. In the last year, four U.S. cabinet secretaries have visited Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Feb 23 2016 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama and his Cuban counterpart Raúl Castro will go down in history as two statesmen who managed to overcome more than half a century of hostility to bring back together two neighbouring countries with too many shared interests to remain at loggerheads.

When Obama visits Havana on Mar. 21-22, it will be the fourth time he sees Castro in person. But it will be the first time a U.S. president is a guest of the Cuban government since 1928.

In December 2013, they shook hands for the first time in South Africa during the funeral of former president Nelson Mandela. At the time, few imagined that there would be further, less incidental, meetings – let alone that diplomatic ties would be restored and Obama would make an official visit to Cuba.

But diplomats from the two countries had been working behind the scenes since June 2013, with Canada and Pope Francis brokering the efforts, before the two governments surprised the world on Dec. 17, 2014 with the announcement of the decision to reestablish the ties broken off on Jan. 3, 1961.

In 2015 they met on Apr. 11 in Panama, during the Summit of the Americas, and later on Sep. 29 in New York, at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. The latter was the first time the presidents of the two countries met in the United States since the 1959 revolution in Cuba.

In this Caribbean island nation, just 90 miles off the coast of the state of Florida, Obama will find people who admire him – and people who don’t.

Several generations of Cubans have grown up with the anti-imperialist rhetoric according to which the United States is the source of all evil. And although it has been toned down in the last few years, there is still a great deal of scepticism regarding Washington’s “good intentions” with respect to the thaw, or incomprehension as to why the former “enemy” is now a friend.

Independent journalist Miriam Leiva, of the internal opposition, said Obama’s visit is very important. “The Cuban people will receive his message directly. Besides, he’s coming with results; his measures have brought benefits such as an increase in remittances, which improve the lives of many people, not just of those who receive them directly,” she told IPS.

The United States is the main destination of Cuban immigrants, and as a result it is the biggest source of money sent back home to families in Cuba. According to official U.S. figures, nearly two million people of Cuban origin live in that country. Of that total, 1.1 million were born in Cuba and 851,000 were born in the U.S.

This explains why migration was the only issue that brought the two countries to the negotiating table – although not without tension – regularly for years. In these talks, Cuba complained that the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which grants Cuban immigrants U.S. residency one year and a day after reaching the country, encouraged illegal immigration to the U.S.

The image of U.S. President Barack Obama on a TV screen in Havana, announcing the restoration of diplomatic ties with Cuba, on Dec. 17, 2014. Now Obama can be seen in person by the people of Havana, when he visits the country Mar. 21-22. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Issues of mutual interest and possible cooperation were discussed in the first contact made to outline the roadmap for the thaw – led by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson, and Josefina Vidal, director general of the Cuban foreign ministry’s U.S. Division.

The agenda for the normalisation of bilateral ties includes human rights, telecommunications, the fight against drug trafficking, environmental protection, prevention of natural disasters, and combating epidemics, among other areas of mutual interest and possible bilateral cooperation.

A year after the announcement of the restoration of ties, with the two countries’ respective embassies installed in the same buildings they were in before relations were broken off, President Castro publicly summed up what has been done so far and the issues that, in his view, must still be addressed for the complete normalisation of relations.

Among the results, he mentioned the expansion of the already existing cooperation in air security and aviation, and in efforts against drug and people trafficking and immigration fraud, as well as possibilities of cooperation in areas including environmental protection, maritime-port security and health.

Delegations from the two countries are currently working on more complex issues such as mutual compensation, people trafficking and human rights.

With respect to human rights, “we have profound differences and we are holding discussions on the basis of respect and reciprocity,” Castro said.

In a Feb. 20 reference to his upcoming trip to Cuba, Obama said that with Castro “I’ll speak candidly about our serious differences with the Cuban government, including on democracy and human rights.”

Josefina Vidal, director general of the Cuban foreign ministry’s U.S. Division, after reading out an official communiqué Feb. 18 on the historic Mar. 21-22 visit to the country by U.S. President Barack Obama. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Cuban authorities have habitually flatly rejected accusations about human rights.

However, on Feb. 18 Vidal said the Cuban government is open to dialogue with the Obama administration on any issue, including human rights, on the basis “of respect, equality, reciprocity and non-intervention in internal affairs.”

In a statement, the White House said that besides holding a bilateral meeting with Castro, Obama would “engage with members of civil society, entrepreneurs and Cubans from different walks of life.”

These are expected to include representatives of dissident movements and the emerging private sector.

In the last 12 months, the governors of several U.S. states have visited Cuba, along with dozens of members of Congress and of the business community.

Government officials who have visited include the secretaries of State John Kerry; of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack; of Commerce, Penny Pritzker; and of Transportation, Anthony Foxx.

And from Feb. 15 to 18, Pritzker hosted Cuba’s minister of foreign trade and investment, Rodrigo Malmierca. During the visit, the two officials stressed their interest in moving forward in the area of bilateral trade, although they recognised that changes are needed in order for this to prosper.

Pritzker said U.S. companies continue to face difficulties in Cuba, such as the requirement that foreign businesses hire Cubans through state organisations, or problems reaching people in the government to discuss business opportunities.

Malmierca, meanwhile, reiterated that the measures taken by Obama to make the embargo more flexible fall short, and said the president has the power to push harder to dismantle the sanctions in place against Cuba since 1960.

And he said the ban on the use of the dollar in financial transactions affects operations with companies from the United States and from elsewhere.

Businessman Gerard Dion, a former U.S. Marine and the author of “Cuba Unchained”, a political thriller that delves into the history of the relations between the U.S. and Cuba, is convinced that Obama knows what political, economic and legal changes must take place to convince Congress that it is time to lift the embargo.

“I’m sure he’ll discuss these things with Raúl Castro and will work hard to reach a mutually beneficial arrangement,” he told IPS by email.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The South Atlantic Shipyard is the biggest in Suape Port, in the Northeast Brazilian state of Pernambuco, where oil tankers have been built after a slow start that threatened to put an end to the project. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 4 2015 (IPS)

Besides suffering from macroeconomic imbalances, like a drop in GDP, a high inflation rate and a large public deficit, Brazil is experiencing heavy losses as many oil industry and logistical works grind to a halt.

Much of the infrastructure under construction is part of a cycle that is coming to an end, of rising demand for and prices of raw materials.

China’s economic slowdown has had an especially big impact on iron ore, the price of which has plunged more than 60 percent since 2013. This will hinder the viability of several iron deposits in Brazil, as well as two railways under construction in the Northeast, which now have an uncertain future.

The West-East Integration Railway (FIOL), designed to cross the state of Bahia, connecting soy-producing areas with the coast, depends on the start of operations in an iron mine in Caetité, 380 km as the crow flies from the port city of Ilheus.

A similar situation is now faced by the Transnordestina railway farther north, which is to link another mining and agricultural area to two ports. “But the mine doesn’t even exist there yet,” said Newton de Castro, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

“Low-grade iron ore is pushed out of the market when demand goes down, affecting the railroads that transport it,” de Castro, an engineer with a PhD in transport systems, told IPS. He criticised “badly designed projects” that have mushroomed in Brazil in recent years to fill a gap in infrastructure.

Doubts about the viability of the Caetité mine have undermined the construction of Porto Sul, the port that is the endpoint of the Fiol railway. Construction of the megaport has not yet begun, and work on the railroad has stalled, and it was left out of the government plan for the expansion of transport routes.

More progress has been made on the Transnordestina line, which benefits from the existence of two port destinations that are also industrial complexes: Suape in the Northeast state of Pernambuco and Pecém in one of the country’s northernmost states, Ceará.

But the deposit of iron and other minerals that it was built to serve has been abandoned since its owner Eike Batista, once known as the richest person in Brazil, went bankrupt.

Another major infrastructure project, the expansion of the Carajás railroad by the country’s biggest mining company, Vale, is on a better footing. “It will transport excellent quality mineral and the cost will be low, because it involves expanding already-existing infrastructure,” Castro said.

The new reality of lower demand and prices “will push out of the market mines that are more costly to operate, and small mining companies,” favouring the predominance of big firms like Vale, the British-Australian Rio Tinto and the British Anglo American.

Brazil is the world’s second-largest producer and exporter of iron ore after Australia, and Vale is the world’s single largest producer of the mineral, the chief market for which is China.

The expansion in the size and number of ports along Brazil’s coastline will also be hampered by the drop in activity in the mining industry, as well as by the oil crisis caused by the drop in prices and especially the scandal that has hit the state-run oil company, Petrobras.

The drastic cutback in Petrobras’ investments has hurt the government’s strategy to develop a strong shipbuilding industry based on dozens of shipyards along the Brazilian coastline producing boats, offshore platforms and other oil exploration and drilling equipment for deepwater oil industry operations.

The Carajás railroad, which links the region where large new iron deposits belonging to Vale were found, with the port of Ponta Madeira in the Northeast city of São Luis, as it passes by a small town in the state of Maranhão. The railway network is going to be expanded and upgraded as part of a project that has not been hurt by the current crisis. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The crisis triggered the dismissal of tens of thousands of workers and the suspension of work in many shipyards and their port areas. One company alone, Enseada, hired to produce six drillships for Petrobras by 2020 for a cost of 4.8 billion dollars, has laid off nearly all of its 7,000 workers since 2014.

The company’s plant is only 82 percent complete. This and other white elephants represent an enormous waste of resources, which are not likely to be recovered.

“The programme was built on unrealistic foundations; the crisis has penalised investments that were misguided or badly designed,” said Adriano Pires, an economist who specialises in energy planning and is the director of the Brazilian Infrastructure Centre, a consultancy.

Most of the oil discovered in Brazil lies deep below the seabed off the Atlantic coast. The enthusiasm for creating a national industry for oil drilling equipment emerged after the 2006 discovery of large amounts of oil under a thick layer of salt, known as the pre-salt layer, more than 5,000 metres below the surface.

The difficulties of tapping into that newfound wealth make technology, ships, and large, complex equipment necessary. The administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) launched a strategy to develop the pre-salt reserves, in which Petrobras played a dominant role.

The government also set national content standards averaging 60 percent for the equipment used, to drive local production. And shipyards began to mushroom.

“It was an illusion. Reserving market encouraged waste not efficiency, besides favouring corruption,” Pires told IPS.

“Recovery will be slow and difficult; everything will have to be revised, and it will require a government with credibility, unlike the current one,” said the expert, an outspoken opponent of the centre-left government of President Dilma Rousseff, in power since Jan. 1, 2011. “It will require a regulatory framework that offers legal security, to attract investment.”

Oil and infrastructure are the sectors that can fuel recovery of economic growth, to overcome the recession that has hit Brazil since last year, he said.

Among analysts there are even doubts about the economic feasibility of exploiting the pre-salt oil reserves at the current prices, which stand below 50 dollars a barrel. “That is not evaluated on the basis of today’s prices, but looking at long-term prices, and I estimate that prices will go back up to 60 or 70 dollars a barrel within five years,” Pires said.

By contrast with the oil, mining and railway industries, the power industry has escaped the wave of frustrated infrastructure projects.

“In Brazil there is repressed demand, and that requires an expansion of the power grid in the long term – a need that doesn’t disappear because of recession or two years of economic slowdown. At the most, some goals could be postponed,” said André Lucena a professor of planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

In this country of 202 million people, “per capita consumption of electricity is low in comparison to developed countries, which is why it tends to grow, for example with the incorporation of new electric and electronic equipment in homes,” he told IPS. For that reason, new hydroelectric and thermal plants will never be useless.

Moreover, a stable power supply requires a surplus: “some idle capacity forms part of the system’s operating mechanism, it’s beneficial,” he said.

On a daily basis there are “consumption peaks” that the system must deal with to avoid blackouts. The generation and distribution of electricity cannot be based on average usage.

In Brazil, hydropower plays a predominant role – it is inexpensive and operates as long as there is water. It represents nearly two-third of the country’s installed capacity.

Thermal plants, fired by oil, natural gas or coal, produce more expensive electricity, and are only used when there is not enough hydropower. “They are built to be idle most of the time, but they’re not useless,” said Lucena.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A geothermal drilling rig at the Menengai site in Kenya's Rift Valley to exploit energy which is more sustainable than that produced from fossil fuels. A Climate Change Bill now before the Kenyan parliament seeks to provide the legal and institutional framework for mitigation and adaption to the effects of climate change. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu
NAIROBI, Jul 27 2015 (IPS)

Alexander Muyekhi, a construction worker from Ebubayi village in the heart of Vihiga County in Western Kenya, and his school-going children can now enjoy a tiny solar kit supplied by the British-based Azuri Technologies to light their house and play their small FM radio.

This has saved the family from use of kerosene tin-lamps, which are dim and produce unfriendly smoke, but many other residents in the village – and elsewhere in the country – are not so lucky because they cannot afford the 1000 shillings (10 dollars) deposit for the kit, and 80 weekly instalments of 120 shillings (1.2 dollars).

“Such climate-friendly kits are very important, particularly for the rural poor,” said Philip Kilonzo, Technical Advisor for Natural Resources & Livelihoods at ActionAid International Kenya. “But for families who survive on less than a dollar per day, it becomes a tall order for them to pay the required deposit, as well as the weekly instalments.”“Once it [Climate Change Bill] becomes law, we will deliberately use it as a legal instrument to reduce or exempt taxes on such climate-friendly gadgets and on projects that are geared towards low carbon growth” - Dr Wilbur Ottichilo, Kenyan MP

It was due to such bottlenecks that Dr Wilbur Ottichilo, a member of parliament for Emuhaya constituency in Western Kenya, and chair of the Parliamentary Network on Renewable Energy and Climate Change, moved a motion in parliament to enact a Climate Change Bill, which has already been discussed, and is now being subjected to public scrutiny before becoming law.

“Once it becomes law, we will deliberately use it as a legal instrument to reduce or exempt taxes on such climate-friendly gadgets and on projects that are geared towards low carbon growth,” said Ottichilo.

While Kenya makes a low net contribution to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the country’s Draft National Climate Change Framework Policy notes that a significant number of priority development initiatives will impact on the country’s levels of emissions.

In collaboration with development partners, the country is already investing in increased geothermal electricity in the energy sector to counter this situation, switching movement of freight from road to rail in the transport sector, reforestation in the forestry sector, and agroforestry in the agricultural sector.

“With a legal framework in place, it will be possible to increase such projects that are geared towards mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change,” said Ottichilo.

The Climate Change Bill seeks to provide the legal and institutional framework for mitigation and adaption to the effects of climate change, to facilitate and enhance response to climate change and to provide guidance and measures for achieving low carbon climate-resilient development.

“We received the Bill from the National Assembly towards the end of March, we studied it for possible amendments, and we subjected it to public scrutiny as required by the constitution before it was read in the senate for the second time on Jul. 22, 2015,” Ekwee Ethuro, Speaker of the Senate, told IPS.

“After this, we are going to return it to the National Assembly so that it can be forwarded to the president for signing it into law.”

The same bill was first rejected by former President Mwai Kibaki on the grounds that there had been a lack of public involvement in its creation. “We are very careful this time not to repeat the same mistake,” said Ethuro.

Under the law, a National Climate Change Council is to be set up which, among others, will coordinate the formulation of national and county climate change action plans, strategies and policies, and make them available to the public.

“This law is a very important tool for civil society and all other players because it will give us an opportunity to manage and even fund-raise for climate change adaptation and mitigation projects,” said, John Kioli, chair of the Kenya Climate Change Working Group (KCCWG).

Evidence of climate change in Kenya is based on statistical analysis of trends in historical records of temperature, rainfall, sea level rise, mountain glacier coverage, and climate extremes.

Temperature and rainfall records from the Kenya Meteorological Department over the last 50 years provide clear evidence of climate change in Kenya, with temperatures generally showing increasing trends in many parts of the country starting from the early 1960s. This has also been confirmed by data in the State of the Environment reports published by the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA).

As a result, the country now experiences prolonged droughts, unreliable rainfall patterns, floods, landslides and many more effects of climate change, which experts say will worsen with time.

Furthermore, 83 percent of Kenya’s landmass is either arid or semi-arid, making the country even more vulnerable to climate change, whose impacts cut across diverse aspects of society, economy, health and the environment.

“We seek to embrace climate-friendly food production systems such as use of greenhouses, we need to minimise post-harvest losses and food wastages, and we need to adapt to new climate friendly technologies,” said Ottichilo. “All these will work very well for us once we have a supporting legal environment.”

Edited by Phil Harris

Palm plantation in Sumatra, Indonesia. Palm plantations are being used for the production of biofuel under the guise of a new source of ‘green’ fuel, often displacing local communities and eradicating forests. Photo credit: Clare McVeigh/Down To Earth

By Robbie Blake
BRUSSELS, May 9 2015 (IPS)

Last week, the European Union reached a momentous decision to finally agree a reform to its disastrous biofuels legislation, signalling Europe’s U-turn on the burning of crops for biofuels.

In so doing, the European body has recognised what NGOs and scientists have long been warning – that using food and agricultural crops for transport fuel causes major side effects, including food price hikes and volatility, hunger, forest destruction, expanded land consumption, and climate change.“Using food and agricultural crops for transport fuel causes major side effects, including food price hikes and volatility, hunger, forest destruction, expanded land consumption, and climate change”

Six years of political wrangling has ultimately boiled down to a few percentage points. The European Union decided to limit biofuels from food crops like maize, rapeseed, soy and palm oil to 7 percent of transport energy in 2020 (compared with an expected 8.6 percent business as usual).

If that doesn’t sound much (and it should have gone further, given that it still means increasing consumption beyond today’s levels), it is worth knowing that this prevents emissions of an estimated 320 million tonnes of CO₂ – equal to the total carbon emissions of a country like Poland in 2012.

The European Union has moreover committed to end policies and subsidies supporting crop-based biofuels after 2020.

Friends of the Earth (FoE) first heard that policies to incentivise biofuels might be causing serious problems a decade ago. Back then, biofuels were hyped as a silver bullet – backed by big agricultural industry interests and as an easy ‘drop-in’ alternative to fossil fuels.

But FoE partners in Indonesia, Paraguay, Brazil and elsewhere began reporting a pattern of massive new plantation developments for sugar cane, oil palm and soy, under the guise of a new source of ‘green’ fuel. These began to displace local communities and eradicate forests – and continue to do so today.

Meanwhile, studies began to show that many biofuels were helping to drive – not prevent – climate change. Extensive scientific research now shows that, on balance, diverting crops to fuel our transport often does more to contribute to climate change than to combat it, due to the deforestation that goes hand-in-hand with large-scale expansion of agricultural land for biofuels.

The results were also disastrous for food. In 2011, a global report on food price volatility by organisations including the OECD, the World Bank, FAO, and the IMF recommended that “governments remove provisions of current national policies that subsidize (or mandate) biofuels production or consumption.”

By turning its back on these biofuels, Europe sends a strong signal to global markets that the biofuels bubble has burst.

The significance of this should not be underestimated. Many countries, rightly or wrongly, see the European Union as a global leader on policies to tackle climate change, and are likely to follow this example in their own biofuels policies. The European Union is also the world’s biggest producer and importer of biodiesel, so this decision will be noticed on world biofuels and commodity markets.

Biofuels-producing countries should take note. Indonesia recently announced plans for new subsidies to expand biofuels plantations in Indonesian forests – which now seems like a serious misstep.

E.U. governments will now have to implement this reform, and they must set the course for phasing out the misguided blending of food crops into Europeans’ fuel tanks altogether. They should next take stock and ensure that other forms of bioenergy (for example, burning wood for electricity) do not cause unintended harm for citizens, the environment and the climate.

And to truly and effectively reduce carbon emissions from transport, they must urgently adopt readily available options like reducing fuel demand in cars, making trains and public transport better and cheaper, speeding up the electrification of our transport systems, and incentives to get people cycling and walking.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

The town of Ilhéus in the Northeast Brazilian state of Bahia, part of whose coastline will be modified by the construction of the Porto Sul port complex, which environmentalists and local residents are protesting because of the serious ecological and social damage it will cause. Credit: Courtesy Instituto Nossa Ilhéus

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 24 2015 (IPS)

Activists and local residents have brought legal action aimed at blocking the construction of a nearly 50 sq km port terminal in the Northeast Brazilian state of Bahia because of the huge environmental and social impacts it will have.

The biggest project of its kind in Brazil has given rise to several court battles. With a budget of 2.2 billion dollars, Porto Sul will be built in Aratiguá, on the outskirts of the city of Ilhéus, at the heart of the Cocoa Coast’s long stretches of heavenly beaches, where the locals have traditionally depended on tourism and the production of cocoa for a living.

The courts have ordered four precautionary measures against the project, while civil society movements say they will not stop fighting the projected mega-port with legal action and protests.

The Porto Sul port complex will be financed by the Brazilian government, through its growth acceleration programme, which focuses largely on the construction of infrastructure.

Construction of the deepwater port and the complex will employ 2,500 people at its peak. But the project is staunchly opposed by locals and by social organisations because of what activists have described as the “unprecedented” environmental impact it will have.

Critics of the project have dubbed it the “Belo Monte of Bahia” – a reference to the huge hydroelectric dam being built on the Xingú river in the northern Amazon jungle state of Pará, which will be the third-largest in the world in terms of generation capacity.

Environmentalists protest that the new port terminal and its logistical and industrial zone will hurt an ecological corridor that connects two natural protected areas.

These are the 93-sq-km Sierra de Conduru State Park, which boasts enormous biodiversity in flora and fauna, and the 4.4-sq-km Boa Esperança Municipal Park in the urban area of Ilhéus, which is a refuge for rare species and a freshwater sanctuary.

Construction of the port complex “shows a lack of respect for the region’s natural vocation, which is tourism and conservation. Since 2008 we have been fighting to show that the project is not viable,” activist Maria Mendonça, president of the Nossa Ilhéus Institute, dedicated to social monitoring of public policies, told IPS.

Ilhéus, a city of 180,000 people, has the longest coastline in the state, and is famous as the scenario for several novels by renowned Bahia writer Jorge Amado, such as “Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon”.

Digital view of a small part of the future Porto Sul port complex in Aratiguá, in the Northeast Brazilian city of Ilhéus. Credit: Bahia state government

The project’s environmental impact study, carried out in 2013, identified 36 potential environmental impacts, 42 percent of which could not be mitigated. Some of them will affect marine species that will be driven away by the construction work, including dolphins and whales. The project will also kill fauna living on the ocean floor.

Aratiguá, the epicentre of the Porto Sul port, “is an important fishing location in the region, where more than 10,000 people who depend on small-scale fishing along a 10-km stretch of the shoreline clean their catch,” Mendonça said.

An estimated 100 million tons of earth will be moved in this ecologically fragile region, where environmentalists are sounding the alarm while authorities and the company promise economic development and jobs, in a socioeconomically depressed area.

Social and environmental activist Ismail Abéde is one of 800 people living in the Vila Juerana coastal community, who will be displaced by the port complex project.

“The erosion will stretch 10 km to the north of the port, where we live, and the sea will penetrate up to 100 metres inland. It will be a catastrophe,” Abéde complained to IPS.

He pointed out that the complex was originally to form part of the Projeto Pedra de Ferro project.

That project, operated by Bahia Mineração (Bamin), a national company owned by Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) and Zamin Ferrous, is to extract an estimated 20 million tons of iron ore a year in Caetité, a city of 46,000 people in the interior of the state.

The iron ore will be transported on a new 400-km Caetité-Ilhéus railway, built mainly to carry the mineral to Bamin’s own shipping terminal in Porto Sul.

The mining project was granted an environmental permit in November 2012 and an operating license in June 2014.

Meanwhile, the Porto Sul complex received a building permit on Sep. 19, 2014, and construction is to begin within a year of that date at the latest. The complex is to be up and running by the end of 2019.

Porto Sul, the biggest port being built in Northeast Brazil and one of the largest logistical structures, will be the country’s third-largest port,l moving 60 million tons in its first 10 years of activity.

The main connection with the complex will be by rail. But an international airport is also to be built in its area of influence, as well as new roads and a gas pipeline.

The interconnected Projeto Pedra de Ferro requires a 1.5 billion dollar investment, and the mine’s productive potential is 398 million tons, which would mean a useful life of 20 years.

“The mine is not sustainable and the railway to carry the mineral to the port runs through protected areas and local communities,” Mendonça complained.

Activists argue that iron ore dust, a toxic pollutant, will be spread through the region while it is transported, affecting cocoa crops and the rivers crossed by the railroad.

Abedé also protested the way the company has informed the families that will be affected by either of the two projects. He said neither the company nor the authorities have offered consultation or dialogue.

“The state can expropriate property when it is for the collective good, not for a private international company,” he said.

The Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), a United Kingdom-based multinational, was delisted from the London Stock Exchange in November 2013, accused of fraud and corruption.

“We are preparing reports that we will present to public banks to keep them from financing the projects,” said Abedé, referring to one of the measures the activists plan to take to fight the project, along with court action.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The container terminal administrative building in the port of the Mariel special economic development zone in Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Aug 22 2014 (IPS)

The Mariel special economic development zone, the biggest construction project undertaken in decades in Cuba, emerged thanks to financial support from Brazil, which was based on political goodwill, a strategy of integration, and business vision.

“Cuba would not have been able to undertake this project from a technical or economic point of view,” economist Esteban Morales told IPS. He added that the geographic setting makes the development zone strategic in terms of trade, industry and services in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Brazil financed the construction of the container terminal and the remodeling of the port of Mariel, which is equipped with state-of-the-art technology to handle cargo from Post-Panamax container ships that will begin to arrive when the expansion of the Panama Canal is completed in December 2015.

Post-Panamax refers to vessels that do not fit in the current Panama Canal, such as the supertankers and the largest modern container and passenger ships.

The port, 45 km west of Havana, is located along the route of the main maritime transport flows in the Western hemisphere, and experts say it will be the largest industrial port in the Caribbean in terms of both size and volume of activity.

Construction of the terminal, in the heart of the 465 sq km special economic development zone, has included highways connecting the Mariel port with the rest of the country, a railway network, and communication infrastructure, and the port will offer a variety of services.

In the special zone, currently under construction, there will be productive, trade, agricultural, port, logistical, training, recreational, tourist, real estate, and technological development and innovation activities, in installations that include merchandise distribution centres and industrial parks.

The special zone is divided into eight sectors, to be developed in stages. The first involves telecommunications and a modern technology park where pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms will operate – two sectors which will be given priority in Mariel, along with renewable energies, agriculture and food, among others.

The Cuban government is currently studying the approval of 23 projects from Europe, Asia and the Americas for Mariel, in the chemical, construction materials, logistics and equipment rental industries.

The terminal was inaugurated on Jan. 27, and during its first six months of operation it received 57 ships and some 15,000 containers – small numbers compared to the terminal’s warehouse capacity of 822,000 containers. Post-Panamax vessels can carry up to 12,600 containers, three times more than Panamax ships.

Another economist, Pedro Monreal, estimates that the cost per container will be cut in half.

The lower costs, he said, will improve the competitiveness of Brazil’s manufactured goods, to cite one example. Mariel, where a free trade zone will also operate, could become a platform for production and export by the companies, even for supplying Brazil’s domestic market.

Heavy machinery prepares the terrain for a railway that will form part of the new infrastructure linked to the special development zone in the port of Mariel – the biggest project undertaken in Cuba in decades: Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Although Decree Law 313, which created the special economic development zone, was passed in September 2013, the remodeling of Mariel began three years ago, led by a joint venture formed in February 2010 by the Compañía de Obras e Infraestructura, a subsidiary of the private Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht, and Quality Cuba SA.

The container terminal is run by Global Ports Management Limited of Singapore, one of the world’s biggest container terminal operators, which has been working with the Cuban firm Almacenes Universales S.A, which is the owner and user of the terminal, and responsible for oversight of its efficient use.

The relationship between Cuba and Brazil is a longstanding one. Former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) did not hide his sympathies for the Cuban revolution, and has visited this country a number of times, first as a trade unionist and political party leader, and then as a president and former president.

Two packages of agreements signed in 2008 and 2010 between Lula and Cuban President Raúl Castro marked their interest in strengthening bilateral ties, an effort continued by current Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

When she attended the inauguration of the terminal, Rousseff said the project would take 802 million dollars in the first stage, plus 290 million for the second stage. The first of Brazil’s loans was initially to go towards construction of the road, but the local government decided to start with the port.

The credit was granted by Brazil’s National Bank of Economic and Social Development (BNDES). Havana provided 15 percent of the investment needed for the work.

“Cuba is a priority for our government, and Brazil is important to Havana,” the director general of the Brazilian Agency for the Promotion of Exports and Investments (APEX-Brazil), Hipólito Rocha, told IPS.

APEX-Brazil was created by Lula and Castro to promote joint business ventures with Cuba, the rest of the Caribbean and Central America.

Odebrecht is the most important company involved in Mariel, but diplomatic sources told IPS that a total of around 400 Brazilian companies are taking part in the project. “Between our countries there is affinity, political will, an interest in integration, but business matters are also important,” Rocha said.

He added that Cuba strictly lives up to its financial commitments with Brazil, and said bilateral relations “are solid, sustainable and bring benefits to our country as well.”

Analyst Arturo López-Levy said Brazil’s involvement in the Mariel project was decisive not only because of the investment. The political scientist, who lives in the United States, says the Brazilian government is sending a message to Washington and the European Union and other emerging powers that it backs the transformations underway in Cuba.

The presidents of China, Xi Jinping, and Russia, Vladimir Putin, also sent out signals when they visited Cuba in July, indicating their interest in expanding cooperation with Havana.

The two presidents stopped over in Cuba when they travelled to the sixth summit of the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), held Jul. 14-16 in Brazil.

The strengthening of ties promises greater access to the Chinese and Russian markets, attraction of investment in areas of common interest like the pharmaceutical and energy industries, and cooperation for the modernisation of strategic areas in defence, ports and telecommunications, López-Levy told IPS.

With respect to the possible interest of U.S. businesses in getting a foothold in the special economic development zone, and to an increase in pressure for the lifting of the five-decade U.S. embargo, the analyst said “the Cuban market awakens very limited interest in the United States.”

However, he said it was “clear” that U.S. investors are becoming more interested, especially Cuban-Americans.

“In order for this motivation to turn into political pressure against the embargo, the Cuban economy has to give out clear signs of recovery and of the government’s willingness, in key areas, to adopt a mixed economy with transparent guarantees for investors and export capacity,” he said.

Rocha has a somewhat different opinion.

“The embargo is going to collapse under its own weight,” he said. “Business will knock it down.”

It was seen as symbolic that the first ship that docked in the Mariel port after it began to operate brought food for Cuba from the United States – cash-only imports, which were authorised by the U.S. Congress in 2000.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Taxi driver Jesca Machingura is one of the few women who has been involved in the industry for 15 years. With the income she earns she has been able to send her daughter to university in South Africa. Courtesy: Jeffrey Moyo

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Aug 8 2014 (IPS)

Mavis Gotora from Mabvuku high-density suburb, in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, walks up and down, as she persuades one passer-by after another to board the private taxi cab she drives.

But eight years ago when she first started in this industry things weren’t so easy for her. “I had to fight hard [and was] competing against verbally-abusive male taxi drivers who envied how I easily got clients,” she tells IPS.

“The male taxi drivers who felt challenged by my presence on the streets where we scrounged for clients would call me all sorts of names, at times labelling me a whore. But I remained unbreakable as I fought my way through to live on in the industry,” says Gotora.

Gotora says eight years ago she was unemployed and had no other option except to try taxi driving.

“Most women scramble for jobs as hairdressers and as vendors on street pavements. But hit hard with joblessness, I said let me try taxi driving after I had obtained a driver’s licence in 2005,” explains Gotora.

Now she says her fortunes have turned around.  

“I’m now a proud owner of a housing stand, with my new home at foundation level. I also bought my own car, which is still being shipped from Japan, which I’m going to convert into a taxi and [start my own business],” adds Gotora.

But she is not the only woman who has turned to the transport sector looking for a job.

According to the Female Drivers Association of Harare (FEDAH), an independent organisation of women drivers, there are currently 3,200 women drivers in public transport countrywide, with 22,5 percent of these driving private taxis cabs. 

FEDAH chairperson Lynette Muzondiwa attributed the presence of women in what was formerly a male-dominated job to the harsh economic conditions in this southern African nation.

“For over a decade the Zimbabwean economy has been shrinking, leaving many people including women out of employment and consequently forcing women to turn to any jobs even those dominated by men. That is why today other women have turned to driving taxis,” Muzondiwa tells IPS.

Surveys conducted by FEDAH from 2007 to 2013 shows that the number of female taxi drivers has been steadily rising.

In 2007 and 2008 approximately 110 women nationwide became taxi drivers. Currently there are 720.

Tinashe Murwira, a 30-year-old female taxi driver, says the job offers quick returns to both owners and drivers.

“As taxi drivers, we are obliged to meet a weekly target of 250 dollars, which is submitted to the taxi owner and whatever remains is the driver’s commission and this is unlike the little moneys women vendors make daily on the streets,” Murwira tells IPS.

But she agrees with Gotora that its not always an easy environment for women to work in.

“We have to outdo each other on the streets as private taxi drivers, mostly against our male counterparts begrudging us for being more appealing to customers than them.

“On the other hand some of our unscrupulous clients at times pester us for sexual favours,” Murwira says.

But Murwira said she used to make about 25 dollars a week selling sweets and mobile phone recharge cards. But now her earnings have increased.

“Each week I make about 400 dollars, out of which I take 250 dollars to surrender to my employer, meaning every week I often carry home 150 dollars, adding to 600 dollars in monthly earnings,” says Murwira.

Taxi owners like Nkosana Dlamini from Harare say there are still few women drivers here.

“Women are quite rare in terms of being taxi drivers. In business you have to introduce newness always for a business to survive. The taxi business is a money-spinning venture where you have to entrust your resources on trustworthy characters, and women drivers fit easily into that bracket,” Dlamini tells IPS.

“Women again are not reckless drivers unlike their male counterparts,” he adds, adding that passengers feel safer with women drivers.

Ashley Muzenda, a hairdresser, agrees.

“I feel safer being driven by women taxi drivers than male drivers as women are responsible drivers. Male drivers often drive dangerously, eluding traffic cops while they also use foul language against passengers and often double as criminals,” Muzenda tells IPS.

Meanwhile, in 2013 Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Transport started training young women drivers for employment in the public transport sector.

For Gotora and many other female drivers here, with government behind them, better days may be looming.

“I feel hey-days are approaching, with government backing women’s survival efforts in the driving industry,” Gotora says.

Edited by: Nalisha Adams

The writer can be contacted at: moyojeffrey@gmail.com

The Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA) line has about 900,000 passengers who use the railway annually. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
DAR ES SALAAM, Dec 11 2013 (IPS)

Some say it’s the journey, not the destination that matters. Hop aboard the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA) line at Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam port and begin the 1,860-kilometre journey to Kapiri Mposhi, a small town in Zambia’s Central Province, and you may find yourself pondering this adage.

For a large number of passengers using what is known as the “Freedom” or “Great Uhuru Railway”, it is about getting from point A to point B safely. The railway line is a necessity today, given that some roads in southeastern Tanzania are poor, impassable or nonexistent.

“Try and travel on those buses … You’ll pray you arrive,” Lawrence Pangani, a pension scheme manager who is listening to music on his portable stereo, tells IPS.

Pangani, along with a number of Zambian and Congolese businessmen, are travelling in TAZARA’s first class cabin as the train crosses the Rift Valley. He is making his way from Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, where he was working, to his home in Kabwe, which lies west of Zambia’s capital Lusaka.

The railway was built in the 1970s with an interest-free loan of about 412 million dollars from China. At the time, it was the largest single foreign-aid project undertaken by the Asian country. TAZARA was handed over to Tanzania and Zambia in 1976.

It became a significant alternative transport system for Zambia, a copper-rich but landlocked southern African state which, at the time, was sanctioned by still-colonised neighbouring regimes for supporting the liberation struggle of many of those countries.

But in recent times TAZARA has veered off track. Just over five years ago the railway was said to be “on the brink of collapse” after accumulating debts of up to 45 million dollars.

In 2011 China, described by TAZARA spokesman Conrad Simuchile as the railway’s “surrogate mother”, signed a protocol with the Zambian and Tanzanian governments, writing off roughly 50 percent of their debts. Simuchile tells IPS that most of the support for TAZARA, in the form of equipment and expertise, has come from China. He stresses that there are no conditions attached to the assistance.

But even with this help, the railway is still struggling.

In September it was reported that revenue had averaged 1.53 million dollars per month against an estimated average expenditure of over 2.5 million dollars.

A two-week strike, which began in August over the unpaid wages of 1,067 workers, cost TAZARA 1.4 million dollars and inconvenienced 46,000 passengers.

The company desperately needs recapitalisation, says Simuchile.

“We are doing so badly right now. But this is not a write-off. This company, TAZARA, is not a perpetual loss-making company [as some places have dismissed it],”  he says from his office at the railway’s Dar es Salaam headquarters.

“All we need is just maybe three or four major customers and this company will break even, make a profit. And we have clients knocking on our doors everyday. They want us to move their cargo.”

He says government ministers have recently given the company leeway to look for smart partnerships with the private sector without necessarily affecting the shareholding structure.

Simuchile is optimistic the line will be extended to Lusaka in the next two years.

“It’s very convenient for our customers but [we are not just transporting] minerals – copper, cobalt, manganese. We are also moving a lot of imports from Asia, from all over the world. They come in through Dar es Salaam and they go on to Malawi, Congo, Zambia, and the Great Lakes countries of Burundi and Rwanda.”

Nelson Nyangu, director of transport in Zambia’s ministry of transport, works, supply and communication, says TAZARA is a “lifeline” for Zambia and its operations must be “immediately revitalised”.

“At present the authority is experiencing serious operational and management challenges that have resulted in the company operating below break-even point,” he tells IPS.

TAZARA’s hauling capacity has gone down from a peak of over one million mega tonnes per year to less than 500,000, Nyangu says.

However, there are still about 900,000 passengers who use the railway annually.

Today, farmer Emmanuel* is transporting his rice to sell at the local market in Makambako, a town in Tanzania’s southern highlands. A super-seater ticket cost him about nine dollars, compared to a bus ticket that costs nearly 25 dollars and involves three changes.

TAZARA runs two passenger services a week. The one that departs Zambia on Tuesdays is called the “Mukuba Express”, mukuba meaning “copper” in the country’s Bemba language. The Friday service from Tanzania is called “Kilimanjaro”.

Today’s Kilimanjaro service left Dar es Salaam nearly 10 hours late and is failing to make up time.

“I was supposed to pass through this place at night. Now it’s daytime, meaning my schedule has been delayed,” says Emmanuel, speaking in Swahili through an interpreter.

Simuchile admits there are “breakdowns on a weekly basis”.

“Our infrastructure is really rundown,” he says. “Our equipment itself, the locomotive, the wagons they’ve really aged and maintenance schedules have not been followed because of the serious lack of recapitalisation.”

But Simuchile points out, “it’s the unexpected things that happen that really are interesting.”

“The things you experience on TAZARA are the real life experiences Africans have on a daily basis. The hiccups you face are part of the reality,” he says. “So the important thing is to get on TAZARA with an open mind.” And an open schedule.

But for some foreign passengers who are travelling on a train in Africa for the first time, these “hiccups” may be what is most exciting about the trip.

Sara Strandstoft, her partner Jacob Anderson, and their two boys travelling on TAZARA. After three days on board, the Danish family still does not know when they will reach their final destination of Kasama, in Zambia’s Northern Province.

“We took our watches off, time goes as it goes,” Strandstoft tells IPS, laughing.

*Not his real name.

Location of the projected terminal (in pink) on the coast of Rocha, between La Paloma (bottom left) and Cabo Polonio (upper right). Credit: Comisión Interministerial del Puerto de Aguas Profundas

By Pablo Tosquellas
MONTEVIDEO, Nov 6 2013 (IPS)

The small South American country of Uruguay could become a major logistics hub in the Southern Cone due to the deepwater port that the government is planning to build in a tourist area on the Atlantic ocean.

The project is controversial, because it would convert an undeveloped natural tourism zone in the department (province) of Rocha in the southeast of the country. And it would also compete with terminals in the country’s two giant neighbours: Brazil and Argentina.

There is already ongoing tension over trade issues between Uruguay and Argentina, and the ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo have been rivals since Spanish colonial times.

According to government sources consulted by IPS, the terminal will be built in stages, and because of its geographic location and its natural depth of 20 metres, it is being offered as a lower-cost shipment point for minerals and grains from neighbouring countries.

Enrique Pintado, Uruguay’s minister of transport and public works, told IPS that the project should be a kind of “cooperative” effort among all countries in the region, to save on shipping costs so that products reach their destination, mainly China and Southeast Asia, “with less distorted prices.”

According to a document from the Inter-ministerial Commission on the Deepwater Port, the terminal could generate 50 percent savings in logistics costs for certain trade flows from the region to Asia, and could eventually handle 50 million tons a year of cargo.

The minister said the capacity of other ports in the region is “saturated”, like Santos in the southeast of Brazil, which is Latin America’s biggest container port, which means “the waiting time for loading and unloading merchandise is excessive.”

The key to the success of the new port is its natural depth, according to Pablo Genta, under-secretary of transport and a member of the Inter-ministerial Commission.

Today, ports on the Atlantic that are about 12 metres deep can handle 60,000 tons of cargo per vessel. The port in Rocha could more than double that capacity, by serving ships carrying up to 160,000 tons, Genta told IPS.

The port of Santos handles more than 100 million tons of cargo annually.

“The port of Montevideo, in the best years, handles 12 million tons,” Genta said. “And the Buenos Aires terminal just barely reached 11 million tons last year.”

The port of Montevideo as seen from the Cerro neighbourhood. Credit: Daniel Stonek/CC BY 3.0

Uruguay wants to attract a significant portion of the grain and mineral cargo that Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay ship to China and Southeast Asia.

But the under-secretary stressed that Uruguay’s own future production justifies the plans for the port. He was referring to the Aratirí mining project in the centre of the country, where the Indian company Zamin Ferrous hopes to extract 18 million tons of iron ore a year which would be transported to the coast through a slurry pipeline.

Economic, topographical and marine hydrology studies are currently being carried out, as well as physical-chemical studies to establish an environmental baseline, with the aim of putting it out to tender in 2014.

A law passed in January approved construction of the port in the department of Rocha, in an area that contains the beach resort towns of Mar del Plata, El Palenque and San Francisco.

The port is to cover an area of 3,027 hectares, for which land will have to be expropriated. In July, the government called for expressions of interest from potential users of the terminal.

The coastline of Mar del Plata, El Palenque and San Francisco is sparsely inhabited. The white sands and waves and natural vegetation form part of a 46-km stretch of beach between La Paloma, Rocha’s main resort town, and Cabo Polonio, a remote beach village that is inaccessible by road, has no electricity or running water, and is home to a colony of southern sea lions and South America’s most important mobile sand dune area.

Opponents of the port, especially the Movement for a Sustainable Uruguay (MOVUS), argue that there is no clear evidence that neighbouring countries will be interested in using the port.

The only obvious freight use, they say, is by the planned Aratirí open-pit mine, which does not yet have all the permits it needs, and has run up against strong social and environmental opposition.

Legal action has been taken to challenge the approval of construction of the port.

Minister Pintado argued, however, that Uruguay cannot fail to take advantage of the fact that Asia “has been shifting its interest in investment and business westward and is breaking down the North-South economic logic.”

In the mid term, he said, the port would handle shipments of grains and bulk liquids, especially oil and its by-products.

The authorities estimate the cost at one billion dollars – an investment that will be made in stages, “like the layers of an onion,” Pintado said. Different terminals will be built as neighbouring countries and the private sector express interest.

Corporación Navíos SA, a shipping company that operates under the free-zone procedure in the port of Nueva Palmira at the confluence of the Uruguay and Paraná rivers, has closely followed the process and hopes to invest in the Rocha terminal, perhaps by means of a public-private contract.

The firm stores and transports freight that arrives in river barges from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Ruben Martínez, general manager of Corporación Navíos, told IPS that many of the company’s ocean-going ships set out with “incomplete” loads.

“There is merchandise, like iron ore, that requires larger vessels, which need a stop off at another port to complete their load,” he said. For that reason, he added, the activities in the ports of Nueva Palmira and Rocha could complement each other.

By Leonardo Padura
HAVANA, Nov 6 2013 (Columnist Service)

For the Cuban economy, the year 2014 is set to start with the opening of the first installations in the Special Economic Development Zone in the upgraded Mariel port, 70 km west of Havana.

The new trade and industrial hub will include a container port, enormous warehouses, a free trade zone, industrial endeavours with foreign capital, and modern infrastructure. It will be the country’s leading industrial centre, and is already considered Cuba’s main window to the world of imports and exports.

As soon as the Mariel container terminal begins to operate, Havana’s ageing port will start to be overhauled and renovated, to turn it into a marina for yachts and cruise ships, especially once the half-century U.S. embargo is lifted to allow tourists to come and boats from the United States to dock on Cuban shores.

The upgrade of the Mariel port installations has been mainly financed – 640 million of the 900 million dollars invested – by a loan obtained through an intergovernmental agreement signed by Brazil and Cuba.

Leonardo Padura

The involvement of Brazil and its companies in the construction and investment gives some indication of that country’s interest in gaining a commercial and productive foothold in this privileged geographic location in the Caribbean, at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico and across from the U.S. coast, just before the expansion of the nearby Panama Canal, which will be able to serve bigger ships as of 2015.

The big question with respect to the future of Mariel is who will invest, and under what conditions, in the development zone, which will have not only port installations and warehouses but also industries.

There has been a great deal of talk about the need for the Cuban government to finally declare whether it will modify its legal relations with foreign capital.

Back in July 2012, an official announcement was made that a new investment law was to go into effect by the end of that year, to replace Law 77 passed in 1995.

But there has not yet been a clear response to the expectations created. Meanwhile, what has actually happened is that 190 joint enterprises between the Cuban government and private foreign capital were operating in mid-2013 – only half the number in operation in 2000.

According to a recently read report, from which I took the previous figures, a Cuban deputy minister of foreign trade stated that “a general and sectoral policy to accompany the fomenting of foreign investment is currently being evaluated, and although a modification of the law is not being considered, certain regulations could be updated.”

In other words, no new law can be expected for the time being, and the Mariel Special Economic Development Zone will move towards its future under regulations that in the last few years have scared off more investors than they have attracted, according to the most simple of mathematical operations.

However, due to its special characteristics, Mariel could be governed by different legal mechanisms, which will perhaps be among the regulations to be updated.

The economic transformations undertaken by the government of Raúl Castro, outlined in the economic and social policy guidelines approved at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in 2011, have gradually modified certain structures and fundamentals of the Cuban economy.

Self-employment has been revitalised, numerous agricultural and services cooperatives have been created and small private businesses have been opened, which has improved services, gastronomy, passenger transport, and food production to a certain extent….

But because of their reduced level of influence on macroeconomics, the changes have failed, and will fail, to become a motor to accelerate development in a country in urgent need of efficiency, productivity, modernisation of all infrastructure, liquidity and access to finance – that is, the elements capable of generating palpable wealth, and with that, an improvement in the living standards of a populace that for nearly a quarter of a century have been getting by on depressed wages that make it impossible to satisfy all of their basic needs, including food.

On several occasions, high-level government officials have said that the most significant economic modifications are yet to come. But the content of what has been promised is unknown and the timeframe for implementation uncertain.

If the announced new law on foreign investment is not approved in the end in a form that manages to draw foreign capital, it is hard to imagine who will be interested in investing in Cuba, even in the Mariel development zone.

Besides Brazilian, Chinese and Russian companies that are predictably close to that investment, the geographic factor and hopes for future changes alone no longer seem sufficient attractions for businesspersons who, upon arriving in Cuba, would even have a problem buying a vehicle for driving around executives and employees.

And a pending question would be where Cubans – that is, Cubans living in Cuba – fit in these new structures, because according to what I read, the Mariel Special Economic Development Zone could be a source of employment for them…but not investment.

Excerpt:

Aerial view of the Machín volcano. Credit: Servicio Geológico Colombiano/Observatorio de Manizales

By Constanza Vieira
FINCA GALICIA, Cordillera Central, Colombia , Oct 26 2013 (IPS)

A new system of tunnels at the Alto de La Línea mountain pass in Colombia’s central Cordillera mountain range will open up a key logistics route for this country and neighbouring Venezuela. But it could be overcome by disaster if the Machín volcano erupts.

The complex engineering feat includes two main one-way tunnels, 8.8 and 8.6 km long, as well as 21 short tunnels and 29 viaducts that will total 6.8 km in length.

The first of the main tunnels, which will be the longest road tunnel in Latin America, is to be completed by mid-2014. The firms that will build the second tunnel have not yet been selected.

Danger: volcano ahead

But in the department (province) of Tolima, the road passes six km from an unassuming hill which is actually the Machín volcano, one of Colombia’s most dangerous volcanoes, which has erupted six or seven times in the past 10,000 years. The most recent eruption occurred around 800 years ago.

“The most explosive volcanoes remain quiet for long periods of time,” said Marta Calvache, director of the Colombian Geological Service (SGC).

The SGC – formerly Ingeominas – drew up the first hazards map for the Machín volcano in 1998, which it amplified in 1999, 2000 and 2003.

The map recommends that the hazards posed by the volcano be taken into account in decision-making on “strategic medium and long-term plans for routes, especially roads.”

The La Línea tunnel and the Machín volcano are 15 km apart as the crow flies. If the volcano erupts, “the tunnel will be left without a road,” Calvache told IPS.

More than 100 monitoring stations keep an eye on the volcano 24/7. In 2008, authorities declared a yellow alert, which is still in place. (Green is for normal, yellow for alert, and red for warning and evacuation.)

Even the smallest eruption by Machín would be larger than the eruption of the Ruiz volcano, 45 km to the northeast, which in November 1985 spewed out 0.3 cubic km (km3) of lahar – mudflow or debris flow – which destroyed the town of Armero, killing 22,000 of its 28,000 inhabitants and leaving over 5,000 injured.

“Machín’s normal eruptions can cover several cubic kilometres. And the big ones have been approximately 20 km3,” Calvache said.

If the next one is big, “it will affect the entire central area of the country,” including parts of the provinces of Tolima, Quindío, Valle del Cauca and Cundinamarca that are home to nearly one million people combined, the geologist warned.

The Machín volcano’s eruptions “produce major pyroclastic flows (a fast-moving current of hot gas and rock). No one survives a pyroclastic flow, and the basin would be completely changed,” Calvache said.

“That change, in human terms, would be forever. It would be human beings who would have to adapt,” she said.

“The volcano has been changing,” she added. “What we don’t know is whether that change is headed towards an eruption or if it is simply being unruly and will go back to being calm again for many years.”

The authorities are apparently betting on the latter.

In the environmental impact assessment for the tunnel, “Machín isn’t mentioned as a risk factor,” environmentalist Néstor Jaime Ocampo, of the Cosmos Ecological Foundation based in Armenia, the capital of Quindío, told IPS.

One of the 29 viaducts that form part of the project to upgrade the La Línea highway and mountain pass. Constanza Vieira/IPS

Key route

The government of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) declared the La Línea route “strategic” in 2005.

La Línea is essential for trade between Cúcuta, the main city on the border with Venezuela, in the northeast, and Colombia’s only Pacific Ocean port, Buenaventura, in the west.

The road runs through the wealthiest part of the country, the central highlands, where Bogotá is located.

“All of the freight that reaches Bogotá from the Pacific comes through here,” Luis Orlando Muñoz, the head of the Colombian Society of Engineers (SCI), told IPS. “Thousands of tonnes of imports and exports are transported daily. This is the country’s spinal column, when it comes to roads.”

Ocampo, the environmentalist, said “What is being built is a modern road corridor between Caracas and Buenaventura.” In other words, Venezuela’s outlet to the Pacific.

The corridor connects the Gulf of Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea with Ecuador on the Pacific, and it forms part of the plans outlined by the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA).

Stressful driving

Like almost all roads in Colombia, the one joining Cúcuta and Buenaventura has just two lanes along most of its 1,020 km.

As it climbs into the central Cordillera range – the highest of the three branches of the Andes in Colombia – the road switchbacks through a stunning landscape of cloud forest, Quindio Wax Palm (Ceroxylon quindiuense), and the royal purple flowers of the Glory Bush (Tibouchina lepidota), and past paddocks and cliffs.

Truckers treat the La Línea route with respect. Because of the frequent fog, steep inclines of up to 18 percent, and tight curves, the average speed is just 18 km an hour. It took IPS six hours to drive the 38 km between Ibagué and this mountain pass.

The need to control traffic on this narrow, busy road and the extreme poverty in the area have given rise to a strange occupation: human stoplights – men and women dressed in rags who use flags, flashlights and whistles to warn drivers that a semi-trailer truck is coming in the other direction, just around the next curve.

It is impossible for these huge trucks to avoid invading the other lane when taking a curve on the La Línea road. Drivers thank the human stoplights by tossing them a few coins.

The tunnel will ease traffic by cutting the distance by 10 km and saving drivers an 840-metre climb, which will reduce the average time it takes to drive across the Alto de La Línea pass by 87 percent for truck drivers (to 80 minutes) and by 72 percent for cars (to 30 minutes).

The average speed should increase to 60 km an hour, and accidents should be reduced by 75 percent, according to the Colombian Infrastructure Chamber.

Logistics and planning delays

Nearly 80 percent of Colombia’s domestic cargo is transported by road, according to the transport ministry.

But the country’s road infrastructure “is lagging by at least 30 years,” Diana Espinosa, the president of SCI – the engineers association – told IPS.

She attributed that to a lack of adequate state policies and to “the dedication of funds to financing the war [the nearly half-century armed conflict against left-wing guerrillas], which is causing us a huge lag in infrastructure.”

In the last decade, road freight traffic has increased multifold, reflecting the growth in foreign trade, especially imports.

The volume of imports is three times that of exports, according to the National Council on Economic and Social Policy, the national planning authority.

For that reason, the first main tunnel will serve traffic from Buenaventura to Bogotá.

Ignoring the risk

“People prefer the known risk to unknown solutions,” expert on natural disasters Gustavo Wilches-Chaux told IPS to explain why, despite the tragedy in Armero, no one is considering relocating Cajamarca, population 10,000 – the town that is closest to the Machín volcano.

To the contrary, the South Africa-based firm AngloGold Ashanti is moving forward with the massive La Colosa open-pit mine between Cajamarca and La Línea.

Ocampo said that “By pursuing economic activities in that area, like the La Colosa mine, we are inviting tens of thousands more people to live in an area of hazardous volcanic activity.”

“A blockage of the highway lasting just a few months would be a catastrophe – the country’s foreign trade would practically collapse,” the environmentalist said.

“This is not about our comfort, so our drive from Armenia to Ibagué will be 25 minutes shorter. This is for the comfort of the multinational companies. And it will be us who will pay a steep toll for going through that tunnel.”

A Metrobus stop on 9 de Julio avenue in Buenos Aires, with the famous Obelisk in the background. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

A new system of exclusive lanes for bus rapid transit appears to be benefiting public transport passengers and bus drivers in the most congested part of the centre of the Argentine capital.

Although there are as yet no studies on its impact, users interviewed by IPS said the new Metrobus on 9 de Julio Avenue, the second widest thoroughfare in the world at 140 metres and 14 lanes wide, delivers faster journeys, with fewer stops and for the same fare.

Built in just six months, the system of exclusive lanes and stops for 10 bus lines began to operate on Jul. 24. The project was controversial because it involved removing small plazas and transplanting nearly 1,500 trees.

Critics claimed that quick journeys over that stretch were already available on the subway, which meant the Metrobus was redundant.

The bus rapid transit (BRT) corridor is 3.5 km long, stretching from the ground-level railway stations of Retiro, north of the city, and Constitución, to the south, which connect with the subway lines.

But the Government of the City of Buenos Aires, the national Transport Secretariat and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP, an NGO) stress that different groups of people use each of these systems.

Around 13 million people live in the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area.

A survey by the Transport Secretariat found that 89 percent of people who travel in the metropolitan area make their journey as a single stretch. And those who choose the cheapest option say the Metrobus is “all gain.”

They arrive in the city centre by bus, from their urban neighbourhoods or from the suburbs, and remain on board the same vehicle until reaching their destination.

Previously they had to endure a slow, stop-and-start trip across the city centre if they wanted to avoid transferring to the subway for the short journey to the final station, which would make the trip more expensive.

The new Metrobus, on the avenue where the Obelisk monument, a city centre landmark, is located, now concentrates the six bus lines that used to mingle with the cars and taxis on the avenue, and another four lines that used to move at snail’s pace on the narrow streets on either side of 9 de Julio.

Now the 10 bus lines run down the centre of the avenue, carrying around 200,000 passengers a day. The narrow side streets have been cleared of bus traffic and are in the process of being pedestrianised, and air pollution has been reduced.

Braking and acceleration have been minimised, increasing fuel efficiency and generating lower volumes of the greenhouse gases that are responsible for global warming.

When IPS rode one of the bus lines, passengers and drivers agreed that the system inaugurated in July is faster. Some people said their travel times were halved.

“It used to take me an hour to get downtown from my home, and now it takes just over 30 minutes,” said a passenger, pointing out that previously, her bus travelled along the most congested part of the avenue, and now it drives in the fastest lane, “all without a fare increase.”

Bus services are provided by the private sector and subsidised by the state. The minimum bus fare, for the shortest distance, costs 1.50 pesos (25 cents of a dollar), while the subway has a flat fare of 2.50 pesos (45 cents of a dollar).

Two other passengers travelling the full distance from Retiro to Constitución said the trip previously took 45 minutes and now only 15. “But you have to look sharp, because now it doesn’t stop so frequently, it’s like the subway,” one of them said.

In effect, the system is similar to trains. Buses go along a single lane and only stop every 400 or 700 metres, at raised platforms level with the bus floor. If they do not need to stop, they travel freely in their exclusive lane, with no taxis or cars in the way.

“It’s much better for us,” one of the line 67 bus drivers told IPS. “On one occasion it took me an hour and 15 minutes to get from Constitución to Corrientes avenue, but now I always do it in 15 minutes.”

Andrés Fingeret, the head of ITDP Argentina, told IPS that while it is too soon to evaluate the results, so far the response received is that “for the vast majority of the travelling public, it has been positive.”

“Not just for passengers, who save time and have a more enjoyable travel experience, but also for bus drivers and for cars and taxis, who experience relief because the streets are less congested,” he said.

Fingeret emphasised that building bus rapid transit networks costs 10 percent of what it would cost to build equivalent subways. He also said they are very effective and can be set in motion much more quickly. For example, the 9 de Julio system was established in just six months, he said.

“One kilometre of subway costs around 250 million dollars and the same distance of Metrobus costs between eight and 15 million dollars, for a much more sophisticated system than was installed in Buenos Aires,” he said.

BRT systems have spread around the world and can be found in over 150 cities, the Buenos Aires city government reported.

In Latin America, the pioneers were Curitiba in Brazil, and Bogotá in Colombia. With variations, the system has also been introduced in Santiago, Chile and in Mexico City.

In Buenos Aires, the first BRT network was constructed in 2011 on Juan B. Justo avenue, comprising a 12-km corridor between the neighbourhoods of Liniers and Palermo, two public transport hubs for buses and trains.

This bus corridor reduced travel times by 40 percent, according to the city transport under-secretariat. And after the 9 de Julio system was installed, a third network came into operation this month between Constitución and Puente La Noria, in the south of the city, over a distance of 24 km.

“It’s a system that offers a lot of advantages and that could still grow ten-fold in Buenos Aires. In fact, the city government is carrying out feasibility studies on further corridors,” said Fingeret.

However, he thinks the network has room for improvement. “There’s a lot to be done to improve integration with other services, such as the subway, trains or bicycles,” he said.

He also thinks better services could be provided for passengers at the bus stops. The stops have seats, roofs and lighting, but they could also have ticket offices, information, sales of soft drinks or cellphone recharging facilities, Fingeret said.

The San Juan River in Nicaragua, one possible route for the canal. Credit: Oscar Navarrete/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Aug 23 2013 (IPS)

The law passed in Nicaragua to grant a concession to a Chinese company to build a canal between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans repealed legislation that protects Lake Cocibolca and its tributaries.

Lake Cocibolca, also known as Lake Nicaragua, is the biggest source of freshwater in Central America and the second largest lake in Latin America after Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo.

The alarm over the new threats to the lake was sounded by two local NGOs, the Nicaraguan Alliance on Climate Change (ANACC) and the National Risk Management Body (MNGR), in representation of 20 environmental groups in the country.

Law 840, dubbed “the great inter-oceanic canal law” by the press, was approved by the legislature in June, with the votes of the governing left-wing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) of President Daniel Ortega.

The canal, which will go across the lake, will be nearly four times longer than its rival, the Panama Canal.

The concession to build and run the canal for 50 years, extendable by another 50 years, was won by the Hong Kong-based Chinese company HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co. Ltd. (HKND Group), owned by Chinese tycoon Wang Jing. The cost of building the canal is an estimated 40 billion dollars.

According to the MNGR, the new legislation repealed the laws that defend the country’s natural resources and bodies of water, included in the “legal compendium on potable water and sanitation”.

The compendium, compiled in 2011 by the national commission on potable water and sanitation and sewage, includes 85 laws, decrees, municipal ordinances, constitutional provisions, international treaties and administrative regulations that protect the country’s bodies of water.

But the canal law establishes that it is the state’s obligation to guarantee the concession-holder “access to and navigation rights on rivers, lakes, oceans and other bodies of water in Nicaragua, and the right to extend, expand, dredge, divert or reduce such bodies of water.”

The state also gives up the right to sue the investors in national or international courts for any damage caused to the environment during the studies for and the construction and operation of the canal.

Law 840 also revoked the principle of application of the general law on national waters, which established that Lake Cocibolca “must be considered a national reserve of potable water, being of the utmost interest to, and highest national priority for, national security.”

Nicaragua granted HKND control over the lake and its surrounding areas, including 16 watersheds and 15 protected areas, where 25 percent of the country’s rainforest is concentrated, David Quintana of the Nicaraguan Foundation for Sustainable Development told Tierramérica*.

The proposed canal routes run through nature reserves that are home to hundreds of species of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, molluscs and crustaceans.

The assistant director of the Humboldt Centre, Víctor Campos, said the canal would simply destroy any chance of making Lake Cocibolca the source of water for all of Central America at some point in the future.

“Construction of the canal and conservation of water for human consumption are mutually exclusive – you either have a canal or you have a reservoir of water for the population,” Campos told Tierramérica.

The canal will be built across 190 km of land, while an additional 80 km of the route will go through Lake Cocibolca. It will serve larger ships than the Panama Canal.

Biologist Salvador Montenegro, director of the Research Centre for Aquatic Resources of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, told Tierramérica that the work on the lake will generate enormous amounts of sediment that will muddy the water and suffocate most of the fish and other forms of life.

Montenegro said the size of the canal – 520 metres wide and 27.6 metres deep – poses the worst environmental scenario for the lake and surrounding watersheds.

“A small oil leak, an earthquake, or the strong winds that blow in that area could cause an ecological catastrophe that would forever put an end to potential human consumption from the lake,” the activist said.

The same concern was voiced by Jaime Incer Barquero, a scientist who advises President Ortega on environmental issues.

“We are still in time to rectify this and not make the extremely serious mistake of endangering the biggest source of water in the country and Central America; no canal is worth as much as that lake,” Barquero told Tierramérica.

In the face of the barrage of criticism, the president has stated that the environmental impact study will be decisive in determining the future of the canal project and the route it will take.

But the environmental and technical authorities did not respond to the arguments of the possible environmental risks, and have merely stressed the economic benefits that the canal will bring to Nicaragua.

HKND spokesman Ronald MacLean has stated in several communiqués that the British consultancy Environmental Resources Management would carry out a professional environmental impact assessment of the different routes considered for the canal.

“Obviously, we also have to address the environmental question, because we will have to see what impact the project will have and what will be the cost of a remediation programme so that the final outcome is positive,” he said in an early August email sent out by the company’s public relations firm in Managua.

Meanwhile, environmental organisations, business groups and opposition sectors, as well as indigenous communities worried about threats to their land and their access to water, are preparing to bring legal action against the project.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

It has been four years since the guns fell silent in Sri Lanka’s northern Vanni region, after almost three decades of ethnic violence. Unfortunately peace does not mean the end of hardship for the most vulnerable people here: the women.

Kugamathi Kulasekeran, from the village of Allankulam in northern Sri Lanka, is taking care of three boys, while looking for one missing child. Her husband went missing during the war. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

In general, life has improved for the Northern Province’s 1.2 million inhabitants. Of these, 467,000 are newly returned war displaced, most of whom fled the last bouts of fighting between the government’s armed forces and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) from 2008 to 2009.

Central Bank Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal frequently mentions that the previously underdeveloped Northern and Eastern Provinces have been recording double-digit growth rates since the war’s end: in 2010 and 2011, the economy of the Northern Province grew at 21 percent and 27 percent respectively, outstripping national growth rates by leagues.

But on closer inspection, it is clear that not everyone is benefiting from this growth, least of all the 40,000 families that now have single mothers at the helm. Their husbands or partners left dead or missing during the conflict, these women have now become the sole breadwinners of their households.

Researchers and experts say that two main obstacles hamper women’s attempts to reap post-war economic benefits – a development effort that is skewed towards males, and a deeply entrenched patriarchal social structure.

“In spite of their number, female heads of households are marginalised both by the government and their own communities in the north,” said Raksha Vasudevan, author of a recent study on female-headed households published by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Development Studies.

“They are clearly discriminated against in hiring for most jobs, even though they are willing to work in non-traditional roles and also face more difficulties than men in accessing credit,” Vasudevan told IPS.

IPS interviewed several women in the north who said they were willing to work in garment factories, in hotels, or even on construction sites but employers do not seem keen to let women into the workforce.

According to the 2012 Labour Force Survey conducted by the department of census and statistics, the female unemployment rate of 13 percent was six times higher than the male unemployment rate, which stood at two percent in the same time period.

"It is high time the financial sector and other sectors of the economy tap into the…womanpower in the labour force." -- Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, head of the Point Pedro Institute of Development
Cabraal says the years following the war’s end have seen the investment of three to four billion dollars in the north, which formed part of the LTTE’s de facto separate state for the country’s minority Tamil population and thus was left out of national development assistance for over two decades.

The bulk of that money, Cabraal told IPS, has gone into the development of infrastructure like roads, highways, electricity, housing and water projects.

According to Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, head of the Point Pedro Institute of Development based in northern Jaffna, a close glance at the sectors that are booming in the north illustrates why women still complain about the lack of jobs.

The fastest growing sectors in the north in the last two years have been banking and real estate, each expanding by 114 percent; transport has been growing at a rate of 69 percent, construction at 56 percent, fisheries at 78 percent, and hotels and restaurants at 65 percent.

All of those sectors, with no exceptions, are dominated by men.

“It is high time the financial sector and other sectors of the economy tap into the…womanpower in the labour force,” Sarvananthan told IPS.

Many women here said they are eyeing cottage industries like poultry, home gardening and sewing, which they feel have a ready-made market – but they lack the necessary start-up capital to make these small ventures pay.

Even the few women who are able to find work remain trapped by a culture steeped in patriarchal attitudes and behaviours. It is particularly tough for widows, or women whose husbands are missing, to seek non-traditional forms of employment outside “acceptable” positions as schoolteachers, or government clerks.

“The women I interviewed reported feeling ashamed, and fear of being ‘gossiped’ about when they moved around on their own,” said Vasudevan. “Any hint of interacting with non-related males could lead to being ostracised by their communities.”

Women in charge of their families’ welfare, who are forced to interact with male employers or buyers of their produce, thus find themselves hit by the double whammy of poverty and social exclusion.

Savithri, a widow with two young kids aged three and six, has begun to plant vegetables in her small garden in the northern town of Kilinochchi, but says that selling her produce is proving difficult.

“The buyers are all men, they try to bully me and get a cheaper price,” she told IPS.

Savithri said most buyers were keenly aware of her economic distress and would wait until the last possible moment, “just before my harvest was worthless”, to confirm purchases and therefore secure the lowest possible price.

No matter how trying her work gets she knows she must keep it at if she wants to keep sending her children to school.

Soldier or housewife?

During the war, the LTTE developed a strong female cadre contingent, including fighting formations. Women were expected to take up arms for the cause, shattering the old stereotypes of women as fragile creatures, in need of protection and best suited to sitting at home.

But that status accorded to female LTTE cadre did not extend to civilian women, who remained fixed in their role as mother-wife-housekeeper.

Loyalty to one’s husband was of the utmost importance in upholding social relations, a mindset that has travelled down through the war years into peacetime.

Now, “even though remarriage could be an emotionally and financially sensible option for many women, the heavy stigma attached to the idea in Tamil society prevents them from even considering it,” Vasudevan said.

Saroja Sivachandaran, who heads the Jaffna-based Centre for Women and Development, told IPS that post-war assistance programmes targeting single women have not taken off in the north.

“With donor funding now drying out, these women find themselves in even more precarious situations,” she said, referring to the fact that the U.N.-Government of Sri Lanka Joint Plan of Assistance for 2012 was underfunded by 77 percent, having received only 33 million of a desired 147 million dollars.

The lack of proper housing coupled with economic insecurity has created a highly precarious situation for women.

“With many still lacking homes with locking doors, they feel very exposed to attack at any moment,” Vasudevan said.

However, officials in the region told IPS that there were no reports of such incidents, adding that the government is doing all it can to ease the burden on female-headed households.

Rupavathi Keetheswaran, the top public official in the northern Kilinochchi District, told IPS that single women with families have been targeted for livelihood programmes, including credit for home gardening, self-employment and the distribution of cattle.

The latest railway tragedy in the Argentine capital, the third in less than two years on the same commuter line, brought to light the severe limitations of a hybrid public-private system, despite the changes underway.

Thursday’s collision, which killed three people and injured over 300, occurred when a commuter train on the suburban Sarmiento line crashed into a train that had stopped near the station in Castelar, on the west side of the city of Buenos Aires.

Interior and Transport Minister Florencio Randazzo said the packed train had undergone repairs and had a new brake system. He suggested that the conductor, who was detained pending investigation, may have been speeding.

Last year, the centre-left government of Cristina Fernández launched a plan for investment and greater state involvement in the metropolitan railway network, after two serious accidents on the Sarmiento line, which links the centre of Buenos Aires with the western suburbs, and was previously run autonomously by a private firm.

The first accident happened in September 2011, when a bus crossed the tracks in front of an oncoming train. The barriers were down but the driver presumably thought they were stuck, as they often were. The train, which crashed into the bus, was derailed and was hit by a train approaching from the other direction. The accident left 11 dead and 212 injured.

And in February 2012, a commuter train slammed into a retaining wall at a railway terminus in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Once, killing 51 people and leaving over 700 injured.

After that tragedy, the Fernández administration withdrew the concession from the Cometrans consortium, and as an emergency measure created a new management unit with two private operators that were already running the other suburban lines.

The new unit runs the Sarmiento line under supervision and orders from the state, which now has greater decision-making authority and control and can levy fines that are automatically discounted from the private companies in case of infractions or breach of contract.

The centre-right government of Carlos Menem (1989-1999) privatised Argentina’s railways in the early 1990s, awarding the concessions to private companies. The contracts were renegotiated over and over again, while the quality of the railway services took a nosedive due to a lack of investment, maintenance and upgrading.

Nevertheless, the state coffers continue to shell out an average of 3.8 billion dollars a year in subsidies to keep fares down; 25 percent of that total goes to the six commuter lines serving the suburbs of Buenos Aires.

“There have been changes recently. Some things have improved. But Randazzo isn’t a magician, he’s a minister,” Norberto Rosendo, the president of the Comisión Nacional Salvemos al Tren (Save the Train National Commission), told IPS.

Rosendo was an engineer for Ferrocarriles Argentinos, the state-run company that ran the railways up to the 1990s.

“Improvements have been delayed for more than 20 years, since the railways were privatised and systematic maintenance stopped being carried out. And the outsourcing of repairs doesn’t work,” he said.

Rosendo was referring to the system under which the state hands over the parts to be repaired to Emprendimientos Ferroviarios SA, of Cometrans, which was removed as operator of the Sarmiento and Mitre lines after the February 2012 catastrophe in Once.

The owners of Cometrans and roughly two dozen former government officials are facing charges of criminal negligence and fraudulent administration in relation to the accident.

According to Rosendo, the government could have expropriated the Emprendimientos Ferroviarios SA repair workshop, which employs some 400 workers.

Gradually moving back into state hands

“Why isn’t a state-run company directly set up?” he complained. “I believe it’s because it would reduce the opportunities for corruption, since a state-owned firm has to be held accountable, but third parties are more difficult to control.”

The expert clarified that he was not making an accusation against the minister, who he had no reason to believe was part of a network of corruption, but was criticising the system itself.

“They should move towards total nationalisation, with participation by workers and users,” he recommended. “That is the kind of company that is needed, one that is held to account, that has its own repair shops, that doesn’t have to pay others to fix things or commission new carriages from China.”

Randazzo had announced a contract with Chinese companies for the production of carriages that would mean the complete renovation of the trains on the Sarmiento and Mitre lines in 2014.

The trains that are now running are 50 years old and are subject to continuous repairs. “They have to be thrown out as junk,” Rosendo said.

Users of the system also have complaints and suggestions. VIAS (Verificación Informativa y Auditoría Social) is a group of people who use the railway system in Argentina and carry out surveys and post photos to document complaints on Facebook.

In recent months, improvements have been reported, such as the reopening of bathrooms in train stations, more flagmen, and different safety measures.

But trains are still delayed, there are still doors that don’t close, and there are even risks of electrocution.

Carlos de Luca is one of the activists with the Frente de Usuarios Desesperados del Sarmiento, a movement of users of the Sarmiento line that in the years before the accidents was collecting signatures and protesting the often appalling conditions in the trains.

Although the movement’s complaints did not help prevent the tragedies, they did serve as information and evidence in the lawsuit over the February 2012 catastrophe, he told IPS.

“My wife was pregnant, and I used to go meet her at the station because she was scared. One day she fell. Incredible things happened in Sarmiento, like people who would return home barefoot” because they had lost their shoes in the daily crush.

“Today we are in anguish over this new accident, but I believe that something is changing since the state took over responsibility,” he said.

“The thing is, the changes can’t be seen overnight, as you would like, but we see there is a will to improve things,” he said. “What we have always been asking is for the state to take charge.”

The cyclists riding in the bicycle lanes along the beachfront avenue of this Brazilian city pass the car drivers stuck in rush hour traffic.

The Rio de Janeiro city authorities are encouraging this simple, cheap and non-polluting solution for the growing problems of urban transport.

The sight of commuters on bicycles is increasingly common in Rio because of strong economic growth, easy credit and incentives designed to boost auto sales.

Bicycling in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Courtesy of ITDP

“I sold my car because it was so difficult to park, parking lots were expensive, I couldn’t cope with the traffic any more, and I was stressed out,” physical education teacher Teresa Moreira, who sold her car and now cycles to work, told IPS.

“When I drove to work I was under stress and I was rude. Now, on the bike, I’m not,” said Moreira, who commutes daily along the seafront drive between the neighbourhoods of Leme and Leblón, in the south of the city.

Traffic jams occur in any part of the city and at any time. They are worse when unanticipated events happen, such as an accident, the visit of a president or a rock star, a big international event, or simply Christmas shopping season.

“Originally the focus was on building cycle lanes for recreation, but now our priority is to find ways of fomenting bicycle use as a means of transport for short and medium distances, complementing the mass transport system,” María Lúcia Navarro, manager of the “Rio, Capital da Bicicleta” (Rio, the Bicycle Capital) programme of the city government’s environment secretariat, told IPS.

Rio de Janeiro, home to some 12 million people, is the second largest city in Brazil after São Paulo further to the south.

Special bicycle lanes began to be built in the late 1980s. Today they extend for nearly 300 kilometres, including lanes marked on roads and bicycle paths on sidewalks shared with pedestrians. These efforts put the city in first place in Brazil for kilometres of cycleways, and second in South America after Bogotá, Colombia.

Bicycles do not emit greenhouse gases that cause global warming, and they ensure fast journeys, are low cost, and provide health benefits “because pedalling is an aerobic exercise,” Navarro said.

If the cycle route network is integrated into high quality public transport, “its efficiency will spread throughout the city,” Zé Lobo, head of Transporte Ativo (Active Transport), an NGO that promotes alternative means of transport, told IPS.

The city government’s keen interest can be seen in the appointment of Carlos Roberto de Figueiredo, the city’s former secretary of conservation, to head the transport secretariat, said Clarisse Cunha Linke, deputy head of the Brazil office of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), a New York-based NGO working for sustainable transport.

As a result of his appointment, she expects more policies to foment bicycle use.

Navarro said progress is being made compared to the last 20 years. Today, close to four percent of short and medium distance trips – approximately one million journeys a day – are made on bicycles. Bike users already outnumber train and boat passengers.

The 2009-2012 municipal plan emphasised the importance of sustainable urban mobility, and of maintaining and expanding the bicycle path system, integrating it into other forms of transport, and providing cycle storage shelters and bicycle rental sites.

For the period 2013-2016 the plan is to add 150 kilometres of cycle lanes and paths, as well as bicycle parking lots, with the aim of having a network of 450 kilometres of cycle routes by 2016, when the Olympic Games will be hosted by Rio.

The cycle route network “is still very disconnected from the transport system,” Linke told IPS.

“We’ll have to think about how to integrate the service sites and the bicycle storage units into the mass means of transport – the metro, trains, and fast bus lanes,” she said. “We have to start thinking about bicycles not only as a form of recreation but as a means of transport.”

Navarro discussed meeting this goal through plans for a bus rapid transit (BRT) system with cycle storage facilities at bus stops and with space on the buses for bicycles. The BRT buses are envisaged to spread into densely populated areas, like the west of the city.

ITDP is working with the city government, providing technical advice and evaluating, together with other organisations, a bicycle system for the centre of the city.

“Shops, for instance, still don’t see bicycles as something that could help them draw more customers. It’s important for the private sector to start to participate more,” said Linke.

She said more bike paths are needed, because most of them are concentrated along the coast. “If people can start and finish their journey on bicycle, the system will work better,” she said.

Moreira approves of some of the measures that have already been implemented, like being able to take bicycles on the metro at weekends. But “on weekdays the metro is already crowded. Imagine if everyone decided to take their bikes into the carriages.”

The private sector is contributing with 600 shared bicycles, rented mainly in tourist areas. Linke said this system should be further encouraged.

The new transport plan will put out to tender the supply of 200 cycle stands and 2,000 bicycles in less privileged and more remote zones.

Bicycle parking lots also need to be expanded.

“The total quality of the infrastructure should be attended to, and not just its extent,” Lobo said.

Solange Medeiros, a law student and sports cyclist, believes it is important to develop respect between cyclists and pedestrians.

“Sometimes pedestrians walk where they’re not supposed to on the cycle routes, creating problems and the risk of accidents,” she told IPS.

Moreira suggested that the authorities carry out traffic campaigns, especially for drivers of electric bicycles, who “move at 40 kilometres per hour, faster than is allowed, and knock over elderly people.”

As in all things, “what matters is respect,” she said.

Ghana’s bamboo frames for bicycles are being exported to Austria. Credit: Portia Crowe/IPS

By Portia Crowe
KUMASI, Ghana, Aug 23 2012 (IPS)

In Ghana, a country burgeoning with traffic congestion, increasing economic growth, and a stark urban-rural divide, making frames of bicycles out of bamboo could be the key to promoting sustainable development. It also makes stronger, longer-lasting bikes.

This is according to Bernice Dapaah, the executive director of Bamboo Bikes Initiative, which trains young Ghanaians to build, fix, and market bamboo-framed bicycles.

“We are into women, children, and youth’s empowerment. And the project reduces carbon emissions and contributes to traffic decongestion, so using it is also a form of reducing climate change,” she said in an interview with IPS.

Bamboo Bikes works in partnership with Ibrahim Djan Nyampong, the owner of Africa Items Co Ltd in Accra, and the frames are sold abroad for 350 dollars each. They cost nearly 200 dollars to build, and Nyampong — also Bamboo Bikes’ technical advisor — pays the young apprentices an additional 30 dollars per frame for their labour.

Nyampong described some of the technical advantages that bamboo frames hold over their carbon fibre or metal counterparts.

“It lasts longer than the metal frame,” he said. “You know a bamboo bike doesn’t break – it’s very durable.”

He said a control test run in Germany proved bamboo frames to be 10 times lighter than metal frames, and noted their heavy load-bearing capacity. Indeed bamboo’s tensile strength — meaning the maximum stress it can withstand while being stretched — is much higher than that of steel.

Bamboo is fibrous, and therefore shock-absorbent. It naturally dampens vibrations, so the frames do not require steel or titanium springs.

“The bamboo has also been treated against splitting and termites, so it’s very strong,” Nyampong explained.

He said the bamboo is treated for three to six months before being used for production. It is then coated in a clear lacquer to protect it against rain and other damage.

These elements have enhanced the frames’ international marketability, and BambooRide, an Austrian company, has begun importing them for sale in Europe.

“At first, we were developing the frames together with (Nyampong), because they were good, but they had to fit a certain European standard,” said Matthias Schmidt, BambooRide’s sales manager.

“So it was like a partnership, a knowledge transfer in both directions,” he told IPS.

The Austrian importers also provided Nyampong’s team with new equipment, including their first jig, to improve precision and reduce the margin of error.

Now, the Austrian company imports up to 10 frames per month, and Schmidt said he looks forward to the initiative’s continued expansion.

“Their capacity is limited… and in the case that we need more frames… we’ll need other sources. So we’re supporting Dapaah’s efforts to improve the equipment and technology,” he said.

Ensuring Environmental Sustainability 

Using bamboo rather than metal to build bicycle frames also holds several advantages for producers – and for the environment.

According to Dapaah, bamboo’s availability as a local material not only enables producers to avoid expensive import costs, but also eliminates the carbon emissions that would arise from the transport of imported materials into the country.

Bamboo is also organic and recyclable, and, unlike metal materials, does not require high levels of energy during extraction and manufacturing.

“The bamboo bicycle is environmentally friendly… because we are also fighting against climate change,” explained Dapaah.

She said the initiative also commits to ecological sustainability by working with bamboo farmers in rural communities to harvest new bamboo crops, and conserve already existent ones.

“If we cut one bamboo, we make sure to plant at least three or five more,” she said.

In addition, bamboo bicycle frames promote sustainable transportation as an alternative to motor vehicles and fossil fuels.

According to Isaac Osei, the regional director for Ghana’s Environmental Protection Agency, this is important.

“The traffic situation in the country in general is increasing, and when traffic increases it has its associated environmental issues,” he told IPS.

There are 30 motor vehicles for every 1,000 people in Ghana, and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority registers hundreds more each day. Data suggests that vehicle ownership will continue to rise, as the country hits record levels of GDP growth per capita. Ghana has the largest GDP per capita in West Africa at 402.3 dollars in 2011.

Osei noted some of the harmful impacts of increased vehicle use, including carbon dioxide emissions and pollution from dust particles on dirt roads.

“To actually educate people to use bicycles rather than vehicles, I think it is good for the country and the world as a whole,” he said.

By employing and providing young people with technical skills, the initiative is designed to reduce unemployment and, consequently, rural poverty.

“So far I’ve trained about 10 boys,” Nyampong said. “They can build the bikes, but it’s not up to the quality control level, so we are still training them.”

In addition, Bamboo Bikes will help graduated trainees establish their own workshops, and begin to train more young people.

In 2009, Bamboo Bikes won the Clinton Global Initiative Award, and in 2010, the United Nations Environment Programme Seed Initiative award. It also garnered international attention in June when it received a World Business and Development Award at the 2012 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

The road between Zimbabwe’s Victoria Falls and Livingstone, in Zambia, is a well-traversed one, criss-crossed by bicycle riders towing trailers of bread and other supplies, with their bicycle spokes reinforced to bear the extra weight.

“If you have a bicycle, you can be rich,” said one cargo cyclist on the road just beyond the falls, as he abandoned pedalling and pushed his wheeled load. “This is how we trade.”

Although they are low-tech, the trailers are skilfully designed and often neighbourhood- manufactured, have two wheels and are attached to the bicycle via a hitch behind the saddle. They can carry up to around 200 kilogrammes of goods, water or, less often, people. These are significantly greater weights than what can be transported by head load, handcart or backpack.

Zambulances – bicycle trailers with a mattress, privacy curtain and basic medical equipment – have replaced walking or being pushed in a wheelbarrow for many ailing rural people who live some distance from healthcare centres. Credit: Gail Jennings/IPS

In Zambia, Namibia and more recently Congo-Brazzaville, bicycle trailers save not only livelihoods, but also lives. Zambulances – bicycle trailers with a mattress, privacy curtain and basic medical equipment – have replaced walking or being pushed in a wheelbarrow for many ailing or pregnant rural people who live some distance from healthcare centres.

Designed and produced by Zambikes, the 2012 winner of the international MobiPrize for mobility-related social entrepreneurship, these trailers have been found to save one life for every nine days they are used.

South Africa has been slower than its neighbours to embrace the bicycle as an obvious example of low-cost, low-carbon mobility. But slowly micro-entrepreneurs and bicycle tourists are discovering the ease and economic opportunity a bicycle trailer can offer as a way of transporting goods and passengers.

Malibongwe* lives in Khayelitsha, a low-income neighbourhood on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. He makes a living buying ice cream and selling it from his make-shift bicycle trailer – and manages to support his whole family. Recently he tested positive for HIV and now uses his bicycle to make the monthly trip to collect his anti-retroviral medication as well.

So it was with dismay that Malibongwe learned that his enterprise is in danger, from a surprising source. Despite the country’s draft non-motorised transport (NMT) policy that aims to increase the role of NMT as a key transport mode and allocate adequate and sustainable funding for its development and promotion, the South African National Department of Transport (NDoT) is considering prohibiting the use of bicycle trailers on public roads.

However, the department recognises that although there is growth in motorised transport in developing countries such as South Africa, a large portion of the population depends on non-motorised forms of transport. This is likely to not only continue, but increase following global trends of rising fuel prices and the need for low-carbon transportation.

“Local transport solutions such as trailers, handcarts or bicycles could assist poor and rural communities in making them more efficient with small business and domestic duties,” stated the draft NMT Policy.

It also noted that the “effects of inefficient transport systems in rural parts of Africa, which rely on non-motorised transport in its most basic form, are manifested in a lack of market integration, poor provision of education and health services, low productivity and low rates of regional and local economic activity.”

Yet in June, the NDoT published an intention to amend the National Road Traffic Regulations, proposing that “no person shall ride a pedal cycle on a public road drawing or towing a trailer or anything.”

Malibongwe told IPS that he is “very worried about the new law, as if it is passed I’ll have no way of supporting my family.” He is one of a number of bicycle riders who petitioned the NDoT in July, asking that the proposal be reconsidered.

Kyle Mason-Jones, a chemical engineer whose work focuses on carbon emissions reduction, and who also bicycle commutes 15 kilometres most days in Cape Town, is another.

“By limiting the ability of bicycles to carry goods and passengers, this regulation will undermine their potential as a primary mode of transport for individuals and for most entrepreneurial small businesses,” he told IPS.

“For the poor, this will destroy a very promising possibility for affordable transport and wipe out many small business opportunities. For wealthier citizens, it will make the ownership of a motorcar a necessity of life, eliminating many of the benefits of bicycle-centred transport.”

Concerns about road safety were among the reasons behind the proposed amendments, said one of the policy-makers working with the NDoT. “We know that we have a poor safety record – almost half of the deaths on our roads are pedestrians and cyclists,” he told IPS, asking for anonymity.

South Africa has one of the highest road death tolls in the world. During the holiday period from Dec. 1, 2011 to Jan. 10, 2012, 1,475 people were killed in road accidents according to the NDoT. This contrasts sharply with the United Kingdom, for example, where the death toll for all of 2010 was 1,857.

“Road safety activists brought to our attention that in mostly rural areas, people were being carried by these trailers, and we had a concern about the speed of downhill transportation,” the source said.

Safety-conscious countries such as Germany and the UK – where bicycle trailers are popular modes for parents transporting young children, and for long-distance bicycle tourists – strictly regulate bicycle trailers as merely one facet of comprehensive attention to safer road behaviour.

In Germany, bicycle trailer loads (goods and people) may not exceed 250 kg, or 100 kg in a rigid coupling with no independent brakes, and 60 kg if the trailer itself has no brakes and has a flexible coupling.

Trailers must be less than 80 centimetres wide. In the UK, all wheeled vehicles designed for transport must comply with British or European safety standards – the equivalent of the rules and regulations issued by South Africa’s Bureau of Standards. Certain visibility precautions must be taken, such as reflectors, lights and pennants.

In South Africa, current legislation forbids bicycles from towing other vehicles, but does not define bicycle trailers as vehicles. Instead, trailers were broadly defined as a vehicle towed by a car. The country’s Vehicle Technical Committee, in reviewing these regulations in 2011 and 2012, determined to prohibit bicycle trailers rather than regulate or define them.

The new, prohibitive measures seem counter-productive in a middle-income country with high levels of poverty, where the overwhelming majority of people rely on non-motorised transport.

Improving the goods and passenger carrying of non-motorised transport vehicles will not only facilitate the fulfilment of any government’s transportation goals, but also its goals for job creation, micro-enterprise and community sustainability, suggested NMT engineer and safe cycling educator Louis de Waal.

There is no doubt that road danger is a major fear for people who walk and cycle in South Africa, De Waal told IPS. In addition to the ill-disciplined behaviour of road users, the road environment itself is often not conducive to keeping pedestrians and cyclists safe.

“But to ban one form of bicycle transport, ahead of implementing other safety regulations such as mandatory 1.5 metre passing distances, slower road speeds and compulsory bicycle reflectors, just does not make enough sense,” he said.

Citizen action and the resulting correspondence to the NDoT might have made an impact, though.

“Now that we have seen people’s objections, and read their reasoning, we agree that we will have a significant impact on entrepreneurs and small businesses, and livelihoods of people, with this possible regulation. So we will be back at the drawing board,” said the source at the NDoT.

This is good news, of course, said Malibongwe. But he raised a new concern. Unaccustomed to reading South Africa’s government gazette, blogs or social media, he was not on the “public engagement” radar; he found out about the proposed amendments only because a vigilant activist was looking for interviewees. How will he know of the outcome, he asked?

*Name withheld on request.

Indian Railway officials inspecting the burnt carriage in which 32 passengers perished on Monday. Credit: Indian Railways

By Malini Shankar
CHENNAI, Aug 4 2012 (IPS)

At 4:30 a.m. on the morning of Jul. 30, sleeping passengers in carriage S 11 on the Chennai-bound Tamilnadu Express were awoken by a blazing fire, as the train approached the east coast town of Nellore, just two and a half hours shy of its final destination.

At least 32 people burned to death in the train, their bodies charred so badly that hospitals were forced to use DNA analysis to identify the victims for anxious families.

Officials have not ruled out a short circuit in the train toilet or sabotage, considering one survivor reported hearing a loud bang in the burning train car.

Whether or not gas cylinders or other inflammable materials were aboard the train is yet to be established by the Railway’s formal inquiry.

For grieving family members, the inquiry might be too little too late.

But if similar tragedies are to be avoided in the future, authorities must use this accident to draw lessons in disaster management for the colossal Indian railway network, which operates 9000 trains carrying 18 million passengers daily. This number does not include the countless thousands who travel on train roofs, undeterred by the risk of fatal injuries inside mountain tunnels or the possibility of electrocution.

It quickly became apparent to disaster management experts, after the fire had been put out and the survivors pulled to safety, that the lack of emergency preparedness on most Indian trains is a huge liability.

It was the gatekeeper of a railway crossing who first noticed the fire in the passing carriage and notified the Nellore railway station, which halted the train. By then screaming passengers had already pulled at the emergency brake.

The burning car was immediately separated from the train to prevent the fire spreading to other coaches. But this did not make up for the fact that there were no fire alarms in the train cars.

The public relations officer of the South Central Railway, Frederick Michael, confirmed to IPS that there were no fire hydrants in the sleeper car.

“Since it was night time, the passengers had closed all the windows and one door of the vestibule that connects to the rear car was also locked for the night to prevent criminal elements’ entry and mischief,” he said. The other vestibule door, according to reliable sources, was also closed for the night, resulting in a death trap for the passengers.

Inflammable material like synthetic cushion covers and curtains, inadequate emergency exits and fire extinguishers, to say nothing of a poorly trained cabin crew are the main culprits in this avoidable disaster, experts told IPS.

Lower class train cars, which carry millions of Indians, do not contain a single fire extinguisher or hydrant. Nor are passengers instructed in basic emergency evacuation procedures. Further, there is no public address system on board the long-distance non-luxury trains.

Railway coaches are in dire need of inflatable life rafts with a rigid hull, disaster management experts aver. These rafts should automatically unfurl themselves as escape chutes from the hinges of the emergency exits in case of a fire, or during a water evacuation.

These can help save lives and can also double up as easy transport for frail, infirm and physically challenged passengers.

Wide emergency exits with collapsible shutters that can automatically open during emergencies need to be installed by the dozen in every train car. Currently each car has only four emergency exits and four entry doors for carriages that accommodate 72 passengers and probably carry scores of other unreserved commuters.

The spokesman of the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) in Chennai told IPS that ICF only manufactures coaches for Indian Railways but is not responsible for the design of the carriages, nor the rolling stock – hardware such as wheels, steps or sleeper frames – within them.

The fact that the Railway Authority does not provide for the needs of physically challenged persons is hazardous to all passengers during emergencies and seriously hinders rescue operations – with the infirm or the disabled getting left behind, or other passengers stuck behind them.

The average height of the train floor is at least 1.5 metres above the ground. The steps are arranged more like a ladder than a staircase, making it impossible for physically challenged passengers to use them unassisted.

Though the mobile “medical relief van” stationed at all railway stations reached the burning train within minutes, they found they could not access the passengers inside, as the inflammable material and burning heat had caused the doors’ locks to melt and fuse together.

Ambulances rushed the critically injured survivors to the district general hospital after rescue teams cut through the burning car. If the fire had occurred in the countryside it would have led to far more casualties, experts say.

C. U. Rao, general secretary of the Indian Red Cross Andhra Pradesh chapter, the state where the tragedy occurred, told IPS, “The Nellore branch of the Indian Red Cross scurried to (transport) injured passengers to various hospitals, installed freezers to keep the corpses awaiting DNA identification, brought their mobile blood bank to the site of the disaster, and distributed food packets to survivors in the immediate aftermath of the calamity.”

But these services should be the responsibility of the railway authorities. Emergency equipment should be installed in every railway station across the country as part of disaster mitigation efforts, especially since the railway network has been responsible for the deaths of 1,200 people in the last five years alone according to statistics provided by Indian Railways.

Michael believes that “a review of design is urgently called for; hereafter we will have to heed attention to alternative designs.” Wide collapsible doors that automatically roll up in the event of fires are far more effective than doors that have to be opened manually.

Locks and emergency brakes need to be automated to ensure heat does not create vacuum chambers and seal doors shut.

If the Indian Railways fails to learn its lessons from tragedies like the one at Nellore, then it is condemning thousands of other passengers to a similar fate.

(END)

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Apr 27 2012 (IPS)

“It changed our lives” is a sentiment frequently heard from commuters who use Metrocable, the aerial cable car system that connects one of the poor hillside neighbourhoods in the Venezuelan capital with the city’s public transport system.

The Metrocable system that has connected the hilltop neighbourhood of San Agustín with the Caracas metro since January 2010 is the second mass transit aerial tramway in Latin America, after the one that has been operating in Medellín, Colombia since 2006. And in July 2011, a third system began to operate in Rio de Janeiro, linking hillside favelas or shantytowns with the rest of the city.

“Metrocable has boosted our dignity,” María Eugenia Ramírez, 51, a cable car security guard who lives in San Agustín, told IPS. The poorest part of her neighbourhood lines a steep slope in the hills that surround the valley where Caracas is located at 1,000 metres above sea level.

“I wasn’t prepared to walk through the air,” says Ramírez, who has seven grandchildren and has already lost two of her four children.

Naiger Hernández and Doralis Viera also remember their first vertigo-inducing rides in the cabins that carry commuters between the system’s five stations in nine minutes.

“In the cabins you run into people you didn’t know and people you knew before but had lost touch with. Now we have that day-to-day contact again, neighbourly relations,” said Ramírez, one of the neighbourhood leaders, at a weekly meeting of community councils held to organise activities around Metrocable.

Since 2006, the community councils have been the key component of “people’s power”, promoted by the government of populist left-wing President Hugo Chávez, who has been in office since 1999.

There are already 35 community councils in the district, and the plan is to reach 38, Alfredo Mariño, an architect who coordinates the San Agustín integral development plan, which is associated with a Brazil-Venezuela presidential agreement signed in 2009, told IPS.

The plan is aimed at creating a methodology for tackling the issue of informal or unplanned neighbourhoods, in contrast with “the ‘formal city’,” he said.

“These neighbourhoods are urban manifestations of a highly unequal system, which relegates large segments of the population to living conditions that at times are subhuman, where they have to subsist by creating their own habitat,” Mariño said.

The hilly southern part of the neighbourhood, San Agustín del Sur, was the site of the first self-construction project in Caracas, and offers favourable conditions for implementing a broad experimental multi-project plan like the one coordinated by Mariño, or a new transportation system such as Metrocable.

The neighbourhood, which is home to just over 45,000 people, has a population density far lower than that of other poor districts lining the hillsides. It also preserves part of the original greenery, and its soils are relatively uneroded.

At the same time, Mariño pointed out, the neighbourhood has “a strong urban cultural and social tradition.” San Agustín was settled mainly by people from a region with a large black population, which helped strengthen the community’s sense of identity, in its efforts to reinforce the dignity of a marginalised culture.

Before the cable car system began to operate, local commuters had to climb down hundreds of steps every day, or ride in jeeps that operate as collective transport on the neighbourhood’s steep roads, to reach the metro station or the largely unregulated system of often rickety buses and vans that wind their way through the chaotic traffic in Caracas.

“I used to get up at 5:00 in the morning to reach work at 8:00. Now I rise at 6:30, and I don’t come home exhausted from climbing the stairs,” said Viera.

San Agustín del Sur “is an enclave isolated by different barriers, a kind of ghetto,” said Mariño. “We are seeking to replace the exclusion with inclusion on multiple levels.”

“Inclusion” is a buzzword frequently used by experts and users of Metrocable when they talk about what the system has achieved – and which aspects of the project have gone unfulfilled, such as the promise of social services like day care centres and shops that were to be given a space in the stations – now that it transports an average of 15,000 people a day.

Since June 2011, riders have had to pay for a ticket, at a price equivalent to 23 cents of a dollar, integrated with the metro ticket system.

“One condition set by President Chávez was that the construction project had to include the local people from the neighbourhood, as did Metrocable itself: all of its workers are from San Agustín,” said cable car operator Jenny Álvarez, a 35-year-old mother of two.

Ramírez stressed that “many fathers and young guys who were using drugs were given the opportunity to work on the construction project, and now they are men leading decent lives.”

She added that “the community takes care of Metrocable; no one touches the installations.”

Caracas, a city of five million people, was the most violent capital in the Americas in 2011, with a murder rate of 108 per 100,000 people, according to the United Nations. Most of the homicides occur in poor neighbourhoods.

In response to criticism of the cost of the system and the relatively limited number of people using it, Ramírez replied that “if this had been built in ‘las lomas’ (the hills where the wealthier neighbourhoods are located) it would have been fine, but since it was built in the ‘cerros’ (the steeper hills) where the ‘barefoot blacks’ live, they’re opposed to it,” she said, referring to opposition-aligned media and experts in a country marked by extreme political polarisation.

In Caracas, the hills are known by different terms depending on the social strata: they are called “cerros” when they are the site of shantytowns; “colinas” when the residents are middle class; and “lomas” when the neighbourhoods are upper middle class.

Odebrecht hired paintings by Natalya Critchley, a British artist who has lived in Venezuela for over a quarter century, for display in the Metrocable stations.

Critchley, who is known for her paintings of industrial landscapes, told IPS that Metrocable is “a non-invasive transport system, with a low impact on space.

“However, it should not only be limited to that, but should serve to influence public spaces, apply green technologies, create infrastructure, like a boulevard, and generate activities to benefit the barrio, including a tourist route. The view of the city from the stations is amazing, and it is not adequately exploited,” she said.

But until all of that happens, cabins named after Venezuela’s 23 states, and basic values – like inclusion, patriotic fervour, ethics, equity, freedom, solidarity or peace – are already part of the urban landscape, visible, as they shuttle up and down, from roads and highways down below.

Two young women in brightly coloured hijabs and tight jeans stand on the edge of a freeway as cars whiz by. They watch the traffic, heavy in Amman where car ownership is skyrocketing by 10-15 percent a year. When there’s a break in the steady flow of vehicles, the women hold hands and race across the road.

Amman’s streets are more for cars than for women. Credit: Michael Coghlan/CC-BY-SA-2.0.

It’s an odd sight here. The city is not pedestrian-friendly. Nor is it common to see women walking, much less darting, across freeways.

Though Western media has praised Amman’s urban planning as a step towards egalitarianism, highlighting the fact that the ‘Amman 2025’ urban master plan won the 2007 World Leadership Award in Town Planning, a visit to Amman, home to nearly three million people, reveals a starkly different picture.

Poor public transportation keeps women isolated from city life; low-income families are dependent on cars; and, ironically, the Arab Spring has sidelined urban development.

One of the women, Sandra Hiari, is an architect, urban planner, and founder of Tareeq (Arabic for street), a website that focuses on city design in the Middle East.

“If you want to know if a place is safe or not, count how many women are walking on the street,” she said, adding that in Amman, women are visible only “in limited areas, like Rainbow (Street).”

Located in a bourgeois neighbourhood, the avenue is filled with chic cafes, bars, and restaurants, drawing enough of a crowd for women to feel safe, Hiari explained. But the street is not an example of the city’s planning. It is a rare exception. Because women often face harassment and catcalls, many avoid public spaces including Amman’s public transportation system, relying on cars and taxis instead.

Women, Hiari said, have been forced to “resort to structures –buildings – and to stay there rather than to use the street as a safe place where they can navigate through the city. I think we women are captured in bubbles,” she reflected. “We move from one bubble to another in the city.”

Despite closing the education gap, with girls and women attending schools and universities in slightly higher rates than boys and men, Jordanian women comprise a smaller percentage of the workforce than their male counterparts.

According to Hazem Zureiqat, a transportation planner and economist at Engicon, the lack of transportation options in Amman – home to half of the country’s population – is largely to blame for this discrepancy.

Zureiqat pointed to a recent survey that asked Jordanian women why they don’t work. “Many of them cited mobility and transportation (issues),” he stressed, meaning that, often, women simply cannot get to work.

While at least half of Jordan’s low-income households have a car, the male usually drives it, leaving women, who might otherwise work, stuck at home.

When asked if creating separate bus lines for women is the answer to their transportation troubles, Zureiqat quickly answered, “No, no. I don’t support that…you have to fix the (social issue) rather than just separating women (from men).”

He added that service needs to be improved in general, not just for women. Amman’s few bus lines run infrequently and are very unreliable. Up until some shelters were erected at bus stops recently, Zureiqat lamented that there had been “barely any shelter from the sun and rain” for commuters.

The Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system was an ambitious project that sought to correct many of these issues with 32 kilometres of new, bus-only lanes. Each BRT lane would have carried three times the amount of people than a regular traffic lane.

Zureiqat said that the BRT wasn’t just about improving the movement of people throughout the city. It was also about “human dignity.”

Ironically, however, the Arab Spring led officials to scrap the project.

Zureiqat explained, “Fighting corruption became the buzzword here and everything (was called into) question.”

Former Amman mayor Omar Maani came under particularly intense scrutiny, as did the projects that the municipality had a hand in during his tenure from 2006 to 2011. That included the BRT; the Amman Institute for Urban Development, a city-funded “think and do tank” that sought, among other goals, to help reverse the country’s brain drain; and the Amman 2025 master plan, which emphasised public transportation and fostering a more pedestrian-friendly city.

Although the BRT passed an intensive governmental review that probed every aspect of the project – including its finances – it was sidelined in September of 2011.

In December 2011 Maani was arrested on unrelated fraud charges. He is currently out on bail.

While the Amman Institute for Urban Development was beset with problems from the get-go, the Arab Spring spelt the end for the inefficient organisation, including what many considered its “overinflated” wages.

Hiari, who was employed by the Amman Institute, explained that there’s a stigma attached now to the Amman 2025 master plan as well as projects that were born of the Amman Institute.

“Officials (at the Greater Amman Municipality) are afraid to sign off on anything associated with the Amman Institute and the master plan,” Hiari said, because they don’t want to be “associated with corruption.”

These reactionary changes have left the city as unplanned, chaotic and isolating as ever.

Maldivian women brave water cannon at a protest rally. Credit:

By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Apr 3 2012 (IPS)

Maldivian women, long used to taking a backseat in the Muslim-dominated Indian Ocean country, say they are determined to ensure that they are not deprived of their rights under the new regime of President Mohammed Waheed Hassan.

Television footage of women battling police, soon after the Feb. 7 resignation of president Mohammed Nasheed, showed the new assertiveness of Maldivian women, even while wearing the ‘hijab’ or head-cover traditionally worn by Muslim women. Nasheed later claimed it was a coup against his elected government.

“Yes, life is changing in the Maldives with women asserting their rights more aggressively than before,” Mauroof Zakir, a young trade union activist, told IPS over telephone. “This is a new and exciting development.”

Zakir said Nasheed’s policy of providing free health insurance and allowances for single mothers was not lost on the women who have been taking to the streets in large numbers, confronting police and demanding reinstatement of his government.

“After the coup women want to express their views. They are very angry and disappointed at the sudden removal of an elected president and his government,” said Aishath Aniya, a prominent female activist and former secretary-general of Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP).

“Women never took part in rallies or came onto the streets before, but now they readily attend rallies or speak in public to demand change,” said Aniya, who was among a group of female protestors who were arrested and stripped naked by a group of policewomen after one protest.

“We were able to muster as many as 8,000 women at some of the rallies,” Aniya told IPS in a telephone interview.

Females account for slightly less than half of the estimated 350,000-strong Maldivian population.

Nasheed, a former journalist educated in Britain, led the MDP during a massive campaign for democracy in the Maldives before winning the elections held in November 2008 and defeating Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, 74, who had ruled the country with an iron fist for 30 years.

Nasheed’s ouster is widely believed to have been orchestrated by Gayoom and his allies, though the former president has repeatedly denied involvement.

Waheed’s cabinet is packed with Gayoom supporters. The former dictator’s youngest son, Ghassan Maumoon, is minister of state for human resources, and his daughter, Dhunya Maumoon, is junior minister for foreign affairs in Waheed’s cabinet.

Also, Abdul Samad Abdulla, Maldivian envoy to Bangladesh during Gayoom’s rule, is foreign minister while the finance minister is Abdulla Jihad, who held the same portfolio under Gayoom.

Shifa Mohamed, a frontline women’s leader of the MDP, says quite a few women work in the country’s civil service but not at policy or decision-making levels. “Men have traditionally dominated these positions,” she said.

Shifa told IPS that Nasheed understood the issues facing women and tried to address their concerns by coming up with schemes like health insurance and improving transportation to schools and health clinics.

Aniya believes women became more empowered under Nasheed’s governance and points to how he improved transportation, an important issue on the islands. “Earlier when someone fell ill residents were forced to plead with boat owners for a ride to the nearest clinic or hospital – and often refused.”

Today under a state-subsidised system, there are regular ferries between the islands, she said. “Women being the main caregivers felt the difference in approach.”

Shifa said women are anxious that there is no return to the past. “During Gayoom’s rule, even if women voted massively against him, the results would show 100 percent support.

“That was the kind of repression felt not just by women but by everyone and that is why women feel compelled to stand up for their rights and for the benefit of the next generation of Maldivians.”

Nasheed, while in power, had openly advocated a moderate brand of Islam and spoken up against such practices as female genital mutilation, child marriage and the public flogging of women for adultery.

Nasheed had also backed a controversial domestic violence bill aimed at providing female victims emergency protection and easing a woman’s ability to resort to divorce. The bill has remained in the Majlis or parliament for over a year.

A government spokesman contacted by IPS disputed the claim of large numbers of women turning out for protests against the Waheed regime, saying they consist mostly of relatives or friends of Nasheed.

“Their (MDP) claims are all nonsense. I would reckon the numbers taking part are around 200 to 300 or less. The problem is that the capital has many small alleys and even a small number of women looks like a large crowd and provides nice video,” said Imad Mazood, spokesman for President Waheed. “Male is like a studio.”

Foreign media began converging on Male a few days before Nasheed resigned and, as tensions rose, footage unflattering to the new regime was carried on social media networks like YouTube and by international TV channels.

Mazood said with Male’s population comprising a sizable number of foreigners, mostly Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Indians, it is impossible to muster 8,000 women for a rally. “You won’t get even half that number.”

There are over 100,000 foreign workers in the Maldives, the majority employed in the country’s main industry of international tourism.

Mohamed Latheef, a founder of the MDP and widely seen as Nasheed’s mentor, admits that it is difficult to accurately estimate the number of women involved in protests and rallies.

“Society in Male is so polarised that it is an ‘us versus them’ situation,” he said, speaking to IPS in Colombo where he lives in exile.

Amnesty International (AI), the London-based rights group, has voiced concern over attacks against women protestors, referring in particular to a Feb. 26 march.

AI said a group of peaceful women protestors was “charged by soldiers who wielded batons and used pepper spray, pushed them around, and kicked them on their legs and ribs,” as they moved towards a public meeting on Addu island, addressed by President Waheed.

Aniya said, after a protest march on Mar. 19, she and 12 other women were body-searched and stripped naked. “They took urine samples and wanted to pin charges of drugs use on us, similar to the kind of false charges earlier used against opponents of the Gayoom regime.”

But, Aniya said, such tactics are not going to deter the women from joining the rallies against the new regime. “Many of them are determined to protest for 24 hours, even daily, till president Nasheed is reinstated.”

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Mar 28 2012 (IPS)

China may be the country that emits the most carbon dioxide (CO2), but oil-rich Venezuela and some of its Caribbean neighbours produce more of this greenhouse gas responsible for global warming on a per capita basis.

The Asian giant emitted just over seven billion tonnes of CO2 in 2008, or 23 percent of the world total, according to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre (CDIAC) of the United States Department of Energy. On a per capita basis, this is equivalent to 5.3 tonnes of CO2 per person.

And while Venezuela emits only 0.56 percent of the global total, or 169.5 million tonnes of CO2, this is equivalent to six tonnes per person.

The energy sector is responsible for 95 percent of Venezuela’s CO2 emissions, of which 35 percent is produced from transport, 48 percent arises from the oil industry and thermoelectric plants, and 17 percent from the rest of the country’s industries, Juan Carlos Sánchez, an engineer who is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, told IPS.

“What stands out is the squandering of petrol at the cheapest price in the world – two cents of a dollar per litre – which does not even cover production costs,” Sánchez told IPS. “This wanton consumption defeats any fuel savings or efficiency plan.”

To high consumption of fossil fuels “must be added deforestation of 240,000 hectares a year, which removes CO2-absorbing trees from the environment,” forestry expert Julio César Centeno, a professor of postgraduate courses at the University of the Andes in the southwest of the country, told IPS. “Although half the national territory is covered with forests, 0.6 percent a year is being lost to deforestation.”

The gas flares burning wastefully by the oil rigs are a symbol of the decadence of the century-old extractive industry in Venezuela. In addition, the country has a petrol-guzzling automobile fleet, and an increasing number of thermoelectric plants, as hydroelectricity capacity has been outpaced by demand.

The five million vehicles on the country’s roads consume some 300,000 barrels of petrol a day, “and what is worse, fuel efficiency is 10 km per litre or less, so that 250 grams of CO2 are released into the atmosphere for every kilometre driven, compared for example to 140 grams in Europe, where there are plans to reduce emissions to 95 grams per kilometre by 2020,” said Centeno.

But a few island nations in the Caribbean, and some of Venezuela’s partners in the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), perform even more poorly.

Trinidad and Tobago emit just 49.7 million tonnes of CO2 a year, but that is equivalent to 37.3 tonnes per person, making the island state the second largest per capita emitter in the world.

And the former Netherlands Antilles (including Curaçao, since 2010 an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands) are in fourth place, producing 31.9 tonnes per person, while Aruba, another Dutch Caribbean island, is in ninth place with 21.7 tonnes per person.

An oil refinery in operation since 1918 accounts for much of Curaçao’s emissions. In Trinidad and Tobago, CO2 emissions come mainly from the extraction and liquefaction of natural gas. And on other small islands, emissions are produced by the intensive use of aviation fuel at airports where millions of tourists land and take off.

The experience of other small countries where, for different reasons, fuel use is intensive, is much the same, such as Luxembourg (ranked eighth for per capita emissions), the British overseas territory of Gibraltar, the French islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, and the Danish Faroe Islands.

The leading per capita emitter of CO2 is Qatar, with 53.5 tonnes per person, and among the top 20 are other countries with economies heavily dependent on oil: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Brunei, Kuwait, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Kazakhstan.

Among these countries, Venezuela stands out for the lack of policies and measures aimed at curbing emissions or compensating for them, “in contrast with its grandiloquent environmental rhetoric at international forums,” said Sánchez, who pointed out that it is the only OPEC country to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

With its hydroelectric power stretched to capacity, Venezuela has begun building thermal plants running on liquid fuels, “when it ought to be using natural gas instead, which can generate the same amount of electricity while emitting 40 percent less CO2,” said Centeno.

Similarly, sources say Venezuela should improve the fuel efficiency of its vehicles, introduce hybrid cars that can run on ethanol, and promote railways and public transport in general over cars: of the five million vehicles circulating daily, 3.2 million are private cars.

As for petrol, there is a broad consensus that the price at the pump, which has been maintained at the same level for nearly 15 years thanks to subsidies, undermines any energy savings plan, quite apart from the loss of over 12 billion dollars a year in state revenues because of the difference with the much higher international price, according to Ecoanalítica, a consulting firm.

Centeno called for measures to halt the degradation of the rivers that supply water to the population, and recommended a programme to replant native trees on at least two million hectares, which could capture 1.1 billion tonnes a year of CO2 from the atmosphere – almost as much as the 2008 CO2 emissions of Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela combined.

Aside from purely environmental concerns, there is a link between economic development and CO2 emissions.

The world releases on average 0.60 tonnes of CO2 for every 1,000 dollars of GDP. However, because of the effect of efficiency gains, in Europe the ratio is only 0.28 tonnes per 1,000 dollars of GDP, while in the United States it is 0.42 tonnes and in Central and South America combined, 0.53 tonnes.

The figure for China is 2.20 tonnes per 1,000 dollars of GDP; for India it is 1.40 tonnes; and for the oil-producing countries of the Middle East it ranges from 0.72 tonnes in Qatar to 2.52 tonnes in Iran. Saudi Arabia emits 1.25 tonnes of CO2 per 1,000 dollars of GDP.

Venezuela and some Caribbean nations that have intensive oil production and consumption have emissions that are above the regional average: Venezuela emits 0.90 tonnes of CO2 per 1,000 dollars of GDP; in Trinidad and Tobago the figure is 2.45 tonnes; and in the former Netherlands Antilles, which in 2008 included Curaçao and its large refinery, it is 2.87 tonnes.

Excerpt:

A bike-riding course for women in Santiago. Credit: Pamela Sepúlveda/IPS

By Pamela Sepulveda
SANTIAGO, Mar 8 2012 (IPS)

What does riding a bike have to do with women’s rights? According to the Chilean feminist group Macleta, which promotes cycling and a gender perspective on public transport, a bicycle is a powerful tool for social change.

Less than five percent of residents of the Chilean capital use bicycles for transportation (as opposed to recreation), and of that small minority, only 20 percent are women, according to a survey on urban transport in Greater Santiago published by the Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications, based on data from 2001 and 2006.

“In my house, riding a bicycle was something only for boys and men,” explained Magali Lagos, who has decided at the age of 46 to learn to ride a bicycle.

She first heard about the women’s bike-riding courses offered by Macleta two years ago, but was afraid of “making a fool of myself.” She finally worked up the nerve to give the classes a try just a few weeks ago.

“It’s hard to feel confident when you don’t know how, it’s pretty difficult,” she confessed to Tierramérica. She is not afraid of being on the street, but she is afraid of failing. She views it as a personal challenge, and if she succeeds, she plans to buy herself her first bicycle ever.

As well as serving as a means of transportation and recreation, “when you ride a bicycle, it’s like freedom itself,” declared Lagos.

It is this freedom that is the ultimate goal of Macleta, which is currently offering its seventh series of classes aimed at teaching women to conquer their fears and move around the city with a sense of ownership.

As Macleta coordinator Sofía López told Tierramérica, the group’s raison d’être is “the empowerment of women through bicycles.”

More than a hundred women have now taken part in Macleta’s courses, ranging in age from 18 to 68.

Some did not know how to ride a bicycle when they started the classes, either because they had never had one, or because they had suffered bad bike-related experiences in childhood.

Others “knew how to ride a bike, but didn’t dare to use it to get around because they were frightened of cars, or felt that they didn’t have the necessary skills,” explained López. “A lot of women want to ride a bike, but don’t think they can manage it.”

This is why one of the organisation’s areas of work is research. Using data and information about women, their fears and their motivations, Macleta is able to design teaching methodologies and strategies to successfully encourage them to overcome those fears.

“Learn to pedal” is the first level, for complete beginners, while “Get off the sidewalk” is aimed at women who know how to ride a bicycle but are too frightened to use a bicycle to get around the city.

“We believe that a bicycle, more than an end in itself, becomes a means,” said López. “A woman who starts to ride around on a bicycle is happier, she is more aware of the public space around her, she wants to occupy it, interact with other people… it promotes a kind of empowerment.”

Cycling is also a highly economical means of transportation, “and that also helps us contribute to greater justice, because on a bicycle we are all equal and we all move around the same way, and this ultimately benefits those who have less to invest in a means of transportation,” she stressed.

Transportation and its association with the severe air pollution in Santiago are among the main problems facing this city of seven million people.

The 2007 inauguration of the public-private Transantiago system spurred a wave of protests, because it failed to meet the real transportation needs of the city’s population or to tackle the problem of pollution, in addition to the high cost of fares, roughly 1.5 dollars.

Against this backdrop, bicycles offer enormous benefits for the city: they create no pollution, they help decrease traffic congestion, and they are silent. These advantages are recognised by the authorities.

In his year-end report last December, Transport and Telecommunications Minister Pedro Pablo Errázuriz announced plans to promote bicycle use, including the interconnection of bike lanes to create a 200-km network in Santiago and smaller networks in other cities, in order to “strengthen the use of this means of transportation that is non-polluting and accessible to everyone.”

But Macleta takes it a step further, insisting that public transportation policies must address the specific needs and demands of women, because women “are a distinct type of transportation user, like the elderly and children,” said López.

There are clear gender-related differences in mobility, she explained, noting that 40 percent of “trips” by women are made on foot, and more than 60 percent of the time they are moving from one location to another outside of the usual peak transportation hours.

This implies that much of the time, women “are not traveling for work-related purposes, but rather for reasons related to domestic tasks or their responsibilities as caregivers in the home,” she concluded.

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

By Ashfaq Yusufzai and - -
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Mar 4 2012 (IPS)

With no money to see a doctor, Gul Lakhta,50, had resigned himself to blindness when a ‘mobile hospital’ drove into his village in the Bajaur Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), on Pakistan’s rugged border with Afghanistan.

At a mobile hospital camp Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

After the United States-led coalition forces toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001 its leaders fled across the border to the FATA and adjacent areas, bringing with them their fundamentalist ideology and culture of violence.

Before long, the Taliban had unleashed a campaign of bombings against their hosts, targeting schools, health facilities, markets, government buildings and forces, bringing life to a virtual standstill in the seven agencies that make up the FATA.

“In the process, Taliban militants also destroyed 60 health facilities, forcing patients to travel to Peshawar and beyond to seek treatment for even minor ailments,” said Dr Niaz Afridi, head of the MHP in the FATA.

The government allocates Pakistani rupees 60 million (660,000 dollars) per year for the programme and there are plans to expand it, Afridi said.

These clinics-on-wheels have proved a blessing for the patients because they are well-equipped and manned by dedicated teams. Currently they provide treatment to 90,000 patients annually.

“We also organise medical camps in areas which are inaccessible by the regular medical workers and our medical teams visit the remotest areas to reach the patients and provide diagnosis and treatment free,” Afridi said.

Dr Nauman Mujahid, development officer for health services in the FATA, said the MHP is manned by a staff of 150, including physicians, surgeons, gynaecologists and other specialists like ophthalmologists and dentists.

Each vehicle is equipped with a generator that powers a mobile operation theatre, a dental unit, x-ray and ultrasound machines and laboratories that allow for quick diagnostics.

“Critically-ill patients who require hospitalisation are referred to tertiary care centres in Peshawar,” said Mujahid.

The programme started with the South Korean government donating 14 mobile clinic units in 2003 to help the people in the insurgency-hit areas of the FATA.

Although the process of the rebuilding damaged health outlets is in progress, the MHP will, because of its popularity, continue to operate in the FATA with a fleet that was augmented in 2010 by the government.

Mobile hospitals are particularly effective in ensuring that patients who need to be on drug regimens lasting several months get their doses. This is especially so in the case of tuberculosis (TB) patients who, if improperly treated, can develop drug resistant strains that can endanger a community.

Waqar Ali, 46, who was diagnosed with TB at a free medical camp in North Waziristan three months ago, is now on medication he must take for eight months. “I am feeling better and do my farming like normal people,” he told IPS.

Authorities take care to notify people in areas where the camps are going to be held about a week in advance. Often announcements are made from the mosques.

Talking to IPS, Dr Bilqees Qayyum, a gynaecologist on the rolls of the MHP, says that people often come to the medical camps in droves with a variety of complaints.

“Besides running camps to treat patients routinely, we also rush to the areas hit by outbreaks of diseases, like measles, gastroenteritis and diarrhoea,” she said. “We were the first to reach the Hazara division in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) when it was hit by a massive earthquake in 2005.”

The MHP played a significant role in providing medical assistance to people displaced by military operations directed against the Taliban in Swat in 2009.

In the following year, MHP proved its mettle by providing emergency medical services to people affected by floods in the Nowshera and Charsadda districts of KP.

“Our highly trained doctors, paramedics and nurses have been awarded commendation certificates by government for their excellent performance in emergencies,” Qayyum said.

In 2011 MHP surgeons carried out operations on 13,000 patients and the numbers continue to grow, Dr Fawad Khan, director of health services in the FATA, told IPS.

“Given the success of the MHP, the KP and Punjab (provincial) governments have requested us to put in place a similar programme for them,” Khan said. “Our teams already visit these provinces in emergencies,” he added.

Excerpt:

By Raquel Martinez and - -
MADRID, Mar 1 2012 (IPS)

Though Vitoria-Gasteiz, capital of the Basque Country, was elected the European Green Capital of 2012 – an award presented by the European Union to promote and reward efforts to mitigate climate change – Spain still has a long way to go to earn the label of ‘sustainable’ for others cities around the country.

The air that the citizens of Vitoria-Gasteiz breathe is of the highest quality, according to the score given by the European Union, thanks to campaigns to increase bicycle use around the city and the promotion of a new bus network together with tram routes and new parking regulations.

In contrast, cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla or Bilbao have been consistently exceeding standard levels of pollution as a result of a lack of environmental planning and a long drought.

“The necessary ingredients of a sustainable city are social inclusion and environmental quality in a dense, compact and diverse area with (democratic) participation in decision making,” Luís Jiménez, director of the Observatory on Sustainability in Spain (OSE), told IPS.

“In the developed world, cities determine to a great extent (a country’s) consumption pattern of materials and energy as well as territory. (Urban areas) contribute 75 percent of the planet’s pollution and use 70 percent of energy consumed by mankind,” he added.

Ignacio Santos, an environmental expert currently working as a technical assistant for the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), points out two key factors in measuring environmental advances or degeneration in Spanish cities: firstly, residents’ quality of life (which is tied to the quality of the urban environment) and secondly, an ‘ecological footprint’.

In terms of air quality, it is worth noting that approximately 87 percent of the Spanish population breathes ‘polluted air’, as defined by the World Health Organization.

This has resulted in 16,000 premature deaths annually and led to the proliferation of various respiratory diseases.

“In Spain, the process of industrialisation and urbanisation has degraded quality, particularly in urban centers. It is crucial to reinforce the public’s capacity for action against atmospheric pollution and to take decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with integrated health, environmental and climate change policies,” Jiménez stressed.

According to Luis González, a member of Ecologistas en Acción, the main reason behind air quality degeneration in the cities is increased traffic, which directly emits particles in suspension from precursors (carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides or methane) that make up tropospheric ozone.

Sadly, “Local authorities have just denied the problem or moved the measure stations. There are no programs aimed at reducing traffic and insufficient awareness of the use of different means of transport, such as the bicycle,” González told IPS.

The ‘ecological footprint’, a reliable methodology designed to measure human impact on the planet, essentially maps humans’ demand for natural resources and contrasts it against the Earth’s ecological capacity to regenerate those resources. According to the Ecological Footprint Atlas (2010), a publication from the Global Footprint Network, Spain has the 19th largest eco-footprint per person in a list of 153 countries.

Spain’s ecological footprint has grown by an annual average of 0.1 global hectares per person since 1995, according to the report Global Change Spain 2020/2050. By 2005 there had been an increase of 19 percent, which meant that the necessary ecological territory to produce resources and assimilate the residue produced by each Spanish person in 2005 was 6.4 global hectares per person.

“Therefore we are living beyond our means. If we want cities with quality of life and minimum impact, we have to ensure that our ecological footprint does not exceed our available biocapacity. Technological measures to improve efficiency in the use and production of resources are not enough to achieve that. The main challenge is to achieve a great change in current consumption habits,” Jiménez concluded.

Some experts believe it is necessary to rethink ‘urban metabolism’ as a means of reducing a country’s ecological footprint and improving air quality as well as other environmental aspects.

In the past few decades, territorial and urban planning based on unlimited and indiscriminate real- estate growth has been promoted.

This programme has been supported by a series of contradictory legislations: several regions’ urban regulations placed an upper limit on building densities, but in no case were these regulations enacted.

“It is important to have a clear idea of what kind of model of city we are talking about,” said Santos. “Sustainable cities are not those which are built with a lot of houses nor those full of big buildings and without green spaces,” he added.

“For example,” Santos told IPS, “Madrid’s metropolitan area is a model of a big city developed in an uncontrolled and dispersed way. New neighborhoods without an underground transport service are still being designed while there are a large number of empty houses in the city centre.”

An expansive city with a low building density and territorial dispersion in urban services needs more transport infrastructure, more energy consumption and takes up more land surface. All those factors affect the environment and increase greenhouse emissions, with a severe impact on air quality, climate change and acoustic pollution, among others – all of which affect the quality of life of citizens and other surrounding social and natural systems.

Also, a city without parks and green belts means a lack of trees to absorb pollution and reduce the impact of noise.

Dealing with all of these issues requires adapting the city to the limits of biocapacity, while aiming for sustainability.

“If we are in a relative situation of sustainability improvement, as a result of the economic crisis, this does not mean that a clear effort to change unsustainable growth (patterns) exists,” Jiménez stressed.

Current development trends in Spain are intrinsically incompatible with the planet on which we live, which has finite resources that are dwindling faster than at any other time in human history.

Stressing the urgency of the situation, Santos urged “not only need political will, but also scientific knowledge. To design and implement policies, it is necessary to have planners, decision makers and citizens with the carbon cycle constantly on their minds.”

Excerpt:

Increasingly frequent and tragic railway accidents in Argentina, like this week’s crash, show that the rail system, run by private companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from the state, constantly ignores warnings from inspectors and fines, observers say.

“Another catastrophe could happen at any time,” former socialist lawmaker Héctor Polino, founder of Consumidores Libres (Free Consumers), a citizens group that has filed numerous complaints against the companies running the railways, told IPS.

The debate on the state of Argentina’s privatised and heavily subsidised rail network has flared up again in the wake of the Wednesday Feb. 22 crash, when a packed commuter train slammed into a retaining wall at a railway terminus in Buenos Aires.

The train entered the station at a speed of more than 20 km per hour and did not stop, for reasons that have yet to be determined, killing 50 people and injuring more than 700 others.

Some passengers said there were signs of problems with the train just before the accident.

The crash was the second in the Argentine capital in less than six months. The first occurred in September on the same line, Sarmiento, when a bus crossed the tracks in front of an oncoming train. The train crashed into the bus, and after it was derailed it was hit by a train approaching from the other direction. The accident left 11 dead and 212 injured.

Polino said the state of Argentina’s rail system today is the direct result of the wave of privatisations carried out by the government of Carlos Menem (1989-1999), which put the railways into the hands of private companies. Since then, the system has been plagued by negligence, mismanagement, a lack of maintenance, and “connivance” between the companies running the rails and officials in charge of oversight, he said.

“The proof of that is Ricardo Jaime,” he said, referring to the official who headed the transport secretariat during the government of late former president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), and who was kept in his post by Kirchner’s widow and successor, Cristina Fernández.

Jaime resigned as transport secretary in 2009, citing “personal reasons”. But he was facing a number of corruption charges in cases that are still making their way through the courts.

Now he has been charged with receiving free vacation flights from Claudio Cirigliano, whose holding company owns Trenes de Buenos Aires (TBA), the company that runs the Sarmiento line and others.

According to the lawsuit, Cirigliano paid for plane tickets to Brazil for Jaime, who at the time was in charge of granting subsidies to the private concession-holders running the rail system, so that they would keep ticket prices down.

Polino pointed out that when he was in the lower house of Congress, Consumidores Libres got the courts to issue an interim measure to prevent the companies from raising ticket prices. Cirigliano tried repeatedly to meet with him, but outside of his office in the legislature.

“I always refused, so he went to my office to ask me to stop pressing forward with the case,” Polino said. “A member of the transport workers union also came to ask me, in (Cirigliano’s) name, to do the same thing.”

The system was privatised in the early 1990s, when 10-year concessions were granted to private companies to run the railways, while the state continued to own the stations, tracks and trains.

The Argentine government received a massive World Bank loan to drastically reduce the workforce at Ferrocarriles Argentinos, the state enterprise that owned the entire national railway system until then.

After that, the private companies that were granted concessions whittled the country’s railway network down to one-fourth of its capacity.

Although Kirchner cancelled one of the concessions on the grounds of breach of contract, the service was then handed to another private company.

In recent years, there have been some improvements to the rail services, but the underlying system has not changed, Polino said.

Cristina Suárez with the Frente de Usuarios Desesperados del Sarmiento, a rail users group, told IPS that they had filed “all kinds of complaints” between 2006 and 2010, to draw attention to the serious flaws in the system.

“Overcrowding, lack of safety, lighting and hygiene, and broken barrier arms” were some of the most serious problems she listed with regard to the Sarmiento line, which connects a populous district on the west side of Buenos Aires with the centre of the city.

The campaigns carried out raised awareness among users, but few improvements have been seen, Suárez said. “A few tracks were fixed and new units were purchased, but obviously the problems are still there,” she added.

The creation of tunnels for some stretches of railway was announced, but work has not begun. And the incorporation of new carriages has been slow.

But the companies continue to receive hefty subsidies – a combined total of three billion pesos (698 million dollars) from the transport secretariat in 2011 alone.

Polino said he had gained access to a March 2010 report by the National Commission for Transport Regulation, which answers to the transport secretariat, in which inspectors pointed to serious violations by TBA and recommended that the company be fined.

The inspectors mentioned “steady deterioration of the infrastructure granted in concession” to TBA, due to “insufficient maintenance and failure to follow technical standards.”

But the company was never fined, the former legislator said.

The inspectors’ observations concurred with reports by the comptroller-general’s office, which for nearly a decade has periodically pointed to serious maintenance and safety problems in the companies running the railways, and in TBA in particular.

Norberto Rosendo, a railways engineer who is the president of the Comisión Nacional Salvemos al Tren (Save the Train National Commission) which plans to “battle the concession-holders,” agreed with Polino and went a step further in his criticism.

“I know that the inspectors at the Commission for Transport Regulation have worn themselves out making complaints, but the problem is that the legislation protects the companies,” he told IPS, referring to laws passed in the heat of the severe economic crisis that hit Argentina in late 2001 and 2002.

Rosendo said “the problems have to do with a system for which the state earmarks discretionary funds, which creates a breeding ground for corruption” because those funds can be diverted from their intended purposes.

But he acknowledged that under the current transport secretary, Juan Pablo Schiavi, “things have improved a great deal.

“Now there is an overall plan for the railways and a lot of investment, but it’s not enough,” he said. “There is a structure of corruption, and powerful underlying interests that involve government officials, the companies, and trade union leaders.”