On residential streets of Caracas with little traffic it is possible to see cars that have been abandoned by their owners for years. They probably migrated from Venezuela or cannot afford to repair and sell their vehicles. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 23 2023 (IPS)

Diego has just enrolled to study journalism at a university in the Venezuelan capital and, with 2,000 dollars that his family members managed to gather, has bought his first car, a small 2007 Ford that can take him to class from his home in the neighboring Caribbean port city of La Guaira.

Tomás, an experienced physiotherapist who sold Diego the car, is leaving for Spain where a job awaits him without delay, “so I’m quickly selling off things that will give me money to settle there, such as furniture, household goods and appliances, but for now I sold only one of my two cars,” he told IPS."The vehicle fleet in Venezuela - a country that now has 28 million inhabitants - is about 4.1 million vehicles, with an average age of 22 years, and 25 percent of them are out of service. The loss of purchasing power of the owners has caused most of them to delay the maintenance of their vehicles and the replacement of the spare parts that suffer wear and tear, such as tires, brakes, shock absorbers and oil." -- Omar Bautista

“This Ford Fiesta was my first car, I loved it very much, but it doesn’t make sense for me to hold on to two vehicles. I’m keeping a 2011 pickup truck that is in good condition, just in case I don’t do well and I have to return,” added the professional who, like other sources who spoke to IPS, asked not to disclose his last name “for safety reasons.”

The migration of almost eight million Venezuelans in the last 10 years, and the general impoverishment of the population, have led to the deterioration of what was once a shiny fleet of vehicles, with one out of every four vehicles left standing now due to lack of maintenance and leaving much of the rest aging and on the way to the junkyards.

In the basements of parking lots, and in the streets of towns and cities, thousands and thousands of vehicles are permanently parked under layers of dust and oblivion, because their owners have left or because they do not have the money to buy spare parts and pay the costs of repairs.

Along the streets of any Venezuelan city can be seen old rundown vehicles with no sign that the necessary repairs will be made. The impoverishment of the population is at the root of this decline. CREDIT: RrSs

Aging vehicle fleet

Omar Bautista, president of the Chamber of Venezuelan Automotive Manufacturers, told IPS that “the vehicle fleet in Venezuela – a country that now has 28 million inhabitants – is about 4.1 million vehicles, with an average age of 22 years, and 25 percent of them are out of service.”

“The loss of purchasing power of the owners has caused most of them to delay the maintenance of their vehicles and the replacement of the spare parts that suffer wear and tear, such as tires, brakes, shock absorbers and oil,” Bautista said.

Moreover, in contrast to the immense oil wealth in its subsoil, gasoline in Venezuela is scarce and, after more than half a century being the cheapest in the world, it is now sold at half a dollar per liter, a cost difficult to afford for most owners of private vehicles or public transportation.

The country needs some 300,000 barrels of fuel per day and for several years it has had less than 160,000 barrels, according to oil economist Rafael Quiroz, who added that interruptions in the work of Venezuela’s refineries are frequent.

There is almost no residential building that does not have at least one vehicle in storage waiting for its owners to return from abroad. They are part of the 1.5 million vehicles that are permanently parked in the country. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

Not enough money

The minimum wage in Venezuela is four dollars a month. Most workers receive up to 50 dollars in non-wage compensation for food, and the average income according to consulting firms is around 130 dollars a month.

Luisa Hernández, a retired teacher, earns a little more giving private English classes, but “the situation at home is very difficult. I can’t afford to pay for the repair of my Toyota Corolla, but a mechanic friend agreed to do the work, and I can pay him in installments,” she told IPS.

Mechanics have their finger on the pulse of the situation. “People leave and the cars often sit idle for years, and then the owners end up selling them, from abroad. Quite a few of those I have gone to pick up and have fixed them, to sell them,” Daniel, who runs a garage in the capital’s middle-class east side, told IPS.

He said that “many people do not sell their cars before leaving the country, thinking that they’re just going abroad to ‘see how it goes’. But they stay there and then decide to sell their vehicle before it further deteriorates and depreciates.”

Another mechanic, Eduardo González, told IPS that “There are people who go away and leave their cars in storage and from abroad they contact us so that from time to time we can check them and do some maintenance. Or they entrust their vehicle to a relative. There are people who travel and come back, but most of them end up selling.”

This situation “has favored buyers, who can get cars at a low price. But the problems come later, because that very used car will require spare parts and maintenance, and that is expensive and often the parts are difficult to get,” added González.

The same difficulty is also a concern for owners of cabs, buses and private vans that transport passengers, as well as cargo trucks.

“At least half of the truck fleet in the region is affected by the shortage and scarcity of spare parts,” said Jonathan Durrelle, president of the Chamber of Cargo Transportation of Carabobo, an industrial state in the center of the country.

Large and small buses for passenger transport in Venezuelan cities, including Caracas, as well as cargo vehicles, also suffer from the lack of sufficient revenue, as well as spare parts, to keep them in proper working condition. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

Industries have closed down

Elías Besis, from the Chamber of Spare Parts Importers, attributed this to the closure of companies that “years ago manufactured 62 percent of the spare parts needed in the country, and now that production has plunged to two percent.”

Thousands of manufacturing companies closed down in Venezuela during the eight years (2013-2020) in which the country was in deep recession, suffering a loss of four-fifths of its GDP according to economic consulting firms.

Financial and banking activity has also declined, as has the vehicle loan portfolio, which peaked at 2.3 billion dollars in 2008 and plummeted to just 227,000 dollars by late 2022, according to economist Manuel Sutherland.

Vehicle assembly plants, of which there were a dozen until recently, also closed their doors. In addition to selling to hundreds of dealerships, they used to export vehicles to the Andean and Caribbean markets.

Their production peaks were recorded in 1978, with 182,000 new vehicles – Venezuela then had 14 million inhabitants and 2.5 million vehicles – and in 2007, when 172,000 cars were assembled.

In 2022 only 75 vehicles – trucks and buses – were assembled, and in the first six months of this year just 22.

Newer vans and cars drive through middle and upper class neighborhoods, but are part of the “bubble,” the small segment of the population less impacted by the deep economic crisis that Venezuela has suffered over the last decade. CREDIT: Motorpasión

Farewell to the bonanza

The result of this scenario is the aging and non-renewal of the vehicles circulating on Venezuela’s roads.

The new ones, Daniel pointed out, “are SUVs, crossovers and off-road vehicles that cost a lot of money and can only be bought by those who live in the bubble,” the term popularly used to refer to the segment of high-level officials and businesspersons whose finances are still booming in the midst of the crisis.

In addition, in view of the almost total closure of automotive plants, individuals are opting to import new vehicles directly from the United States, favored by the elimination of tariffs for the importation of most models.

For that reason, said Bautista, “there is no shortage of new vehicles, what there is is a shortage of consumers with the necessary purchasing power and conditions to buy new vehicles.”

These consumers were part of the hard-hit middle class – nine out of 10 families in that socioeconomic category had fallen below the middle class by 2020 according to the consulting firm Anova – and they no longer buy new or newer cars because they have swelled the legion of migrants, selling or leaving behind their main assets.

Since the days of the oil boom (1950-1980), Venezuelans developed a sort of sentimental relationship with their vehicles, associating them with comfort and enjoyment that favored cheap gasoline and a network of paved roads that made it easier to travel to places of recreation.

In middle class and even lower middle class families, it was quite common to change cars every two years and to give one to their children when they turned 18. They were helped by credit facilities, and were encouraged to buy cars in cities where public transportation has always fallen short.

They have had to say goodbye to their easy past on wheels, like migrants have said farewell to their country and homeland. Or at least “see you later”.

Photo of several cable cars of the Cablebus, which runs on electricity and has been carrying passengers through the south and southeast of Mexico City since 2021. Mexican public transportation is still based on fossil fuels, and a transition to cleaner alternatives is necessary. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Oct 12 2023 (IPS)

Maribel Ochoa takes less time and spends less money commuting from her home to her work in eastern Mexico City thanks to the use of the electric Cablebus, a cable car that has improved her quality of life since the service began operating two years ago.

“It used to take me an hour. Now I make the trip in 15 minutes and the Cablebus drops me off three blocks from my house. And I don’t have to wait long for the cable car to come,” the 52-year-old married mother of seven, who is a cleaning lady for several families, told IPS."As a country, we are lagging behind. We need to make some adjustments and to be more ambitious. More support is needed from the federal government; it would be very good if it strengthened the mass transit program." -- Bernardo Baranda

In the past, she had to take a minibus to the Metro public transportation system to get to work.

The six-person turquoise-colored cable cars carry passengers dozens of meters at six meters per second through four hills on the east side of Mexico City. Below, passengers can watch the road traffic, the bustle of street vendors and children filing in and out of schools. Greater Mexico City is home to more than 20 million people.

The cable cars fly over the east side of the city, above the chaotic urban expansion below.

The route is part of one of the two lines of the Cablebus electric public transportation system, which is almost 11 kilometers long and connects the southeast with the eastern part of the city.

Since 2021, the cable car system, which cost some 300 million dollars to build, has transported around 36 million people on its two lines, at a rate of 120,000 passengers per day, in 682 cable cars for a distance over 20 kilometers. Line 1 connects the north and east of the capital.

In addition, since 2016, the Mexicable has been operating, with two 14-kilometer routes, in the municipality of Ecatepec, in the neighboring state of Mexico, north of the Mexican capital.

Together with a Metrobus line, a dedicated lane bus rapid transit (BRT) model and trolleybuses, these systems offer an alternative to the conventional fossil fuel-powered transportation networks that are predominant in this Latin American country of some 129 million people.

But these alternative public transportation systems are absent from the streets of medium and small cities due to financial, institutional and technological barriers, according to the report “Moving towards public electromobility in Mexico” released by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Mexico has a long tradition of using trolleybuses and cable cars, which were left in the past due to the prioritization of fossil-fueled ground transportation.

With 623 units, mostly trolleybuses, Mexico is the country with the third largest number of electromobility units, after Chile (2043) and Colombia (1589), according to the international E-BUS Radar platform. In total, the region has almost 5,000 electric buses, concentrated in the capital cities.

The replacement of fossil fuel vehicles with electric ones reduces gasoline consumption, air pollution and noise generation.

In Mexico, transportation accounted for 139.15 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent, a gas generated by human activities and responsible for global warming, out of a total of 690.62 million, according to 2021 data from the National Inventory of Greenhouse Gas and Compound Emissions of the governmental National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC).

The non-governmental Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in the United States estimated that air pollution in Mexico caused the death of around 38,000 people in 2019.

A station of the Cablebus, the electric cable car that since 2021 connects the south and southeast of Mexico City, greatly shortening the commute for residents in those areas. Mexican public transport is still mostly powered by fossil fuels, and the country is making a very slow transition to cleaner alternatives. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS

Few electric vehicles

Bernardo Baranda, director for Latin America of the non-governmental Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) said there was “insufficient progress” in the decarbonization of the sector, which, moreover, is taking place mainly in large cities.

“As a country, we are lagging behind. We need to make some adjustments and to be more ambitious. More support is needed from the federal government; it would be very good if it strengthened the mass transit program, to provide incentives for concessionaires and operators to acquire more electric fleets,” he told IPS in Mexico City, where the Institute’s regional headquarters is located.

Since 2005, the government’s National Infrastructure Fund has financed 30 urban transport projects, at a cost of 5.45 billion dollars, but they have involved mainly conventional vehicles.

In Mexico there are more than 53 million vehicles, and the number has been rising steadily since 2000, according to figures from the National Institute of Geography and Statistics, which adds that most of them run on fossil fuels. The institution reported 229.36 million public transportation users in July in the country’s eight main metropolitan areas and cities.

Victor Alvarado, head of the Mobility and Climate Agenda area of the non-governmental organization The Power of the Consumer, identified challenges such as profitability, sufficient demand, adequate facilities, and awareness of the issue among concessionaires and transport operators.

“What we envision today arises from local needs and a commitment to offer public transport services that can mitigate the effects of climate change. The useful life of conventional buses ranges from 10 to 15 years, and this becomes an opportunity to renew the fleet,” he told IPS.

At the national level, experts point out, Mexico lacks an electromobility strategy, with a plan yet to be finalized, despite its importance in the reduction of polluting emissions and the path to move towards a low carbon economy, which is an additional restriction for the adoption of policies.

However, the government of the capital has set goals for the deployment of alternative transportation and pollution reduction.

Mexico City’s Mobility Sector Emission Reduction Plan calls for the addition of 500 trolleybuses by 2024.

In addition, one of the lines of action of the capital city’s Electromobility Strategy 2018-2030 projects that 30 percent of the Metrobus fleet will be electric by 2030, equivalent to 300 buses.

Little by little, more initiatives are joining the move towards electromobility. The government of the capital is building a third Cablebus line, five kilometers long and with 11 stations, on the west side of Mexico City.

And the northern industrial city of Monterrey, with more than 1.5 million inhabitants, is preparing to introduce some 110 electric buses with an investment of 56 million dollars in public funds.

It is doing so through the Tumi E-Bus Mission project, aimed at supporting 500 cities (including Mexico City and Guadalajara, as well as Monterrey) in their transition to the deployment of 100,000 electric buses in total by 2025.

With technical advice from the German Agency for International Cooperation and six international organizations, the plan is part of the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative.

Likewise, the city of Mérida, capital of the southeastern state of Yucatán, is building the Ie-tram, a 116-kilometer all-electric BRT line on the outskirts of the city, for an investment of some 166 million dollars.

One of the elevated trolleybuses that run along the east side of Mexico City, at one of the stops. Mexico has 623 electric units that reduce polluting emissions, even though the power supply depends on oil by-products. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS

ECLAC outlines three scenarios for Mexico, to 2025 and 2030. The intensive adoption perspective requires an addition of 18.99 million electric units, so that the proportion would rise to 21 percent and 42 percent of the total, respectively.

Ochoa hopes that alternative transportation will expand, so that her commute will become even shorter and cheaper.

But she knows that this depends on the decisions made by the national and local authorities.

Baranda, the regional expert, is confident that the next government will prioritize electric transport. “The sector is one of the main producers of pollutants. This has to be reflected in budgets. In small cities we should move towards the transition; smaller units can be used, these areas should not be left behind,” he said.

Alvarado the activist said actions are needed in financing, reallocation of budgets, professionalization of local authorities and creation of incentives for the acquisition of more environmentally friendly fleets.

“But part of the problem is that the energy source is still fossil fuels. That is where a focus on renewable energy generation comes in. In the states we have to see who dares to explore renewable energy for transportation; that is a great opportunity,” he said.

But until that future arrives, the urban population has to put up with mostly inefficient, unreliable and polluting public transport.

Transport barges navigate one of the branches of the Paraná River in Argentina's Santa Fe province. The Paraná, the second longest river in South America, has been turned into a major waterway through which a large part of Paraguay's and Argentina's agricultural exports are shipped out of the region. CREDIT: Fundación Humedales

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Sep 29 2023 (IPS)

In addition to being a majestic river – the second longest in South America after the Amazon – the Paraná River is the waterway through which a large part of the area’s primary goods are exported. Today, its economic importance has sparked an unexpected diplomatic conflict between Argentina and the countries with which it shares the basin.

Argentina’s decision to charge tolls to vessels on its stretch of the river led to a formal complaint from Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay and Bolivia, which argue that the river corridor agreement signed by the five countries in 1994 stipulated that no taxes or tariffs could be imposed without the approval of all parties.

The Paraguay-Paraná Waterway River Transport Agreement created an Intergovernmental Committee as the political body that would ensure its operation and maintain it as a motor for the development of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), established by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay in 1991 and later joined by Bolivia.

Tension reached unprecedented levels with Paraguay, a landlocked country that owns a gigantic fleet of ships that carry millions of tons of soybeans and beef, the engines of its economy, to the Atlantic Ocean and often return with fuels, essential to supply a nation that produces no oil or gas.

“What is happening is very serious. Paraguay has invested three billion dollars in the last 10 years and has 2,500 transport barges, one of the largest fleets in the world,” Andrea Guadalupe, vice-president in Argentina of the Mercosur-Southeast Asia Chamber of Commerce, which groups export companies from different countries, told IPS.

“It is not wrong for Argentina to charge a toll, because it carries out dredging and beaconing works that allow large ships to pass through the Paraná. But what is wrong is that it has not consulted the other countries and has taken a unilateral decision,” she argued.

Paraguayan Pesident Santiago Peña announced that he would resort to international arbitration, saying that his country’s sovereignty was at stake, and stating: “Paraguay has no future without the free navigability of the rivers.”

Although Peña denied that it was a reprisal, Paraguay announced this September that it would keep half of the electricity from the Yacyretá power plant located on the border between the two countries, on the Paraná River, which has an installed capacity of 3,200 megawatts.

Traditionally, although it is entitled to 40 percent, Paraguay has kept only 15 percent of Yacyretá’s energy and ceded the remaining 85 percent to Argentina, a country with a population of 46 million inhabitants, six times larger than Paraguay’s, which means it obviously consumes more energy.

The Rio de la Plata, seen from Buenos Aires, is at the mouth of the Paraná River and leads to the Atlantic Ocean, allowing the transportation to the export markets of a large part of the agricultural products of one of the most productive areas of South America. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman / IPS

Argentina says it invests between 20 million and 25 million dollars a year in dredging work on the Paraná, which in recent years has become more necessary due to a persistent drop in the water level, which has forced barges to carry less cargo and has increased the companies’ logistical costs.

“The situation is affecting the relationship between two countries that are brothers. Argentina’s attitude is not in line with the agreements, and Paraguay is a landlocked country that needs the river to connect with the world,” Héctor Cristaldo, president of the Union of Production Chambers (UGP), which groups Paraguayan agricultural business chambers, told IPS.

Cristaldo said the main impact for Paraguay is in the supply of fuels used for agriculture and livestock and also for land transportation. “Paraguay has no trains; everything moves on wheels,” he said.

The toll crisis escalated into open friction in early September, when a Paraguayan flagged barge heading north with 30 million liters of fuel was held up for several days by Argentine authorities who released it when it agreed to pay some 27,000 dollars in tolls.

The rate for vessels put into effect in January 2023 is 1.47 dollars per ton transported. It was set by the General Administration of Ports (AGP), the government agency that controls the Argentine section of the waterway.

The new toll drew a statement from the governments of Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay, which expressed “special concern because it is a restriction on the freedom of transit” and asked Argentina to collaborate “to facilitate commercial transport, favoring the development and efficiency of navigation.”

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña (L) is greeted by his Argentine counterpart Alberto Fernández on Aug. 15, when he took office in Asunción. Relations between the two countries later deteriorated over navigation rights in the Paraná River basin. CREDIT: Presidency of Argentina

From Mato Grosso to the sea

The Paraná River, together with its tributary, the Paraguay River, form a waterway stretching almost 3,500 kilometers from Mato Grosso in west-central Brazil to its mouth in the Río de la Plata, which in turn flows into the Atlantic. The basin covers almost 20 percent of South America’s territory, and has an enormous biodiversity and a remarkable productive capacity.
The lower section, from the central Argentine city of Rosario to the mouth of the river, has been dredged to allow trans-oceanic vessels to pass through, carrying millions of tons of agricultural products for export each year. In total, some 100 million tons of goods are transported through the waterway every year.

The work began in 1995, when Argentina granted its section under concession to a consortium formed by the Belgian maritime infrastructure giant Jan de Nul and the Argentine Grupo Emepa, to be in charge of dredging and signaling. Thus, the river was deepened from its natural 22 feet to 34 feet from Rosario – the country’s main agro-industrial center – to the mouth.

Further north, the waterway is only 12 feet deep, which only allows the navigation of barges, with which Paraguay and Bolivia export a major part of their soybean production, which is transferred to larger ships in Rosario.

The following year, the Argentine Ministry of Agriculture authorized the cultivation of transgenic soybeans, which would lead to a major expansion of the agricultural frontier and great pressure from agribusiness to deepen the dredging of the Paraná, which crosses the most productive area of Argentina, so that larger ships could enter.

Map of the Paraguay-Parana waterway. CREDIT: Afip

Low cost transportation

“The Paraná was transformed into a waterway that began to fulfill a function analogous to the one played by the railroad until the first third of the 20th century: to facilitate the expansion of the productive frontier and to be a low-cost transit route,” wrote geographer Álvaro Álvarez, vice-director of the Geographic Research Center of the public Universidad Nacional del Centro.

Álvarez maintains that the Paraná today is “a key infrastructure in the insertion of the region as a supplier of commodities into the international economy, a process through which industrial agriculture, mega-mining and hydrocarbon exploitation have been degrading ecosystems for decades, expelling populations from territories and affecting the health of communities.”

One of the main questions about the waterway is that there are no studies of the environmental impact generated by the modification of the river and the constant traffic of large vessels.

Last year, the Argentine Association of Environmesntal Lawyers filed an injunction demanding environmental impact assessments, which is now being studied by the Supreme Court of Justice.

“The State presented a 30-year-old environmental impact study in the file. Since then there has been and there continues to be removal of thousands of tons of sediment from the riverbed, which in many areas is contaminated with agro-toxins from industrial agriculture, and it is not known how that impacts the contamination and the dynamics of the river,” Lucas Micheloud, a member of the Association, told IPS.

“It is not a matter of adapting the river to the size of the ships, but of the ships adapting to the river,” said Ariel Ocantos, a graduate in International Relations and member of the Ecologist Workshop of Rosario, one of the environmental organizations demanding greater citizen participation in the interventions carried out in the Paraná River.

“We made several requests for information to the government because we want to know if they are conducting environmental impact studies. There is very little information and we are demanding citizen participation, which is absolutely necessary,” he said.

The port of Salina Cruz, in the southern state of Oaxaca, is one of the vital infrastructures for transporting goods and hydrocarbons. It is part of the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, one of the megaprojects of the current Mexican government, which seeks to connect the Atlantic and Pacific coasts by means of a railroad and several highways, and is aimed at the economic development of the region through the creation of 10 industrial parks. CREDIT: Government of Mexico

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 16 2023 (IPS)

Due to insufficient pressure water does not make it up to Elliot Escobar’s house in the Mexican municipality of Matías Romero, where he lives on the second floor, so he pipes it up with a hose from his sister’s home, located on the first floor of the house shared by the two families.

“I store it in 1,000-liter tanks, which last me about a month. We recycle water, to water the plants, for example. In the municipality people don’t pay for the water because there is none, it comes out of the pipes dirty. It’s a worrisome situation,” said the 44-year-old lawyer."The most urgent thing is to make a master plan, which must have a water plan before other processes. It is crucial, before introducing industries. And each one must have very rigid zoning, to avoid pollution of water sources." -- Úrsula Oswald

Matías Romero, with a population of just over 38,000, sits along the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (CIIT), a megaproject under the responsibility of the Ministry of the Navy and one of the three most important projects of the current government, together with the Mayan Train, in the southeastern Yucatán peninsula, and the Olmeca refinery system, in the state of Tabasco, also in the southeast.

The demand for water from the CIIT works is causing concern among the local population, already affected by water shortages, explained the lawyer, who shares the house above his sister’s with the other two members of his family.

“The project will require water and electricity, and our situation is uncertain,” Escobar said. “Everything has to have a methodology, be systematized, the infrastructure must be consolidated. In Salina Cruz (another stop along the megaproject) there have been complicated water problems in the neighborhoods; it’s a problem that’s been going on for years. There are too few wells to supply the local population.”

The lawyer is a member of the non-governmental Corriente del Pueblo Sol Rojo and spoke to IPS from his home in the state of Oaxaca, some 660 kilometers southwest of Mexico City.

In the area, the local population works, at least until now, in agriculture and cattle, pig and goat farming. The municipality is also a crossing point for thousands of undocumented Central American migrants who arrive by train or truck from the Guatemalan border en route to the United States.

Despite the fact that water is a fundamental element of the megaproject, CIIT lacks a water plan, according to responses to requests for access to information submitted by IPS.

The works are part of the Tehuantepec Isthmus Development Program that the Mexican government has been executing since 2019 with the aim of developing the south and southeast of this country of some 129 million inhabitants, the second largest Latin American economy, after Brazil.

A map of the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, some 300 kilometers long, which seeks to connect Mexico’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts by means of highways and a rehabilitated railway to promote industrial development in the south and southeast of the country and encourage exports. CREDIT: Fonadin

An inter-oceanic transformation

The plan for the isthmus includes 10 industrial parks, and the renovation of the ports of Salina Cruz, on the Pacific Ocean, and Coatzacoalcos, on the Atlantic, connected by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec Railway, which is under reconstruction.

It also includes the modernization of the refineries of Salina Cruz, in the state of Oaxaca, and Minatitlán, in the state of Veracruz, the laying of a gas pipeline and the construction of a gas liquefaction plant off the coast of Salina Cruz.

The development program covers 46 municipalities in Oaxaca and 33 in Veracruz, over a distance of some 300 kilometers. The 10 industrial sites, called “Poles of Development for Well-Being,” require 380 hectares each.

Researcher Ursula Oswald of the Regional Center for Multidisciplinary Research at the public National Autonomous University of Mexico told IPS that she proposed a comprehensive model for analyzing all aspects of the megaproject.

“The most urgent thing is to make a master plan, which must have a water plan before other processes. It is crucial, before introducing industries. And each one must have very rigid zoning, to avoid pollution of water sources, and not to repeat the chaos we have seen in the north,” she said from the city of Cuernavaca, in the state of Morelos, next to the Mexican capital.

The researcher said it is necessary to answer questions such as “which basins and aquifers (can be used), and how does the surface water interact with the groundwater?”

The government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in office since December 2018, is looking for companies to set up shop in the south and southeast of the country, in an attempt to attract investment and generate jobs in these areas, the country’s poorest.

But one obstacle to development lies in the logistics of moving the products to the U.S. market, the magnet for interested corporations. Other problems are the lack of skilled workers and the environmental impact in a region characterized by rich biodiversity.

Some recent cases show the difficulties of such initiatives. The U.S.-based electric car-maker Tesla chose the northern state of Nuevo León in March to build its factory in Mexico, despite López Obrador’s interest in having it set up shop in the south.

Between 2020 and 2022, the CIIT’s budget was 162 million dollars in the first year, 203 million dollars in 2021, and almost double that in 2022: 529 million dollars. But in 2023 it has dropped to 374 million dollars.

Independent estimates put the total investment required for the CIIT projects at 1.4 billion dollars, although there is no precise official figure.

A demonstration in Puente Madera, in the state of Oaxaca, against the advance of the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which runs between that southwestern state and Veracruz, in the southeast. The Mexican megaproject has generated opposition from some groups in the region, which see it as an imposed initiative that will hurt local communities. CREDIT: APIIDTT

Water pressure

The megaproject puts greater pressure on water resources in a region where water is both abundant in some areas and overexploited.

Of the 21 aquifers in Oaxaca, five are in deficit, according to figures from the governmental National Water Commission (Conagua). Among these are the aquifers of Tehuantepec and Ostuta, which have suffered a deficit since the last decade and are on the corridor route.

In Veracruz, of the 20 water tables, five suffer from excessive extraction, such as the one in the Papaloapan River basin, also in the CIIT area.

One of the five objectives of the development program is to increase biodiversity and improve the quality of water, soil and air with a sustainable approach.

Meanwhile, CIIT’s regional program stipulates that the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources must guarantee water for both the incoming companies and the local residents.

However, the Auditoría Superior de la Federación, the national comptroller, found no information on increasing biodiversity or improving water, soil and air quality by 2021. Furthermore, it did not have sufficient data to assess compliance with the five CIIT objectives.

For the provision of the necessary water, CIIT identified in its 2022 progress and results report the sale of water rights among users, the transfer from the Tehuantepec aquifer, despite its deficit, and deep wells, the use of dams, rivers or the construction of a desalination plant, in addition to the consumption of treated wastewater.

A model of the Texistepec industrial center in Veracruz, which will form part of the Tehuantepec Isthmus Development Program, that includes the construction of five industrial parks in the southern state of Oaxaca and another five in the southeastern state of Veracruz, five of which the Mexican government has already put out to tender. CREDIT: CIIT

Indigenous people

A May 2021 document on consultations with indigenous communities in the Oaxaca municipality of Ciudad Ixtepec, also along the corridor, seen by IPS, suggests studies on the use of recycled and treated water for some industrial processes, the promotion of the use of rainwater for green areas, and the introduction of programs to raise awareness and foment responsible water use.

The megaproject’s area of influence is home to some 900,000 indigenous people from 10 different native peoples. But the consultation process, free of interference, prior to the development of the works and with sufficient and timely information, only covered less than one percent of the native population.

CIIT has already launched the international bidding process for the construction of three industrial parks in Veracruz and two in Oaxaca.

The right to a healthy environment is another aspect of a context of human rights violations. At the end of July, the Civil Observation Mission, made up of representatives of non-governmental organizations, found violations of access to information, free participation and freedom of expression.

For this reason, Escobar stressed the need for federal authorities to pay close attention to the project.

“Water is not a commodity, its supply has to be guaranteed to the local population,” the lawyer said. “We have to invest heavily in water and develop awareness about it. We do not understand their concept of modernity, they think it is only about building megaprojects. There is going to be an environmental problem in the medium term.”

For her part, Oswald suggested going beyond the traditional focus on attracting investment.

“No company is going to invest if it does not have guaranteed (water) supply, land, a way to export its merchandise on the sides of both oceans, and labor,” said the researcher. “It is necessary to link water, cost, social issues, and which indigenous groups are in the region. What other mechanisms do we have to provide water? Who has control in the region? That is basic to understanding the conflicts. It is a crucial socio-cultural issue.”

Perla Venegas is one of 1444 female bus drivers in the surface public transport network in Santiago, Chile, which aims at gender inclusion and offers job stability and shift flexibility compatible with family life. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Jun 26 2023 (IPS)

Sexual harassment and discrimination are daily realities for women on public transport in Chile and also an obstacle for plans to expand mass transit in order to reduce pollution in several cities in this South American country.

Santiago, the capital, is the most polluted city based on fine air particulate matter among the large Latin American cities, according to the World Air Quality Report 2022, ahead of Lima and Mexico City, while five other Chilean cities are among the 10 most polluted in South America.

Sexual harassment is the most visible form of discrimination against women in Chilean public transportation, in addition to insecurity due to poorly lit bus stops, inadequate buses, and more frequent trips at times when women are less likely to travel.

Personal accounts gathered by IPS also mentioned problems such as the constant theft of cell phones and the impossibility for young women to wear shorts or low-cut tops when traveling on buses or the subway, the backbone of Santiago’s public transportation system.

To address these problems, the Chilean government and the Santiago city government adopted gender strategies: they put in place special telephones to report harassers and thieves, began installing “panic buttons” and alarms at bus stops, and incorporated more women in driving and security.

“When I was younger I suffered a lot of harassment because I didn’t have the character to stand up to the harassers. Now that I am older, I am able to confront an aggressor without fear, even when he is harassing another person, whether a man or a woman. When I confront them, they run away,” Bernardita Azócar, 34, told IPS.

Bernardita Azócar, in a subway station in Santiago, Chile, heads to her job in a collection agency. She says she suffered sexual harassment on public transport in the capital when she was younger, but now she is more alert to any aggression and feels empowered to help others who suffer the same bad experience. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

“It happened to me a couple of times when I was younger. They want to grope you or try to touch another girl and now I confront them. I suffer less because I’m more aware and I try not to put myself at risk,” she added during a dialogue at the University of Chile subway station in Santiago.

Azócar, who works for a collection company, said the root cause of harassment lies in education and in Chilean society.

“If you wear a miniskirt or show cleavage, society points the finger at you, as if you were provoking men and it was your fault. And I don’t think that’s why it happens. It’s abuse to be harassed in the public system…or anywhere else,” she said.

Maite, a humanities student at the Catholic University, feels that women are at a disadvantage on public transportation.

“When a woman takes a bus, she tends to sit next to the aisle to have an easier way to flee from any threat. Or she sits next to another woman so as not to travel alone. There are many things that women do that are not explicit. They are behaviors we learn, to get by on public transportation,” said the young woman who, like her friends, preferred not to give her last name.

According to Maite, “women can’t wear shorts or backpacks on the bus, or openly use a cell phone. Every time you get on the bus you have to take a lot of measures.”

Maite and four other classmates told IPS that they take a combination of buses and the subway to go to school and that none of them have suffered harassment on the bus, but they know of several cases that happened to their friends.

“If someone tries to touch me or crowd me too closely I don’t feel so safe,” said Elena, a commercial engineering student.

“A friend of mine had her cell phone stolen. I have not been harassed, but I would never go on the bus or subway in shorts even if I were dying of heat. I wear long pants because wearing shorts is a risk,” added Emilia, a psychology student.

The five university students in this group lament the discrimination women suffer on Chilean public transport and recognize that they have a “code of conduct” that they personally follow to avoid problems, such as not wearing shorts or miniskirts or showing cleavage, even in summertime, although it sometimes restricts their personal freedom. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

The joys and pitfalls of being a female bus driver

Getting more people to use buses and other public transport in Chile, a long narrow country with a population of 19.8 million, is difficult because 71 percent of households own at least one car.

The incorporation of more female bus drivers is aimed at a friendlier mass transit system.

Perla Venegas, 34, has been working as a bus driver in Santiago’s public transportation system for six years.

“I like my job and driving. The most complicated thing is dealing with cyclists, pedestrians and passengers, who are never satisfied,” she told IPS while parked waiting to pull out on the corner of Santa Rosa and Alameda, in the heart of downtown Santiago.

Her route connects downtown Santiago with the municipality of Maipú, in the western outskirts of the capital.

“I’m on a par with the male drivers, but I’m more cautious, not so aggressive and I’m a more defensive driver. I have been complimented several times, especially by elderly people,” said Venegas, who lives with her two daughters, aged 16 and 8.

“I have female colleagues who have been hit and beaten. I received a death threat from a passenger because when the route ended he wouldn’t get off. He was a homeless drug addict. It was 5:30 AM. In the end I found a carabineros (police) patrol car and I turned him in,” she said.

She added that she has had both pleasant and negative experiences and acknowledged that she is proud that her eldest daughter also wants to be a bus driver “although I would not like her to experience the hard parts.”

The Santiago subway is the backbone of the mass transit system in the Chilean capital. It makes it possible to reach 23 of the 32 municipalities that encompass the capital and allows passengers to combine with a bus network to reach any point of the metropolitan region. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Staying alert in the subway, the main means of public transport

On the Santiago subway there are 2.3 million trips on working days. Its tracks cover 140 kilometers on six lines, with 136 stations in 23 of the 32 municipalities that comprise the metropolitan area. Greater Santiago is home to 7.1 million people.

An additional 2.1 million average daily trips are made on surface public transport.

According to official statistics, during the first five months of the year there were 21 pollution episodes in Santiago above the maximum standard level and eight environmental alerts for excess fine particulate matter, so increasing the use of public transport instead of private vehicles is considered a priority for the authorities.

Paulina del Campo, the subway’s sustainability manager, told IPS that gender issues are a strategic objective in this state-owned company.

“We have taken the issue of harassment very seriously. We do not have large numbers, but we do have moments like March 2022 when the issue was raised because of situations in the streets and in universities that included public transportation,” she said.

After meetings with authorities and student leaders, the subway increased the presence of female security guards at stations in the university district.

“One of the things they said is that in a situation of harassment it is much more comfortable to ask for help from a woman than from a man,” explained Del Campo.

The company thus hired a specific group of female guards to receive and respond to complaints.

“Qualified staff respond and are trained to provide support for the victims. We can quickly activate the protocols with the carabineros police. When it happens we can intercept the train and often arrest the people (aggressors) on the spot,” said Del Campo.

In another campaign, a standard methodology designed by international foundations with expertise in harassment was adapted to the situation in Chile.

At the same time, the subway increased its female staff and the number of women in leadership positions.

“Two years ago we had a female staff of around 20 percent and now, in May, 26.5 percent of the 4,400 subway workers are women. In the area of security guards we have a staff of approximately 700 and of these 110 are women,” explained the company’s Sustainability Manager.

These two women are security guards at the Plaza Egaña subway station, on line 6 in Chile’s capital. The state-owned Metro company is increasing the number of women in its services as part of a gender policy that even includes the maintenance of trains. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS

Gender policies in public transportation

The Metropolitan Public Transport Directorate (DTPM) informed IPS that it aims to reduce the male-female gap in public transport.

It also plans to increase the number of women bus drivers.

The Red system, with buses running throughout Santiago, currently employs 1,444 women – only 7.6 percent of all drivers.

“Many women who have entered this field come from highly precarious and unregulated jobs, so this opportunity has allowed them greater autonomy and, on many occasions, to leave violent environments and improve their self-confidence,” the DTPM stressed in response to questions from IPS.

“This has meant an effort to train and generate conditions to keep and promote women who are part of the system,” it added.

Origin-Destination Surveys reveal that women are the main users of public transport and 65 percent of trips for the purpose of caring for the home, children or other people are made by women. They are more likely to make multidirectional trips and in the so-called off-peak hours, with little traffic.

According to the DTPM, waiting for the bus is one of the most critical moments in every trip.

“This is why we installed the panic button at bus stops and real-time information on the arrival of buses to improve the perception of security,” it explained.

The information is available through an application on cell phones, while the panic buttons began as a women’s safety pilot plan in October 2022 at stops in one of the capital’s municipalities. The plan is to extend them to a large number of stops in Santiago.

Carrying the Mayan flag, members of the Colibrí Collective lead a march against the Mayan Train in the city of Valladolid, in the southern Mexican state of Yucatán, in May 2023. The construction of the Mexican government’s most important megaproject has drawn criticism from affected communities due to its environmental, social and cultural effects. CREDIT: Arturo Contreras / Pie de Página

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 18 2023 (IPS)

Mexico’s development banks have violated their own socio-environmental standards while granting loans for the construction of the Mayan Train (TM), the flagship project of the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The National Bank of Public Works and Services (Banobras), the Nacional Financiera (Nafin) bank and the Foreign Commerce Bank (Bancomext) allocated at least 564 million dollars to the railway line since 2021, according to the yearbooks and statements of the three state entities.

Banobras, which finances infrastructure and public services, granted 480.83 million dollars for the project in the Yucatan peninsula; Nafin, which extends loans and guarantees to public and private works, allocated 81 million; and Bancomext, which provides financing to export and import companies and other strategic sectors, granted 2.91 million.

Bancomext and Banobras did not evaluate the credit, while Nafin classified the information as “confidential”, even though it involves public funds, according to each institution’s response to IPS’ requests for public information.“(The banks) are committing internal violations of their own provisions in the granting of credits, in order to give loans to projects that are not environmentally viable and that do not respect the local communities.” -- Gustavo Alanís

The three institutions have environmental and social risk management systems that include lists of activities that are to be excluded from financing.

In the case of Bancomext and Nafin, these rules are mandatory during the credit granting process, while Banobras explains that its objective is to verify that the loans evaluated are compatible with the bank’s environmental and social commitments.

Bancomext prohibits 19 types of financing; Banobras, 17; and Nafin, 18. The three institutions all veto “production or activities that place in jeopardy lands that are owned by indigenous peoples or have been claimed by adjudication, without the full documented consent of said peoples.”

Likewise, Banobras and Nafin must not support “projects that imply violations of national and international conventions and treaties regarding the indigenous population and native peoples.”

The three entities already had information to evaluate the railway project, since the Superior Audit of the Federation, the state comptroller, had already pointed to shortcomings in the indigenous consultation process and in the assessment of social risks, in the 2019 Report on the Results of the Superior Audit of the Public Account.

The total cost of the TM has already exceeded 15 billion dollars, 70 percent above what was initially planned, mostly borne by the government’s National Fund for Tourism Promotion (Fonatur), responsible for the megaproject.

Mexico’s three state development banks are partially financing the Mayan Train, for which they have failed to comply with the due process of the evaluation of socio-environmental risks that are part of their regulations. The photo shows the clearing of part of the route of one of the branches of the railway line in the municipality of Playa del Carmen, in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, in March 2022. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy / IPS

Violations

Angel Sulub, a Mayan indigenous member of the U kúuchil k Ch’i’ibalo’on Community Center, criticized the policies applied and the disrespect for the safeguards regulated by the state financial entities themselves.

“This shows us, once again, that there is a violation of our right to life, and there has not been at any moment in the process, from planning to execution, a will to respect the rights of the peoples,” he told IPS from the Felipe Carrillo Port, in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, where one of the TM stations will be located.

Sulub, who is also a poet, described the consultation as a “sham”. “Respect for the consultation was violated in all cases, an adequate consultation was not carried out. They did not comply with the minimum information, it was not a prior consultation, nor was it culturally appropriate,” he argued.

In December 2019, the government National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI) organized a consultation with indigenous groups in the region that the Mexican office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights questioned for non-compliance with international standards.

Official data indicates that some 17 million native people live in Mexico, belonging to 69 different peoples and representing 13 percent of the total population.

INPI initially anticipated a population of 1.5 million indigenous people to consult about the TM in 1,331 communities. But that total was reduced to 1.32 million, with no official explanation for the 12 percent decrease. The population in the project’s area of ​​influence totaled 3.57 million in 2019, according to the Superior Audit report.

The conduct of the three financial institutions reflects the level of compliance with the president’s plans, as has happened with other state agencies that have refused to create hurdles for the railway, work on which began in 2020 and which will have seven routes.

The Mayan Train, run by Fonatur and backed by public funds, will stretch some 1,500 kilometers through 78 municipalities in the states of Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán, within the peninsula, as well as the neighboring states of Chiapas and Tabasco. It will have 21 stations and 14 other stops.

The Yucatan peninsula is home to the second largest jungle in Latin America, after the Amazon, and is notable for its fragile biodiversity. In this territory, furthermore, to speak of the population is to speak of the Mayans, because in a high number of municipalities they are a majority and 44 percent of the total are Mayan-speaking.

The government promotes the megaproject, whose locomotives will transport thousands of tourists and cargo, such as transgenic soybeans, palm oil and pork – key economic activities in the area – as an engine for socioeconomic development in the southeast of the country.

It argues that it will create jobs, boost tourism beyond the traditional attractions and energize the regional economy, which has sparked polarizing controversies between its supporters and critics.

The railway faces complaints of deforestation, pollution, environmental damage and human rights violations, but these have not managed to stop the project from going forward.

In November 2022, López Obrador, who wants at all costs for the locomotives to start running in December of this year, classified the TM as a “priority project” through a presidential decree, which facilitates the issuing of environmental permits.

Gustavo Alanís, executive director of the non-governmental Mexican Center for Environmental Law, questioned the way the development banks are proceeding.

“They are committing internal violations of their own provisions in the granting of credits, in order to give loans to projects that are not environmentally viable and that do not respect the local communities. They are not complying with their own internal guidelines and requirements regarding the environment and indigenous peoples in the granting of credits,” he told IPS.

Groups opposed to the Mayan Train protest along a segment of the megaproject in the municipality of Carrillo Puerto, in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, on May 3. CREDIT: Arturo Contreras / Pie de Página

Trendy guidelines

In the last decade, socio-environmental standards have gained relevance for the promotion of sustainable works and their consequent financing that respects ecosystems and the rights of affected communities, such as those located along the railway.

Although the three Mexican development banks have such guidelines, they have not joined the largest global initiatives in this field.

None of them form part of the Equator Principles, a set of 10 criteria established in 2003 and adopted by 138 financial institutions from 38 countries, and which define their environmental, social and corporate governance.

Nor are they part of the Principles for Responsible Banking, of the United Nations Environment Program Finance Initiative, announced in 2019 and which have already been adopted by 324 financial and insurance institutions from more than 50 nations.

These standards address the impact of projects; sustainable client and user practices; consultation and participation of stakeholders; governance and institutional culture; as well as transparency and corporate responsibility.

Of the three Mexican development banks, only Banobras has a mechanism for complaints, which has not received any about its loans, including the railway project.

In this regard, Sulub questioned the different ways to guarantee indigenous rights in this and other large infrastructure projects.

“The legal fight against the railway and other megaprojects has shown us in recent years that, as peoples, we do not have effective access to justice either, even though we have clearly demonstrated violations of our rights. Although it is a good thing that companies and banks have these guidelines and that they comply with them, we do not have effective mechanisms for enforcement,” he complained.

In Sulub’s words, this leads to a breaching of the power of indigenous people to decide on their own ways of life, since the government does not abide by judicial decisions, which in his view is further evidence of an exclusionary political system.

For his part, Alanís warned of the banks’ complicity in the damage reported and the consequent risk of legal liability if the alleged irregularities are not resolved.

“If not, they must pay the consequences and hold accountable those who do not follow internal policies. The international banks have inspection panels, to receive complaints when the bank does not follow its own policies,” he stated.

The laying of the Mayan Train along 1500 kilometers through five states in the south and southeast of Mexico, mostly through the Yucatan Peninsula, will damage the fragile jungle ecosystem, with the removal of vegetation and animal species. The photo shows an area cleared of vegetation near the municipality of Valladolid, in the state of Yucatan. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Nov 2 2022 (IPS)

A beige line slashes its way through the Mayan jungle near the municipality of Izamal in the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán. It is section 3, 172 kilometers long, of the Mayan Train (TM), the most important megaproject of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration.

The metal scrape of the backhoes tears up the vegetation to open up arteries in the jungle for the laying and construction of the five stops of this part of the future railway network, which is being built at a cost currently estimated at more than 15 billion dollars, 70 percent more than initially planned."Everything that is happening in the Yucatán peninsula is affecting the Mayan people, damaging the trees, the water, the animals. It is a part of our territory that is being destroyed. Those who don't produce their own food have to depend on others." -- Pedro Uc

Pedro Uc, an indigenous member of the non-governmental Assembly of Defenders of the Múuch’ Xíinbal Mayan Territory, summed up the environmental impact of the TM in an area of milpa – a traditional system of cultivation of corn, squash, beans and chili peppers – and poultry farming.

“Everything that is happening in the Yucatán peninsula is affecting the Mayan people, damaging the trees, the water, the animals. It is a part of our territory that is being destroyed. Those who don’t produce their own food have to depend on others,” he told IPS from Buctzotz (Mayan for “hair dress”), in Yucatán, some 1,400 km from Mexico City.

Without land, there is no food, stressed the activist, whose organization works in 25 municipalities on the peninsula, which includes the states of Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán, and is home to the second most important jungle massif in Latin America, after the Amazon.

Despite multiple complaints of environmental damage, the Federal Attorney’s Office for Environmental Protection (Profepa) has yet to resolve these complaints, more than two years after construction began.

“It has never carried out its role. It has not addressed the issue, it is merely ornamental. Profepa should attend to the complaints,” said Uc, whose town is located 44 kilometers southeast of Izamal, where one of the railroad stations will be located.

Profepa, part of the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat), received two complaints in 2020, one in 2021 and 159 in the first five months of this year for “acts or omissions in contravention of environmental laws,” according to public information requests submitted by IPS.

Profepa oversees the megaproject through its “Mayan Train Inspection Program, in the areas of environmental impact, forestry, wildlife and sources of pollution”, the results of which are unknown.

In December last year, the agency carried out an inspection of hazardous waste generation and management in the southern state of Chiapas, which, together with the states of Campeche, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Yucatán, is part of the route for the railway.

In addition, in June and July, two other visits were made to verify measures to mitigate pollutant emissions and waste management. Profepa is still analyzing the results of these visits.

The environmental prosecutor’s office has carried out exploratory visits in nine municipalities of section 2, eight of section 4 and 16 of section 5. The laying of lines 6 and 7 began last April, but the agency has not yet inspected them. The megaproject consists of a total of seven sections, which are being built in parallel.

The TM, to be built by the governmental National Tourism Fund (Fonatur), will cover some 1,500 kilometers, with 21 stations and 14 stops, according to López Obrador, who is heavily involved in the project and is its biggest supporter.

To lay the railway, whose trains will transport thousands of tourists and loads of cargo, such as transgenic soybeans, palm oil and pork, 1,681 hectares of land will be cleared, involving the cutting of 300,000 trees, according to the original environmental impact study. The laying of sections 1, 2 and 3, which require 801 hectares, began without environmental permits.

The government sees the megaproject as an engine of social development that will create jobs, boost tourism beyond the traditional tourist attractions and bolster the regional economy, which has sparked controversy between its supporters and critics.

The construction of the Mayan Train has involved logging in several jungle areas in southeastern Mexico. The photo shows a breach opened by a backhoe on the outskirts of Playa del Carmen, in the state of Quintana Roo, in March 2022, without the required intervention by the environmental prosecutor’s office. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Free way

In November of last year, López Obrador, who wants trains running on the peninsula by the end of 2023, classified the TM as a “priority project” by means of a presidential decree, thus facilitating the delivery of environmental permits. On Oct. 25 the president promised that the test runs would begin next July.

This classification reduces Profepa’s maneuvering room, according to Carlos del Razo, a lawyer specializing in environmental cases, of the law firm Carvajal y Machado.

“Some of the early complaints could be filed for works where permit exemptions were issued because they were done on existing rights-of-way. But if it decides not to act, it has to argue that decision. The environmental prosecutor’s office will not have a particular interest in approving government works,” he told IPS.

In its authorizations, Semarnat ruled that Fonatur must implement programs for integrated waste management, soil conservation and reforestation, air quality monitoring, flora management and rescue and relocation of wildlife.

Profepa must supervise that these measures comply with the General Law of Ecological Balance and Environmental Protection, in force since 1988 and which environmentalists say has been violated.

López Obrador denies that there is deforestation, and promised the construction of three natural parks in eastern Quintana Roo and the reforestation of some 2,500 hectares in the vicinity of the railroad route.

In a tacit acknowledgement of logging in the project area, the Ministry of National Defense will plant trees, at a cost of 35 million dollars, according to an agreement between Fonatur and the ministry contained in the massive leak of military emails made by the non-governmental group Guacamaya and consulted by IPS.

Viridiana Mendoza, Agriculture and Climate Change specialist for Greenpeace Mexico, criticized “the lack of action” by Profepa.

“They had already deforested without an environmental impact assessment, which is a crime. We are not surprised, because it is part of the dynamic that has characterized the Mayan Train: illegalities, omissions, false information, violation of procedures. There is a conflict of interest because Profepa answers to Semarnat,” she said.

The international non-governmental organization has found “insufficient, false and inaccurate” information on sections 5, 6 and 7, so it is not possible to assess the dangers and damage to local populations and ecosystems.

Parts of the jungle of the Yucatan peninsula, in southeastern Mexico, have been cut down to make way for the construction of the Mayan Train. But the environmental prosecutor’s office, failing to comply with its legal duty, has turned a deaf ear to complaints of alleged ecological crimes. CREDIT: Guacamaya Leaks

Risks

The project is a paradox, because while the government promises sustainable tourism in other areas of the peninsula, it threatens the very attractions of this influx of visitors, such as the cenotes – deep, water-filled sinkholes formed in limestone – cave systems and the entire ecosystem in general.

The TM endangers the largest system of underground and flooded grottoes on the planet, a complex of submerged caves beneath the limestone terrain.

The porous (karst) soil of the peninsula sabotages the government’s plans, as it has forced Fonatur to change the route of the megaproject several times. For example, section 5 has experienced three modifications between 2021 and January 2022.

Faced with the wave of impacts, the last hope lies in organization by local residents, according to the Mayan activist Uc.

“Between the possible and the impossible, we inform people so that in their own community, they can make the decision they want to make. People do not have the necessary information. Let them take up the struggle from their own communities and make the decisions about what comes next,” he said.

But attorney Del Razo and environmentalist Mendoza said the courts are the last resort.

“The judiciary continues to be the most independent branch of power in Mexico. Interested parties could seek injunctions that order Profepa to correct the process. A strategy of specific details is needed to demonstrate the infractions. The effective thing is to go into the details of the challenges,” explained Del Razo.

Mendoza said there is a lack of access to information, respect for public participation and environmental justice.

“Profepa should have stopped the works for the simple fact of not having the environmental authorization when the removal of vegetation began,” she said. “We don’t see it as likely that it will seek to stop the construction, because we have seen its reaction before. Semarnat supports the project, regardless of the fact that it has failed to comply and is in contradiction with the laws.”

While its opponents seek to take legal action, the TM runs roughshod over all obstacles, which are dodged with the help of the Environmental Prosecutor’s Office, at least until now.

Residents of the Fontanar neighborhood in the Cuban capital are pleased with the incorporation of electric three-wheel vehicles to shorten distances between sectors within Boyeros, one of the municipalities that make up Havana. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Luis Brizuela
HAVANA, Oct 17 2022 (IPS)

The incorporation of small electric vehicles for public transport, together with initiatives that encourage the use of bicycles, represent opportunities and challenges for Cuba to sustainably and inclusively combat the chronic problems in urban mobility.

“Connecting nearby places with electric means of transportation has been very timely and a relief,” said Dania Martínez, referring to the well-known Ecotaxis, six-seater vehicles that since June have been providing transportation between neighborhoods within the municipality of Boyeros, one of the 15 that make up Havana."Neomovilidad has aimed to strengthen the regulatory framework for an efficient transition to a low-carbon urban transport system in Havana, with a positive environmental impact." -- Reynier Campos

The teacher and her son were waiting for one of these vehicles at the Fontanar shopping center to take them to Wajay, their neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana, when IPS asked them what they thought about the service.

“Public transportation is not good in this area, far from the city center, and private taxis charge you a high fee. Just getting somewhere else five kilometers away can be difficult. Hopefully the three-wheelers will spread to other places,” Martinez said.

She was referring to light motorized vehicles that resemble some kinds of Asian autorickshaws, which are also known locally as motocarro or mototaxi, with a capacity for six people in the back.

With a range of 120 kilometers, these three-wheeled electric vehicles cover three two- to four-kilometer routes for a price of four pesos, or 17 cents at the official exchange rate in a country with an average monthly salary equivalent to about 160 dollars.

The fleet of 25 vehicles is part of the Neomovilidad project, implemented by the General Directorate of Transportation of Havana (DGTH) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) office in Cuba.

For its implementation until 2023, it has a budget of 1.9 million dollars donated by the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

“From its start in 2019, Neomovilidad has aimed to strengthen the regulatory framework for an efficient transition to a low-carbon urban transport system in Havana, with a positive environmental impact,” Reynier Campos, director of the project, told IPS.

During the first three months of operation, more than 135,000 people were transported, with an estimated monthly emission reduction potential of 6.12 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

On the downside, Ecotaxis can only recharge at night by connecting to the national power grid, 95 percent of which depends on the burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity. Recharging is carried out at the three-wheel vehicles’ parking area and is done at night because it takes about six hours.

However, there are plans to contract power from solar parks of the state-owned electric utility Unión Eléctrica de Cuba, in order to offset consumption, executives said.

Other fleets of Ecotaxis provide service in the municipalities of La Habana Vieja, Centro Habana and Guanabacoa, also with UNDP support, and contribute to the national commitment to climate change mitigation actions.

Campos explained that Neomovilidad is a pilot project in Boyeros that could be extended to other Havana municipalities and cities of this Caribbean island nation of 11.1 million people, where public transportation is one of the most pressing long-term issues.

Reynier Campos, head of the Neomovilidad project, stressed that the initiative proposes to strengthen the legislative framework and promote public policies based on four lines that contribute to Sustainable Urban Mobility and help reduce carbon emissions in Cuba. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Long-standing problem

With its 2.2 million residents and tens of thousands of people who live here on a short-term basis, Havana has 1.4 million people using transportation daily, one million of whom use the state-owned bus company Empresa de Ómnibus Urbanos, according to the Ministry of Transportation.

But the most recent official reports acknowledge that less than 50 percent of the fleet of public buses are currently operating in the capital.

The Cuban government blames the U.S. embargo as the main obstacle to the purchase of spare parts, as well as the lack of access to credit to repair and renovate buses, the main form of public transportation.

Problems with the availability of fuel and the number of drivers who find work in sectors with greater economic benefits also undermine an irregular service whose most visible face is the overcrowded stops at peak hours.

Figures indicate that 26 percent of the total estimated passengers in Havana use private taxis, which charge higher rates that not everyone can afford.

There are also non-agricultural transportation cooperatives with cabs and minibuses, as well as buses of the state-owned Transmetro Company, that provide services with set schedules.

About 80 percent of Latin America’s inhabitants live in towns and cities, and urban public transport remains essential in regional mobility plans.

Cuba is quietly taking steps to encourage the use of alternative vehicles and increase electricity production from renewable sources, which plans aim to raise from the current five to 37 percent by 2030.

As a result of flexible customs regulations for their importation, as well as assembly, it is estimated that half a million bicycles, motorcycles and electric three-wheelers are in circulation on the island, helping families get around.

However, high prices and sales only in foreign currency hinder their spread. Some of the most economical ones cost over 1,000 dollars, while others range from 2,000 to 5,000 dollars in government stores.

Mirelis Cordovés, driver of one of the electrocycles, makes 11 trips a day on the Fontanar-Wajay route, in the Boyeros municipality of the Cuban capital. She is pleased to have a job and a higher income to support her nine-year-old son, whom she is raising on her own. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Gender focus to reduce gaps

Neomovilidad stands out for encouraging the incorporation of women as drivers and promoting female employment.

“In addition to giving me a job, my income is higher, helping me support my nine-year-old son,” Mirelis Cordovés, a single mother who is one of the 13 women who now form part of the project’s team of drivers, told IPS.

Latin American nations such as Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Panama have adopted national policies related to the development of electric mobility.

In the case of Cuba, the proposal is “a vision for the development of electromobility from the Ministries of Transport, Energy and Mines and Industry, with guidelines and priority lines in public transport, including the conversion of vehicles,” said Campos.

He said that Neomovilidad proposes to promote public policies that contribute to Sustainable Urban Mobility.

The project urges considering the specific mobility needs of each social group and mainstreaming variables such as gender, age and accessibility, in order to reduce gaps.

The National Gender Equality Survey, conducted in 2016 but whose results were released in February 2019, showed that women primarily bear the burden of care work.

They are the ones who spend the most time taking children, family members or other people under their care to schools, hospitals or to buy food, the survey showed.

Transportation was identified as one of the top three problems for Cuban women, second only to low incomes and housing shortages.

The study drew attention to the correlation between time use and income inequality, because cheaper transportation options (public buses) increase travel delays.

Experts consulted by IPS consider that in the case of Cuba, a developing nation shaken by a three-decade economic crisis and pressing financial problems, there is no need to wait for solutions that demand large resources, if small and accessible alternatives can be devised to organize and facilitate mobility.

The Neomovilidad stand during the 2022 International Transport Fair at the Pabexpo fairgrounds in Havana. The project includes a pilot system of public bicycles, with six bicycle stations and 300 bikes, which should start offering its services before the end of 2022. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Integrating bicycles

As part of Neomovilidad, a pilot system of public bicycles should be inaugurated before the end of 2022, with six stations and 300 bicycles, also in the municipality of Boyeros.

The autonomous venture Inteliforja will operate the bicycle mobility system as a local development project, in conjunction with the DGTH, after winning a bidding process.

“The main activity will be the rental of bicycles at affordable prices. It will include other services such as parking, mechanical workshops, as well as complementary activities such as bicycle touring, package delivery and community activities to encourage the use of this means of transport,” explained Luis Alberto Sarmiento, one of the managers of Inteliforja.

Sarmiento told IPS that the central workshop will be located at the José Antonio Echeverría Technological University of Havana, where there are several engineering and architecture courses.

“We plan to install a solar panel-powered station there to charge students’ motorcycles and electric bicycles,” said the young entrepreneur.

“Farther in the future, when we have more resources, we plan to introduce bicycles or three-wheelers for the transportation of elderly and disabled people,” Sarmiento added.

Although electric mobility and the use of bicycles are seen as promoting more open, safer, cleaner and healthier cities, Cuba faces multiple challenges in this regard, starting with the need to lower the price of vehicles and ensure the stable availability of parts and components.

Other pending issues are the lack of recharging points for refueling outside the home, the lack of bicycle lanes or green lanes, in addition to the urgent need to repair a road network, 75 percent of which is classified as in fair or poor condition.

View of a bridge in severe disrepair on the BR-319 highway, in the heart of the Amazon, which the Brazilian government plans to repave along the 405-kilometer central section, out of a total of 885 kilometers, because it has deteriorated to the point that is impassable for much of the year. Those who venture along it take three times the normal amount of time to drive the entire length, with the risk of seriously damaging their vehicles. CREDIT: Tarmo Tamming/Flickr

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 9 2022 (IPS)

The mandatory initial permit granted by Brazil’s environmental authority for the repaving of the BR-319 highway, in the heart of the Amazon jungle, intensified the alarm over the possible irreversible destruction of the rainforest.

The 885-kilometer highway is the only overland route to Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas with a population of 2.25 million in south-central Brazil. The road runs to another Amazon rainforest city, Porto Velho, capital of the state of Rondônia, population 550,000."Restrictions arose that limited the public hearings to evaluate the studies as early as 2021, and so far there has been no solution to these problems. In addition, the participation of affected populations was limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the difficulties in attendance, especially for indigenous people." -- Carlos Durigan

The highway emerged as part of the plans of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship to integrate the Amazon rainforest with the rest of the country, through several highways crossing the then almost unpopulated jungle and the promotion of massive internal migration from other regions.

Due to heavy rains and frequent flooding many sections of the road and a number of bridges have fallen into disrepair. Twelve years after its inauguration in 1976, BR-319 was recognized as a largely impassable road, undermined by neglect.

Local interests tried to repave the road and obtained the support of the central government from the beginning of this century.

However, in 2008 and 2009, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) rejected three environmental impact studies, whose approval is essential in Brazil for projects that affect the environment and that have a social impact.

But a fourth study, presented in June 2021 by the National Department of Transport Infrastructure, was approved and the required initial permit was granted by IBAMA, despite criticism from environmentalists.

In recent years IBAMA’s credibility has suffered due to the openly anti-environmental far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, which weakened the environmental agency by cutting its budget and appointing officials lacking the necessary qualifications.

The Brazilian army always deploys members of its engineer brigade to repair roads in remote areas, such as the Amazon rainforest. But in the case of the BR-319 highway between Manaus and Porto Velho, millions of dollars in investments and costly maintenance services are necessary, which prevent its concession to private companies. CREDIT: Brazilian Army

Doomed project

“Restrictions arose that limited the public hearings to evaluate the studies as early as 2021, and so far there has been no solution to these problems. In addition, the participation of affected populations was limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the difficulties in attendance, especially for indigenous people,” said environmentalist Carlos Durigan.

The environmental impacts assessed were limited to the vicinity of the road, without considering the entire area of influence of the construction work, the director of WCS Brazil, the national affiliate of the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society, told IPS by telephone from Manaus.

Moreover, no prior and informed consultation was held with the indigenous peoples and traditional communities that will be affected, a requirement under Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), he said. This incompliance is likely to lead to lawsuits.

The initial permit was obtained under promises of greater protection, inspection and oversight of protected areas – not very credible at a time of weak public authority in environmental questions, with low budgets and reduced human resources, said Durigan, a geographer from southeastern Brazil who has lived in the Amazon rainforest for two decades.

These and other criticisms form part of the evaluation carried out by the BR-319 Observatory, a coalition of 12 social organizations involved in activities in the road’s area of influence. The 14-point review identifies irregularities in the permit granted by IBAMA and the violated rights of the affected population.

The proponents of the BR-319 highway tried to avoid the requirement of impact studies under the argument that it is only a matter of repaving an existing road, with no new impacts. But the courts recognized it as a complete reconstruction.

In fact, of the 885 kilometers, 405 kilometers will have to be repaved and bridges and animal crossings will have to be rebuilt. The remaining 480 kilometers – the two stretches near Manaus and Porto Velho – are already passable.

But the rains and floods that have occurred since last year have broken down the asphalt on many stretches near Manaus, leaving large cracks and holes. Even without repaving, many people venture to travel along the BR-319 in cars, buses and trucks. But it takes two or three days to drive, and often causes damage to vehicles.

One of the potholes in the BR-319 highway, where the asphalt laid in the 1970s has disappeared. Inaugurated in 1976, the Amazon artery became impassable a decade later and attempts to repave it have so far failed. CREDIT: Tarmo Tamming/Flickr

More deforestation

Environmentalists fear that deforestation, illegal occupation of public lands and the invasion of indigenous lands, which are already occurring along nearly 200 kilometers of the southern section, will spread along the entire highway and its surrounding areas.

This region close to Porto Velho is the area where deforestation in the Amazon has grown the most in recent years.

A usable BR-319 would spread environmental crimes, forest fires and violence generated by land disputes in the middle section of the highway, activists warn.

In fact, 80 percent of Amazon deforestation occurs along the highways that are the arteries leading to the settlement of the rainforest, along with smaller roads branching off from the highways, environmentalists say.

Such effects are already well-known along other Amazonian highways in areas that are more populated and deforested than the territory between Manaus and Porto Velho, bathed by the Madeira and Purus rivers, two of the major tributaries of the Amazon, both of which have their headwaters in Peru. The Madeira basin also extends through much of central and northern Bolivia.

A stretch of the BR-319 highway with an ironic sign pointing to the nearby town of Realidade (Reality). The 885-kilometer road that runs between the Amazonian Madeira and Purus rivers requires high maintenance costs due to frequent flooding, since most of it is located on land that floods in the rainy season. CREDIT: Alberto César Araújo/Amazonia Real

Doubtful economic feasibility

BR-319 faces another uncertainty, which is economic viability. It crosses what is at least for now a sparsely populated area, except for Manaus. The cost of repaving is not small, as the effort includes many bridges and earthworks to stabilize land that floods during the rainy season along many stretches, even though the road is located on higher ground between the Madeira and Purus rivers.

The highway also needs continuous upkeep, as is already the case in the stretch near Manaus, where the necessary repairs have not yet been completed after flooding caused by heavy rains that lasted from October 2021 until well into this year, Durigan pointed out.

Even so, the demand for the repaving of the central section of the highway is very popular, enjoying almost consensus support, the activist acknowledged. The argument in favor of the road is that Manaus is isolated by land, and depends on air or river transport to connect with the rest of Brazil and to be able to export its industrial production.

Since the 1960s, Manaus has had an industrial park and a free trade zone, supported by large subsidies that are regularly extended and will remain in force at least until 2073. These benefits shore up the electronics, motorcycle and beverage industries in the city, despite its remote location and distance from the main domestic markets.

In addition to a reduction in the city’s isolation, the population of Manaus hopes to see a drop in food prices, thanks to a workable road that would allow better access to products from Rondônia, an Amazonian state where agriculture and cattle raising have been developed.

But the beneficial effect of agriculture 900 kilometers away is doubtful. Other Amazonian cities, such as Belém, capital of the eastern Amazon jungle state of Pará, also pay dearly for their food, particularly fresh produce, because they have not developed horticulture.

New anti-Amazon wave

Along with the repaving of BR-319, Brazil’s Amazon rainforest faces other threats from infrastructure projects.

Another resurrected plan is a road through a conserved forest area on the border between Brazil and Peru. It would cross the biodiversity-rich Serra do Divisor National Park.

This plan also looks unfeasible because of its questionable economic viability and due to the severe environmental restrictions it would face.

Three railways are also planned for exports from Mato Grosso, the southeastern Amazonian state that is Brazil’s largest producer of soybeans, corn and cotton, and small and medium-sized hydroelectric plants are projected, especially in the states of Rondônia and Roraima, the latter on the border with Venezuela.

In addition to resistance from environmentalists and indigenous peoples, these projects now face a new stumbling block, or a new counter-argument: climate change, said Sergio Guimarães, coordinator of the Infrastructure Working Group, a network of 47 social organizations.

This is a variable that requires at least a review of all these projects, he told IPS by telephone from Cuiabá, capital of Mato Grosso.

In the photo, people in several vehicles inspect a section of the Mayan Train, the flagship megaproject of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, near the city of Valladolid, in the southeastern Yucatán peninsula, seat of the second most fragile jungle massif in Latin America, after the Amazon rainforest. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Mexico , Apr 8 2022 (IPS)

Along the wide slash of white earth in southwestern Mexico there are no longer trees or animals. In their place, orange signs with white stripes warn visitors: “Heavy machinery in motion,” “No unauthorized personnel allowed”.

Five tractors spread over the terrain, like intimidating metallic guards with sharp teeth. Two blue portable toilets keep them mute company, two white cans overflow with garbage, and a white and solitary awning attempts to protect them from the punishing sun.

The metal teeth tear up the jungle carpet on land in the Río Secreto ejido – an area of communal land used for agriculture – south of the city of Playa del Carmen. With a population of 305,000, Playa del Carmen is the seat of the municipality of Solidaridad, in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, some 1,600 kilometers from Mexico City, on the Yucatán peninsula.

The new 90-meter gap in the jungle opens the way for the 120-kilometer southern route of Section 5 of the Mayan Train (TM), the most ambitious megaproject of the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who wants at all costs for the locomotives to blow their horns by late 2023."Hundreds of hectares are being deforested. We are going to end up with new cities or existing ones are going to grow. This could be a tragedy of enormous proportions, because the ecosystems are being disturbed. Simply by removing vegetation cover, the capacity of water systems to capture and filter water is altered.” -- Lorenzo Álvarez

Mina Moreno, an independent environmental conservationist, describes Section 5, one of the seven sections of the project, as “illegal and opaque”.

“There are no studies, there is no information as to why the route was changed, what is behind the new route. The problem is what the railway will bring with it: it’s a Trojan horse for what is coming behind,” she told IPS.

The project, under the responsibility of the government’s National Tourism Development Fund (Fonatur), has suffered delays and cost overruns since construction began in 2020 and will have environmental, social, cultural and labor impacts, as IPS saw during a tour of several areas along the route.

With seven sections running through the Yucatan peninsula and part of the southeast, the plan is for the Mayan Train, with 21 stations and 14 stops, to cover a distance of some 1,500 kilometers. The railroad will pass through 78 municipalities in the southern and southeastern states of the country: Campeche, Quintana Roo, Yucatán, Chiapas and Tabasco, which are home to a combined total of more than 13 million people.

The first three are located in the Yucatan Peninsula, which has one of the most important and fragile Mexican ecosystems and the second largest jungle massif in Latin America, after the Amazon rainforest.

It is here that around 80 percent of the TM railway will run, whose locomotives will pull wagons carrying thousands of tourists and cargo, such as transgenic soybeans, palm oil and pork, the main agricultural products from the peninsula.

The Mexican government is promoting the president’s flagship megaproject as an engine of social development that is to create jobs, boost tourism beyond the traditional attractions and bolster the regional economy. But these arguments have sparked conflicts between its supporters and critics.

UN Habitat, which is providing technical advice on the project’s land use planning, believes that the railway will create one million jobs by 2030 and will lift 1.1 million people out of poverty in an area with 42 municipalities with high rates of poverty and marginalization. (The estimates were made prior to the COVID-19 epidemic that hit Latin America’s second-largest economy hard.)

The Mayan Train, which will run 1,500 kilometers through five states in southern and southeastern Mexico, threatens ecosystems and tourist attractions, such as subterranean caves and cenotes. The photo shows tourists swimming in the cenote Azul, on the outskirts of Playa del Carmen, in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo on the Yucatan Peninsula. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

One land, two faces

The TM, built with public funds, requires 1,681 hectares of land, which implies the cutting of 300,000 trees, according to the original environmental impact study. The construction of the first three sections, which require 801 hectares, began without environmental permits.

The western route is causing social, cultural and land-ownership conflicts, while the eastern route will cause greater environmental damage.

López Obrador denies that the railway will lead to deforestation, and promised the creation of three natural parks in eastern Quintana Roo and the reforestation of some 2,500 hectares.

But available information shows that the megaproject is moving ahead with construction while leaving environmental management plans behind.

This is seen in a close look at the 2020 public accounts of the Chief Audit Office of Mexico – the comptroller of the public treasury – on the budget and execution of the TM. The office concluded that the project lacks a master plan and the necessary resources to guarantee sustainable development and environmental protection.

It also documented an increase in cost from 7.3 billion dollars in 2019 to 8.8 billion the following year, and found that there was no explanation for the expenditure of about 13 million dollars.

Moreover, the megaproject only advanced one-fifth of what was planned in 2019 and 2020, a bad omen for the president’s plans, although the rate of progress in 2021 and the first quarter of 2022 is not known.

But it is clear that Fonatur decided to step on the accelerator to fulfill the president’s promise and that the last two sections may be built with the participation of the army in the middle of the jungle. It is also clear that López Obrador does not want to inaugurate the TM until the entire line is completed.

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office for Environmental Protection (PROFEPA) did not inspect the works in 2020, nor has it done so for section 5, as stated in a request for access to public information filed by IPS.

The porous karst soil of the peninsula has sabotaged the government’s plans and deadlines, as it has forced Fonatur to change the design several times. For example, section 5 underwent three modifications from January 2021 to January 2022.

In the Mexican municipality of Solidaridad, whose municipal seat is Playa del Carmen, on the Yucatán peninsula, the construction of one of the seven sections of the Mayan Train has deforested at least 10 kilometers of jungle. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

The megaproject contains contradictions, because while the government promises sustainable tourism in other areas of the peninsula, the railway threatens the local sustainable tourism attractions, such as the cenotes, the caves and the entire ecosystem.

In the Yucatan Peninsula there are some 7,000 cenotes – freshwater sinkholes resulting from the collapse of limestone bedrock that exposes groundwater. Between Playa del Carmen and Tulum, cities only 61 kilometers apart, there are 13 of these ecosystems.

In the entire state of Quintana Roo there are at least 105 flooded caves over 1,500 meters in length and 408 underwater caves.

The TM threatens the largest system of subterranean rivers and flooded caves on the planet, a complex of submerged caves more than 340 kilometers long beneath the limestone floor.

From land to sea

Lorenzo Álvarez, a researcher at the Academic Reef Systems Unit of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology at the public National Autonomous University of Mexico, says that as a regional development project, the railway will be “catastrophic”.

“Hundreds of hectares are being deforested,” he told IPS. “We are going to end up with new cities or existing ones are going to grow. This could be a tragedy of enormous proportions, because the ecosystems are being disturbed. Simply by removing vegetation cover, the capacity of water systems to capture and filter water is altered.”

The consequences: water with more sediment in the reefs, waste, leachates and more pollution.

That is the vision that the visitor gets looking at the map from inland to the coast in Puerto Morelos, in the north of Quintana Roo, which has suffered a real estate invasion, to the extent that the reefs have been mortally wounded. They are part of the Mesoamerican Reef, the second largest in the world, after Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The fear in this former fishing village, which is now the largest port on the so-called Riviera Maya with 27,000 inhabitants, is that the TM will exacerbate the real estate boom. But most locals are unaware of the danger.

The Mayan Train will run through the outskirts of Puerto Morelos, seen in the distance in the photo. Located 38 kilometers from Cancun and forming part of the so-called Riviera Maya, this former fishing village is now a port city with real estate encroachment that has damaged the reefs off its coast. The railroad could spell the end for the fragile ecosystem. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

“Construction hasn’t started yet,” Fabiola Sánchez, an activist with the non-governmental group United Voices of Puerto Morelos, told IPS. “There has been no tangible damage here, as in other municipalities, but we know the environmental implications. Our aim is prevention, because we are going to suffer the same environmental effects.”

The activists’ concern is focused on the 2020-2030 Urban Development Program, which they accuse of favoring hotel and real estate interests to the detriment of citizen participation and sustainable planning on a coastline already stressed by excessive tourism.

And, above all, they accuse it of favoring construction of the new railway.

Through legal appeals, opponents of the program have managed to bring it to a halt, but they are witnessing construction without land use planning in other municipalities.

The Mayan Train megaproject includes the construction of sustainable cities (formerly called development poles) around the stations, which include businesses, drinking water, drainage, electricity and urban equipment.

The Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) itself warns that these poles may represent the greatest environmental threat from the railway line.

The sustainable cities should promote “well-managed urban planning” and should help reduce the backlog of local and regional services, according to the official website.

“Considering climatic conditions, efficient use of water, energy and integrated management of solid waste…and respecting natural conditions, affecting ecosystems as little as possible,” are essential, Semarnat stated.

But the construction work on the ground and the lack of urban development plans contradict these precepts.

In any case, the railway’s route does not seem to be set up for the benefit of excursionists and local workers, as its planned stations are far from tourist sites and work centers. Passengers would have to use other means to travel to these places.

In addition, the popular perspective values supposed future returns, such as jobs and income, over current and potential harms, like deforestation.

There have also been labor abuses. Section 5 workers earn about 39 dollars a week – less than the minimum daily wage of 8.5 dollars – and work without protective equipment and without signed contracts, as IPS learned.

Furthermore, there has been arbitrary treatment of “ejidatarios” or local residents of ejidos, since in Campeche the authorities paid about 2.5 dollars per square meter of expropriated land, while in Quintana Roo the price rose to about 25 dollars.

The threat of collapse is not merely an apocalyptic proclamation, environmentalists insist. They quote the closing line of the novel La vorágine (1924), by Colombian writer José Eustasio Rivera, a Latin American classic: “The jungle swallowed them up”, in allusion to the fate of its characters, and they say the same thing could happen to the TM.

In Anapolis, Brazil's North-South railway line, which took more than 30 years to complete, was unable to connect with the existing network due to the different width of its tracks and its southern section remained inactive for several years, until it was privatised in 2019. Precedents like this one create concern about the new planned railway lines, dedicated to the transportation of grains to the export ports. CREDIT: Mario Osava

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Aug 27 2021 (IPS)

The sea of soybeans that sprouts every November will spread even further in the state of Mato Grosso if three new railway lines that would boost soy production in central-western Brazil and growing parts of the Amazon rainforest are built.

The most controversial railway line, the EF-170, is better known by its nickname “Ferrogrão (grainrail)” because it is to be built for the export of grains from the mid-northern part of Mato Grosso, the area where most soybeans and corn are produced in Brazil, through Amazonian rivers and ports in the north of the country.

Mato Grosso already produces 70 million tons of grains per year, a total that will reach 120 million tons by 2030, said Minister of Infrastructure Tarcisio de Freitas, who described the Ferrogrão as “the most important logistics project in Brazil,” in a digital meeting with foreign correspondents in June.

It would lower freight rates in general, by creating competition in the transportation of the bulk of the national agricultural production, replacing thousands of trucks and expanding exports through the ports of northern Brazil, relieving pressure on ports in the south and southeast.

The government intended to auction the concession for the rail line this year, but is unlikely to do so in the face of environmental obstacles and economic uncertainties.

The railway would cause the deforestation of between 1,671 and 2,416 square kilometres by stimulating the expansion of the planted area in the state of Mato Grosso alone, according to a study by the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), an international non-profit organisation with which the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro is associated.

The study does not take into account damage in the state of Pará, where two thirds of the 933 kilometres of the line would be built and where the port of Miritituba on the Tapajós River, the railway’s destination, is located.

In Brazil’s Amazon region, the EF-170 railroad, known as Ferrogrão, is a project of agricultural transnationals supported by the Brazilian government. The aim of the railway, construction of which has not yet begun, is to bolster soybean and corn exports through the ports of northern Brazil. Map: National Land Transport Agency of Brazil

At the port, grains are transferred to barges that travel about 1,000 kilometres on the Tapajós and Amazon rivers to reach the export ports where the large transatlantic ships dock.

In addition to underestimating the extent of the deforestation, the project would violate indigenous rights, threaten conservation areas and stimulate illegal land appropriation, says a group of 38 social organisations in an “extrajudicial notification” to banks that could finance the construction of the Ferrogrão.

“The most serious thing is that it does not evaluate alternative routes,” said Sergio Guimarães, coordinator of the Infrastructure and Social Justice Working Group, a coalition of 47 organisations that headed the notification pointing out nine flaws in the project. (The Working Group is one of the 38 social organisations that sent the notification.)

There are alternatives for transportation already in place or under way for soybeans in Mato Grosso, where 35.9 million tons were produced this year (26.5 percent of the country’s total), such as the BR-163 highway along the same route as the Ferrogrão, a railroad under construction and two others in the planning stage. They should all be assessed in order to find the best economic and environmental options, he told IPS by telephone from Brasilia.

“It is very difficult for the Ferrogrão to be competitive, considering that the BR-163 highway is already in place and there are other alternatives,” said economist Claudio Frischtak, president of the InterB International Business Consultancy.

“It’s a bad project,” he told IPS in a conversation in Rio de Janeiro. “It underestimates the investments and the time needed for implementation and runs the risk of having the same fate as two other railroads whose construction was interrupted in the last decade, leading to the loss of public resources.”

The state of Tocantins in central Brazil aims to repeat this century the soybean boom that transformed the neighbouring state of Mato Grosso, the country’s largest soy and corn producer, which has record exports. To do this, producers are demanding the extension of rail transport. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The economist compared the data from the government’s proposal with figures from the Midwest Integration Railway (Fico), a project under construction by the mining company Vale, which has years of experience in railways. Fico will link Agua Boa, a city in central-eastern Mato Grosso, and Mara Rosa, 383 kilometres to the east, in the state of Goiás.

Based on this comparison, Frischtak calculates that the actual cost of building the Ferrogrão would be 3.4 times the amount reported by the government: 5.45 billion dollars rather than 1.58 billion dollars.

The projected rate of return of 11.05 percent is also totally unrealistic, he said, as is the estimated construction time of nine years.

Frischtak projected that construction would actually take 21.9 years, or even longer given the complicated terrain where the Ferrogrão would be built.

The Fico does not reach the most productive soybean production area, which is around the city of Sinop, the planned starting point of the Ferrogrão. Instead, it connects with the North-South Railway that reaches the port of Itaqui, on the Atlantic coast of the northeastern state of Maranhão, which has the capacity to serve the largest ships.

The third new rail alternative for grains in Mato Grosso is the Ferronorte, a 730-kilometre stretch planned by Rumo, the largest national railroad transportation company, with access to the Port of Santos, the country’s biggest, after crossing the state of São Paulo, the most densely populated productive, agricultural and industrial state in Brazil.

The large warehouses next to the BR-163 highway, used by trucks to transport soybeans to the Amazon ports through which they are exported, have turned Lucas do Rio Verde into a hub of the agro-export economy of the state of Mato Grosso, in central-western Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Rumo’s rail network already reaches Rondonópolis, in the south of Mato Grosso. The idea would be to extend it to the mid-north of the state, where large quantities of soybeans are produced between October and February, and corn in the following months, on the same land. Agriculture in tropical climates has the competitive advantage of producing two harvests per year.

But the biggest competition for the Ferrogrão, according to Frischtak, would be the BR-163 highway, the paving of which was completed in 2019. Management of the highway was awarded to a private company this year. Overland trucking costs fell and continue to decline, which will hinder the financial viability of the new parallel rail line.

The economist argued that it would make more economic sense to upgrade existing infrastructure, such as widening the highway and improving the waterways that also serve agricultural exports through the north. “We must not continue to make the same mistakes,” he said.

But Tiago Stefanello Nogueira, coordinator of Agricultural Policy and Logistics of the Association of Soybean and Corn Producers of Mato Grosso (AprosojaMT), said there is no doubt about the viability and benefits of the Ferrogrão.

“There will be less pollution, because it will reduce the consumption of petroleum derivatives, greater transportation capacity, less carbon emissions and thousands of jobs created during construction, as well as demand for services; there are many benefits,” he asserted.

Railroads are mostly used for freight transport in Brazil, and passenger trains like this one on the Carajás line in Maranhão state often run at a loss, as compensation for the local populace from the companies that control the rail lines. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Only 11 percent of the land in Mato Grosso is dedicated to agriculture, according to Aprosoja, and this could expand to 40 percent, Nogueira estimates.

“To achieve this we need all modes of transportation, whether railways, highways and future waterways, and the paving and widening of roads,” he told IPS by telephone from Sorriso, a city located in a soybean-growing area in the north of the state.

But that’s the problem, according to Alexandre Sampaio, Policy and Programme coordinator of the International Accountability Project (IAP), an international organisation that works for human and environmental rights in development. He said Ferronorte would exacerbate the already unbalanced development model in its area of influence.

Of the 90.3 million hectares in Mato Grosso, 9.7 million are under agricultural production. That includes nine million hectares where soybeans are grown and then corn and cotton after the soybean harvest. The remaining 0.7 million hectares are dedicated to other agricultural activities, according to Aprosoja.

In other words, even though the state of Mato Grosso is known as a huge breadbasket, it produces abundant agricultural production for export but little food, which it has to buy from other regions. In fact, only 18 percent of the state´s population is rural.

Although it is intended to be used for export agriculture, “the railroad is a great investment that drives up the value of the land, boosts the economy and wealth, in addition to reducing traffic on the roads. In other words, it indirectly benefits family agriculture,” said Nilton Macedo, president of the Federation of Agricultural Workers of Mato Grosso.

“We have 148,000 members, 97,000 of whom were resettled as part of the agrarian reform programme,” he told IPS by telephone from Pontes e Lacerda, in the southeastern part of the state. The federation says it represents 500,000 workers, including wage-earning farmworkers and family farmers who work their own land.

In contrast, soybean and corn producers number only 7,300, according to Aprosoja, but they dominate the state’s economy.

The podium at the conference in Argentina’s lower house of Congress, where representatives of UN Environment assured that public transport, which in Latin America has the highest rate of use in the world per capita, will lead the transition to electric mobility. Credit: Daniel Gutman / IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, May 31 2018 (IPS)

With 80 percent of the population living in urban areas and a vehicle fleet that is growing at the fastest rate in the world, Latin America has the conditions to begin the transition to electric mobility – but public policies are not, at least for now, up to the task.

That is the assessment of UN Environment, according to a conference that two of its officials gave on May 29 in Argentina’s lower house of Congress, in Buenos Aires.

The shift towards electric mobility, however, will come inexorably in a few years, and in Latin America it will begin with public passenger transport, said the United Nations agency’s regional climate change coordinator, Gustavo Máñez, who used two photographs of New York’s Fifth Avenue to illustrate his prediction.

The first photo, from 1900, showed horse-drawn carriages. The second was taken only 13 years later and only cars were visible."As at other times in history, this time the transition will happen very quickly. I am seeing all over the world that car manufacturers are looking to join this wave of electric mobility because they know that, if not, they are going to be left out of the market." -- Gustavo Máñez

“As at other times in history, this time the transition will happen very quickly. I am seeing all over the world that car manufacturers are looking to join this wave of electric mobility because they know that, if not, they are going to be left out of the market,” said Máñez.

Projections indicate that Latin America could, over the next 25 years, see its car fleet triple, to more than 200 million vehicles by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

This growth, if the transition to sustainable mobility does not pick up speed, will seriously jeopardise compliance with the intended nationally determined contributions adopted under the global Paris Agreement on climate change, according to Máñez.

The reason is that the transport sector is responsible for nearly 20 percent of the region’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

In this regard, the official praised the new president of Costa Rica, Carlos Alvarado, who called for the elimination of fossil fuel use and for the decarbonisation of the economy. Máñez also highlighted that “Chile, Colombia and Mexico are working to tax transport for its carbon emissions.

“This is an example of public policies aimed at generating demand for electric vehicles,” said Máñez, while another positive case is that of Uruguay, one of the countries in the region that has made the most progress in electric mobility, stimulating it with tax benefits.

“But the region still needs to do a great deal of work developing incentives for electric mobility and removing subsidies for fossil fuels,” he added.

In this respect, he asked Latin America to look to the example of Scandinavian countries, where electric vehicles already play an important role, thanks to the fact that their drivers enjoy parking privileges or use the lanes for public transport, in addition to other sustained measures.

There are very disparate realities in the region.

Thus, while electric vehicles have been sold in Brazil for years, the country hosting the conference is lagging far behind and only began selling one model this year.

An electric bus parked on a downtown street in Montevideo. Credit: Inés Acosta / IPS

In fact, the meeting was led by Argentine lawmaker Juan Carlos Villalonga, of the governing alliance Cambiemos and author of a bill that promotes the installation of electric vehicle charging stations, which is currently not on the legislative agenda.

“The first objective is to generate a debate in society about sustainable mobility,” said Villalonga, who acknowledged that Argentina is lagging behind other countries in the region in the transition to clean energy.

Argentina only started a couple of years ago developing non-conventional renewable energies, which in the country’s electricity generation mix are still negligible.

As for electric mobility, the government of the city of Buenos Aires hopes to put eight experimental buses into operation by the end of the year, as a pilot plan, in a fleet of 13,000 buses.

Combating climate change is not the only reason why electric mobility should be encouraged.

“Health is another powerful reason, because internal combustion engines generate a lot of air pollution. In Argentina alone, almost 15,000 people die prematurely each year due to poor air quality,” said José Dallo, head of the UN Environment’s Office for the Southern Cone, based in Montevideo.

“There is also the issue of energy security, as electricity prices are more stable than the price of oil,” he added.

In 2016, UN Environment presented an 84-page report entitled “Electric Mobility. Opportunities for Latin America,” which noted the change would mean a reduction of 1.4 gigatons in carbon dioxide emissions, responsible for 80 percent of GHG emissions, and savings of 85 billion dollars in fuels until 2050.

The report acknowledges that among the region’s obstacles are fossil fuel subsidies “and a lower electricity supply than in developed countries, where the boom in electric mobility has been concentrated so far.”

It also notes that Latin America is the region with the highest use of buses per person in the world, and that public transport “has a strategic potential to spearhead electric mobility.”

Along these lines, the experience of Chile through the Consortium Electric Mobility, a mixed initiative with the participation of the Ministry of Transport and scientific institutions from Chile and Finland, was also shared during the conference in Buenos Aires.

Engineer Gianni López, former director of the government’s National Environment Commission and a member of the Mario Molina Research and Development Centre, said that “in Chile the decision has already been taken to move public transport towards electric mobility.”

He explained that there will be 120 electric buses operating next year in Santiago and that the goal is 1,500 by 2025 – more than 25 percent of a total fleet of nearly 7,000 public transportation units.

“There are many aspects that make it easier to start with public buses than private cars,” Lopez said.

“On the one hand, buses run many hours a day so the return on investment is much faster; on the other hand, since they have fixed routes, it is easier to install recharging systems; and autonomy is not a problem because you know exactly how far they are going to travel each day,” he said.

One example of this is Uruguay, where electric taxis have been operating since 2014, and since 2016 a private mass transit company has a regular service with electric buses. In addition, a 400-km “green route,” with refueling stations every 60 km, was inaugurated last December.

As for the cost of electric vehicles, Máñez assured that China, which leads the production and sale of electric vehicles, is now close to reaching cost parity with conventional vehicles.

In this sense, the official also spoke of the need for Latin America to develop a technology that is currently underdeveloped.

He highlighted the case of Argentina, which is not only a producer of conventional vehicles, but in the north of the country has world-renowned reserves of lithium, a mineral used in batteries for electric vehicles.

The question is that lithium is exported as a primary product because this South American country has not developed the technology to manufacture and assemble the batteries locally.

One of the new locomotives, imported from China to modernise Argentina’s freight railway network, being unloaded in the port of Buenos Aires in May. Credit: Ministry of Transport

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 12 2017 (IPS)

Development in Argentina in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century was closely tied to that of the railway. The eighth largest country in the world, Argentina’s economy grew through exporting agricultural and livestock products, and the railways were key to founding centres of population and transporting goods to the ports.

“The railways had an enormous social and cultural impact, and often arrived in areas where there was little or no population. Around the middle of the last century there were 48,000 kilometres of track, at which point the railway system was nationalised as Ferrocarriles Argentinos (Argentine Railways), the largest railway company in the world,” historian Eduardo Lazzari told IPS.

But by 1950, decline had set in. Branch lines were closed and the track network was almost halved, in this country with an area of 2.8 million square kilometres and an estimated population of 43.5 million.

This decline is viewed by some Argentines as a cause, by others as a consequence, but nearly all of them see it as symbolic of the fate of the country, which has suffered countless economic crises in recent decades, and where according to official figures one-third of the population lives in poverty.. “We have to think about what kind of railway we want, because for many years the main problem has not been lack of investment but bad management. It makes no sense to try to go back to the railway system the country once had, because needs have changed." -- Alberto Muller

Argentina now has a recovery plan for the railways, involving investments of billions of dollars and addressing both freight carriage as well as passenger transport in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, where 15.2 million people live, representing 35 percent of the country’s total population.

There are also plans, on a lower key, to renovate intercity rail links in this, the third largest economy of Latin America.

“In the last few years there have been investments on a scale that I have never seen before, especially in the metropolitan railway network. Some of them have not been particularly well planned,” transport expert Alberto Muller, the head of a research centre at the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) told IPS.

Muller voiced the doubts entertained by many experts in the field about the priorities that have been adopted. “We have to think about what kind of railway we want, because for many years the main problem has not been lack of investment but bad management. It makes no sense to try to go back to the railway system the country once had, because needs have changed,” he said.

In 2008 the state began to buy new railway carriages for metropolitan trains, which it had not done since 1985.

The railway sector was privatised in the 1990s as part of the neoliberal reforms undertaken by the government of Carlos Menem (1989-1999).

The visible deterioration in services and infrastructure began to be reversed in recent years, when the state recovered ownership of the majority of branch lines.

But it took a major tragedy to give the railways top political priority and accelerate investments.

On a Wednesday morning in February 2012 a train carrying 1,200 passengers on the Sarmiento line drove into Once, one of the four main stations in Buenos Aires used daily by thousands of suburban commuters. The brakes failed and it crashed into the buffers..

The crash killed 51 people and led to a trial that riveted the nation and sentenced transport officials and private railway company administrators to prison terms.

In their verdict, the judges determined that the accident had been caused by the “deplorable lack of maintenance that affected safety conditions.”

The weight of public opinion led to 1.2 billion dollars being spent by 2015 to modernise the metropolitan railway lines.

In 2016, in the first year of the government of president Mauricio Macri, an investment plan was announced for nearly 14.2 billion dollars up to 2023. The goal is that trains entering and leaving Buenos Aires should have a daily passenger transport capacity of five million people, compared with their current capacity of 1.2 million passengers.

The plan will be financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), credits from Brazil’s National Development Bank, and contributions from the Argentine Treasury.

Multimillion dollar investments are also planned to modernise the freight railroad network.

China will contribute four billion dollars to the renewal of more than 1,500 kilometres of track in Belgrano Norte and San Martin, carrying freight from the north and west of the country to the ports of Rosario, on the Parana river, and Buenos Aires, on the Rio de la Plata, to be shipped for export.

The agreement includes the purchase of 3,500 railway carriages and 107 locomotives from China.

“The railroad must play a key role in Argentina’s economic recovery,” Transport Minister Guillermo Dietrich said on May 30 upon receiving 10 of the Chinese locomotives.

As for intercity railways, services between Buenos Aires and the city of Mar del Plata were reinaugurated on July 3. The 400 kilometre journey takes nearly seven hours, giving rise to heavy criticism.

A 60-year-old newsreel video, showing the same journey taking four and a half hours, rapidly went viral on the social networks.

“Argentine society has a nostalgic vision of the railroads, and official policies tend to go along with this, which is a mistake. Intercity trains, for example, have little chance of surviving because this is a very large and relatively underpopulated country, and so the costs are too high,” Jorge Wadell, the co-author of “Historia del Ferrocarril en Argentina” (History of the Railroad in Argentina), told IPS.

One of the most important works in progress is laying the Sarmiento line, which was the scene of the 2012 disaster, underground. This railway line connects the centre of the capital with the west of the conurbation, and practically cuts the City of Buenos Aires in two. At present there are dozens of level crossings that are dangerous and complicate rail traffic.

The project has a budget of three billion dollars and involves digging a 22-kilometre long tunnel with tracks for two trains, one in each direction.

The initiative has been on the drawing board for decades and while many people have called for its completion, some experts have criticised the concept.

“At present there are four tracks on the Sarmiento line, but with the tunnel there will only be two, and all the trains will have to stop at all the stations, so there will be no more fast trains. Nowhere in the world is railway capacity being reduced in this way,” the head of the Instituto Ciudad en Movimiento, Andres Borthagaray, told IPS.

The other major project is the Regional Express Network, consisting of the construction of 20 kilometres of tunnels and a network of underground stations to link the different railway lines arriving in Buenos Aires from the suburbs.

In the Plaza de San Francisco, where the church and convent of the same name stand, fences have blocked off the construction site for the Quito subway for months, as work has been stalled while archaeological finds are assessed. Quito’s historic centre is the biggest in Latin America. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
QUITO, Nov 30 2016 (IPS)

Success can kill, when it comes to cities. Spain’s Barcelona is facing problems due to the number of tourists that it attracts. And the historic centre of Ecuador’s capital city, Quito, a specially preserved architectural jewel, is losing its local residents as it gentrifies.

This paradox was pointed out by Fernando Carrión, president of the Latin American and Caribbean Organisation of Historic Centres (OLACCHI) and a professor at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO) in Ecuador.

“Quito’s historic centre lost 42 per cent of its population over the last 15 years, a period in which it gained better monuments and lighting, and became cleaner,” he said. According to official census figures, the population of the old city dropped from 58,300 in 1990 to 50,982 in 2001 and 40,587 in 2010.“The subway is a good solution, which will reduce the use of private buses that pollute, and will help solve congestion in a city where the traffic passes through the north-south corridor.” -- Julio Echeverría

The effort to revitalise the historic centre was based on a “monumentalist policy,” on the restoration of churches and large buildings, which led to a process of gentrification, driving up housing prices and the conversion of residential into commercial property and pushing out low-income residents, he told IPS.

“I fear that the subway will drive away more people,” exacerbating the tendency, he added.

Two stations of the first subway line in Quito started to be built in 2013 by the Spanish company Acciona. “Phase two”, the construction of a 22-kilometre tunnel and 13 other stations, got underway in January 2016 and is to be completed by July 2019.

The consortium that won the bid is made up of Acciona and Odebrecht, Brazil’s largest construction company, which has built subway lines in several Latin American countries.

Only one station, in the Plaza de San Francisco, will be located in the historic centre. “Projections estimate that 42,000 passengers per day will pass through that station,” that is to say that “with the subway the same number of people will arrive but by a different means of transport,” Mauricio Anderson, the general manager of the Quito Subway Public Metropolitan Company (EPMMQ), told IPS.

Underground transport “will reduce traffic congestion, vibrations and pollution” by replacing cars and buses, he said.

The aim of the new mass transport system is to improve the quality of life of people in Quito, by reducing travel time, generating socioeconomic inclusion of people in the lower-income outlying neighbourhoods, saving fuel, cutting the number of accidents and creating a cleaner environment, according to EPMMQ.

“Each day about 400,000 people in Quito will use this system,” said Anderson. “This will help optimise other services and increase the average travel speed in Quito, which for surface transport is now 13 kilometres per hour, and by subway will be 37 kilometres per hour.”

A dedicated lane system trolley bus and one of its stations, in Ecuador’s capital. Critics of the subway in Quito argue that it would be better for the city to extend and improve the tramways. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

As Ecuador’s capital has an elongated shape, stretching from north to south, the 22-kilometre subway line with 15 stations will enable most of the city’s residents to take the subway or catch a bus that hooks into the system within less than four blocks of their homes or workplaces, according to studies that guided the system’s design.

The subway, with trains that will hold up 1,500 passengers each, “will connect the entire integrated transport system.”

According to 2014 statistics, there were 2.8 million daily trips in the public transport system of the Metropolitan District of Quito, most of them by conventional buses and the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, which uses bus-only lanes.

Opponents of the subway argue that by optimising the BRT system, which serves the same north-south route, it could transport more passengers than the subway, with a significantly lower investment.

But “Quito’s surface is saturated, there are no real dedicated lanes and the roads are narrow,” said Anderson, stressing the greater speed and efficiency of the subway, which benefits both passengers and the environment.

Building the subway will cost just over two billion dollars, “that is 89 million dollars per kilometre, a figure that is below the region’s average,” said the manager of the Quito subway.

The project was designed by the Spanish public company Metro de Madrid. A fare of 45 cents of a dollar will cover the first line’s operational and maintenance costs, according to the company.

But Ricardo Buitrón, an activist with Acción Ecológica, said “They will cost much more than that,” noting that building a subway in Quito is complex and arguing that it cannot be cheaper than in Panama, for example, where each kilometre cost 128 million dollars to build.

The Cerro del Panecillo hill, which divides north from south of Ecuador’s capital, seen from the Museum of the City, at the heart of the historic centre. The rugged topography represents a challenge to mobility in this highlands city. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Besides, with what is being invested in the subway “260 kilometres of exclusive lanes for electric buses plus 40 kilometres of tramways could be created, like the system being built in Cuenca,” in southern Ecuador, he told IPS.

And a 45 cent fare will require subsidies, which he estimated at 100 million dollars annually. In other countries, the operational cost per passenger is over 1.5 dollars, he said.

“Subsidies are inevitable in public transport, but they should contribute to improving the system,” said Buitrón. In Quito, for example, they should bolster the use of electric buses, remedying the setback represented by the replacement of electric articulated buses with diesel-run buses that are more economical, he said.

In Ecuador, diesel fuel is poor quality and heavily polluting, as seen in the black smoke they emit, he said.

“The subway is a good solution, which will reduce the use of private buses that pollute, and will help solve congestion in a city where the traffic passes through the north-south corridor,” said Julio Echeverría, executive director of the Instituto de la Ciudad and former professor of political science in several universities in Ecuador and Italy.

But this responded to a “linear and longitudinal” moment in Quito’s urban development which is long past. Now the city has changed, it is “scattered, fragmented, it stretches toward the valleys and other agricultural areas of great biodiversity,” he said.

Quito, with an estimated total population of 2.5 million, has the largest and least altered historic centre in Latin America, having been declared in 1978 a Cultural Heritage of Humanity site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).

Founded in 1534 on a long and narrow plateau on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains next to the Pichincha volcano, some 2,800 metres above sea level, Ecuador’s capital has a very well preserved centre with more than 50 churches, chapels and monasteries, and dozens of squares.

The negotiated relocation of some 7,000 street vendors to formal markets in 2003, and a pedestrianisation of the historic centre program carried out in the first decade of the century, bringing art to the squares and streets every Sunday, helped to attract local residents and growing numbers of tourists.

The great impact of building a subway under the old city worries many people. “The subway is not a good thing for the poor; it is faster than the trolley bus, but more expensive,” said 52-year-old Manuel Quispe, who earns a living cleaning shoes in Plaza de San Francisco.

Jorge Córdoba, another shoe shiner in the square, agreed that the subway is faster, but told IPS he believes it will be impossible to build, since “Quito was built on filled-in gullies” and it will be hard to open tunnels. He complained, like Quispe, of the many months that the works have been stalled, blocking half of the square and reducing their already meagre incomes.

Texcin, the garment plant built by Brazilian company Riachuelo near the airport in Asunción, under Paraguay’s maquila law, which offers tax exemptions and other incentives for export-oriented production. In the foreground a garment worker in training (“entrenamiento”). Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
ASUNCION, Apr 16 2016 (IPS)

“There were cases of people who stopped coming to work after receiving their first wages and then came back a few days later to ask if there was more work,” because they were used to casual work in the informal economy, said Ivonne Ginard.

Ginard, a human resources manager in the textile firm Texcin, was in charge of hiring the plant’s 353 employees and helping them make the transition from informal labour to working in a factory with set schedules, uniforms, safety measures and medical certificates to justify absences.

Texcin, a garment factory near the Asunción airport, is emblematic of the incipient industrialisation process in Paraguay, which is still an agriculture-based economy, where soy and beef are the main exports and informal employment is predominant in the cities.

The plant is a joint venture between members of the Paraguayan business community and Riachuelo, one of the biggest clothing brands in Brazil, where it has 285 stores and two industrial plants. Riachuelo decided to take advantage of the incentives provided by the law on maquila export plants, in effect in Paraguay since 2000, to produce clothing in this neighbouring South American country instead of importing from Asia.

The aim is to increase the number of workers twofold by the end of 2016 and to continue to expand, since the company has the space to build a new plant.

“Paraguay offers abundant, young, easily trained workers, cheap energy, and tax incentives for maquilas and duty-free zones, which make it possible to import raw materials tariff-free,” said Andrés Guynn, one of the Paraguayan partners, who heads Texcin.

“Our production is competitive with costs similar to those of Asia, with a big advantage in terms of time: it takes 90 days for products to be shipped from China to Brazil, while ours get to (the Brazilian city of) São Paulo in 72 hours, by truck,” he said.

“Under the maquila regime, 108 companies set up shop in Paraguay, 62 of them in the last two years, and 80 percent of them come from Brazil,” the director of the maquila sector in the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Ernesto Paredes, told IPS.

Maquila or maquiladora plants are built by foreign corporations, generally in free trade zones. They import materials and equipment duty-free for assembly or manufacturing for re-export, and enjoy other tax breaks and incentives, as well as more flexible labour conditions.

Texcin human resources manager Ivonne Ginard (right), next to the woman who trains the garment workers, Rosa Prieto. “Texcin changed my life,” said Prieto, who was a self-employed seamstress in the informal sector of the economy for 15 years, before she was hired by the company in January 2015. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“The maquiladora industry is dynamic, but it does not accept trade union freedom, it does not allow unions to be organised in its factories, which violates constitutional rights,” the president of the Confederation of the Working Class (CCT) labour federation, Julio López, told IPS.

Auto parts factories are predominant in the industry, in terms of both revenue and jobs generated by maquiladoras in Paraguay, Paredes said. He said the sector uses the “just-in-time” delivery system developed by Japan’s auto industry, which is an inventory strategy employed to boost efficiency and reduce waste by receiving goods only as they are needed in the production process, which cuts inventory costs.

The Japanese company Yasaki and Germany’s Leoni have recently set up plants in Paraguay, employing thousands of people, nearly all of them women, in the production of electrical car cables.

And Paraguay now has its first car assembly plant. A national company, Reimplex, began to assemble J2 cars for Chinese auto maker JAC Motors on the outskirts of Asunción on Mar. 28.

Clothing factories also employ large numbers of women.

In addition, the plastics industry is expanding fast in the eastern department of Alto Paraná, on the border with Brazil, Paredes said.

Cheap local labour, which he said is “low-cost not so much because of the wages paid, but due to the low social charges” and low taxes, are especially attractive for Brazilian companies. To that is added the cost of electricity, which is 63 percent cheaper than in Brazil, according to the head of the maquila sector.

One limitation is transport and energy infrastructure. “Roads, ports, highways, real estate – all of this is lacking, although Paraguay has been investing heavily in airports, hotels, and office buildings,” he said.

One solution would be to widen the two-lane highway between Asunción and Ciudad del Este, the country’s two main economic hubs. However, the plan is not to expand the existing road, but “to build a second highway exclusively for trucks and trade,” as well as a second bridge to Brazil, said Paredes.

Texcin’s textile warehouse seen behind a sign announcing the expansion of the plant which was built by Brazilian company Riachuelo with partners in Paraguay on the outskirts of Asunción. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Investment is also needed in another route for the transportation of heavy loads, the Paraguay-Paraná waterway, used to export soy.

“Better signalisation would double its capacity and speed up river traffic,” Gustavo Rojas, a researcher at the Center for Economic Analysis and Dissemination in Paraguay (CADEP), told IPS.

This land-locked country of 6.8 million people has the world’s third-largest river barge fleet, as well as shipyards that build them, which favours an increase in river traffic, Paredes said.

Electricity is, potentially, Paraguay’s biggest comparative advantage, since the country owns half of the energy from two huge hydropower dams: Itaipú, shared with Brazil, and Yacyretá, on the border with Argentina, with the capacity to produce 14,000 and 3,200 MW, respectively.

But it only began to use part of that energy when a power line from Itaipú to Villa Hayes, near Asunción, was completed in October 2013. The power line was financed by a Brazilian fund aimed at narrowing the development gap between countries in the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) trade bloc, made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Without an adequate distribution network, however, the new energy supply did not eliminate problems like the February blackout that left 300,000 homes without power in Greater Asunción.

Achieving a more secure energy supply “is a question of time,” said Guynn, who tried to place his company near the new power line.

The problem is that the national power utility, ANDE, does not have investment capacity, and “distribution is not secure and steady,” said Fernando Masi, founding director of CADEP, which carries out research on public policies and provides graduate studies in economy.

But the broad availability of energy is a new element drawing industries to Paraguay, since the other advantages, such as low labour costs and tax incentives, already existed before.

Cheap energy also tempted the British-Australian multinational metals and mining corporation Rio Tinto, which studied the possibility of producing aluminum in Paraguay, even if it had to ship in the raw material, bauxite, from far away, because electric power is the main cost of the aluminum industry.

But a major public campaign, which collected more than 100,000 signatures, managed to block the project, “which would consume more energy than all of the national industries combined,” while requiring subsidies and employing a relatively small number of people, Mercedes Canese, an engineer who was deputy minister of industry during the government of Fernando Lugo (2008-2012), told IPS.

However, another engineer, Francisco Scorza, who studied the case, said the Rio Tinto project became unviable because “China began to produce very cheap aluminum, at 1,200 dollars a ton, 40 percent less expensive than here, and Paraguay can’t afford to subsidise energy.”

CADEP’s Masi said attracting small and medium-sized industries is better for development and employment, but the maquila sector has limits. The auto parts industry, for example, is limited to producing wiring, “because there is no bilateral agreement with Brazil on the car industry,” he said.

Brazil demands that Paraguay stop imports of used automobiles, “a very high cost for Paraguay to pay,” as it has a large fleet of used Japanese vehicles known as the “Vía Chile” cars because they come into Paraguay through that neighbouring country.

The maquila industry only exported 284 million dollars worth of goods in 2015 – very little in comparison to Paraguay’s overall industrial exports of 3.0 to 3.5 billion dollars, said Masi.

Industrialisation in Paraguay “has taken off, but not at the fast pace that was expected,” he said, adding that improving energy and logistics infrastructure could help.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Two ships go through the Miraflores locks on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal, which raise or lower vessels 16.5 metres and take 40 minutes to pass through. Credit: Iralís Fragiel/IPS

By Iralís Fragiel
PANAMA CITY, Mar 4 2016 (IPS)

When the new locks of the expanded Panama Canal begin operations, they will do so amidst numerous challenges, because of the storm clouds hanging over the global economy, especially China. But local authorities and experts are not worried about the possible impact on the expanded canal.

The slowdown in the Chinese economy, the second largest client of the Panama Canal, transporting 48.42 million tons in 2015, is one of the factors causing concern regarding this motor of the Panamanian economy, which last grew six percent, the highest rate in Latin America.

But the start of operations of the expanded canal, due in May or June, does not worry Luis Ferreira, spokesman for the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), an autonomous government agency.“When there were economic problems in the past, we would lose basically two to three percent of the cargo; the same thing might happen this time, but we don’t expect a substantial decrease, unless there is an all-out recession in China.” – Luis Ferreira

“When there were economic problems in the past, we would lose basically two to three percent of the cargo; the same thing might happen this time, but we don’t expect a substantial decrease, unless there is an all-out recession in China,” he said in an interview with IPS.

In 2015, China’s GDP grew 6.9 percent, compared to 7.3 percent in 2014, confirming the slowdown after years of double-digit growth.

The expansion of the 80-km canal, which turned 100 years old in 2014 and which handles approximately five percent of global trade, involved an investment of 5.25 billion dollars. Work began on Sep. 3, 2007.

With this megaproject, carried out by Grupo Unidos por el Canal (GUPC), the consortium led by Spanish construction firm Sacyr, Panama hopes to increase daily ship traffic from 35- 40 to 48-51.

The canal will also be able to accommodate larger vessels. Currently, it can only handle ships with a cargo capacity of up to 5,000 tons, but once the expansion is complete New Panamax vessels with a capacity of up to 13,000 tons will be able to go through the canal.

For Panama’s productive sectors, the expansion of the canal holds out the promise of economic growth.

The ACP’s team of experts in foreign trade told IPS that the weakening of the global economy in 2015 did not affect the canal, and that no impact is expected this year either.

“The volumes of raw materials heading for China for industrial use, such as coal and iron ore, are not significant (for the canal), since there are closer sources in Australia and Brazil, which do not use the waterway,” the ACP experts stated in their collective response to IPS.

Meanwhile, the volumes of grains, especially soy, grew at a strong pace in the last few years, due to the rising demand for food in China.

The experts also said the expansion “will open up new opportunities for trade flows of non-traditional products, such as liquefied natural gas, and will offer economies of scale that will make the Panama Canal route more attractive for segments such as container vessels and dry bulk cargo ships.”

The new locks in Cocolí, on the Pacific Ocean, have 16 rolling gates. Each chamber is 427 metres long by 55 metres wide and 18.3 metres deep. The expanded Panama Canal will be able to handle New Panamax vessels with a capacity of up to 13,000 tons, up from the current 5,000 ton limit. Credit: Iralís Fragiel/IPS

Cargo tonnage by origin and destination has remained steady over the last three years, according to the ACP. The United States remains the largest client of the canal, with a total cargo of 160.78 million tons in 2015.

The cargo traded between the two leading clients reflects this stability. From China to the United States, 10.37 million tons were shipped through the canal in 2013, 10.96 million in 2014 and 10.91 million in 2015. And from the United States to China, 24.95 million tons were shipped in 2013, 30.77 million in 2014 and 30.20 million in 2015.

Given the economic outlook in China and changes in the energy sources used, the ACP is also getting ready for traffic of liquefied natural gas carriers.

“An incursion into new areas of business that reinforce the transportation and logistics industries is being evaluated, such as the case of the Corozal port and the creation of a logistics park that would complement the operations of the expanded canal,” the ACP experts said.

Canal revenue totaled 2.6 billion dollars in 2015, up from 2.5 billion in 2014, and equivalent to 5.61 percent of the country’s GDP.

Jordi Prat at the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) told IPS that Panama has “a positive economic outlook but not without risks.” And in the case of the canal, the United States, which it depends on most, “is growing at a relatively strong pace,” although the vulnerability could increase if the situation in China continues to go downhill.

Prat, the IDB’s principal regional economist for Central America, said the challenge faced by this country is keeping the growth rate between six and eight percent a year, and preventing a decline in maritime trade flows, fuelled by other sources of growth.

Prat pointed out that between 2000 and 2014, the sectors that grew the most in Panama were construction (37 percent), transportation and logistics (22 percent), finance (15 percent) and public services (12 percent).

Besides the economic variables, inclusion is key to development in this Central American nation of four million people, he said.

Panama managed to reduce the poverty level from 38.3 to 25.8 percent, between 2006 and 2014, said Prat. However, inequality is reflected by the fact that 86.9 percent of the population in autonomously governed indigenous “comarcas” or counties is poor.

The IDB economist said Panama should move towards “inclusive growth, by fomenting human capital, education, and access to health and basic services, in order to boost productivity, which has not increased significantly in recent times.”

Analyst Rodrigo Noriega concurs with Prat that Panama has to seriously focus on education, training and scientific research, to bolster development.

“That is where we are limping, in education, and in corruption – these are issues that in the long term definitely hurt the Panamanian economy,” said Noriega.

He said the economy may see growth slow down in 2016 and 2017, due to external factors and the impact of the drought caused by the El El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a cyclical climate phenomenon that affects weather patterns around the world.

“These external factors could be reducing Panama’s GDP by 2.0 to 2.5 percent a year. What I’m saying is GDP could be growing between 7.5 and 8.0 percent, instead of the current 5.0 to 5.5 percent,” he said.

But he stressed that a project such as the expansion of the canal is not something that is undertaken with a short-term view, but to address the needs of the country over the next 30 to 50 years.

“There will be two slow years, but that is actually a good thing for us because right now we have a water shortage problem. It’s best if the ship traffic isn’t so heavy, because we need to recover in terms of water supply and take baby steps to learn to handle the larger vessels,” said Noriega.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

One of the most significant aspects of the international conference on climate change, concluded in Paris on December 12, is that food security and ending hunger feature in the global agenda of the climate change debate.

The text of the final agreement adopted by the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recognizes “the fundamental priority of safeguarding food security and ending hunger and the special vulnerability of food systems production to the impacts of climate change.”

Indeed, of the 186 countries that presented voluntary plans to reduce emissions, around a hundred include measures related to land use and agriculture.

The approved programme of measures constitutes a sector-by-sector program to be implemented by 2020, which implies there will be ongoing focus on agricultural issues and not just about energy, mitigation or transportation, which drew so much of the attention in Paris.

In the next years the commitments must be implemented, which will require helping developing countries make necessary adaptations through technology transfer and capacity building.

The Green Climate Fund, comprising 100,000 million per year provided by the industrialized countries, will be a key contributor to this process. Contributions of additional resources to the Fund for the Least Developed Countries and the Adaptation Fund, among others, have also been announced.

The issue of future food production, long saddled with a low profile in the media, is increasingly a major concern and poses a challenge to governments.

A recent World Bank report estimated that 100 million people could fall into poverty in the next 15 years due to climate change. Agricultural productivity will suffer, in turn causing higher food prices.

According to Jose Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “climate change affects especially countries that have not contributed to causing the problem” and “particularly harms developing countries and the poorer classes.”

The facts speak for themselves. The world’s 50 poorest countries combined, are responsible for only one per cent of global greenhouse emissions, yet these nations are the ones most affected by climate change.

Approximately 75 per cent of poor people suffering from food insecurity depend on agriculture and natural resources for their livelihoods. Under current projections, it will be necessary to increase food production by 60 per cent to feed the world’s population in 2050.

Yet crop yields will, if current trends continue, fall by 10 to 20 per cent in the same period, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and higher ocean temperatures will slash fishing yields by 40 per cent.

One of the least-mentioned problems associated with climate change are the effects of droughts and floods, which have become a near constant reality. On top of the destruction of resources and huge losses brought by these phenomena, they also cause increases in food prices which in turn affects mainly the poor and most vulnerable.

Rising food prices have a direct relation to “climate migrants”, as the drop in production and income is one of the factors that triggers displacement from rural areas to cities, as well as from the poorest countries to those where there are potentially more opportunities to work and have a dignified life.

For example, migration in Syria and Somalia are not driven by political conflicts or security issues alone, but also by drought and the consequent food shortages.

This is why FAO argues that we must simultaneously solve climate change and the great challenges of development and hunger. These two scenarios go hand-in-hand. The dilemma is to make sure that measures adopted to address the former do not generate a constraint on the latter. Production capacity, particularly of developing countries, must not be jeopardized.

This is why developing countries argue that, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they need technologies and support that they cannot fund with their own resources without hobbling their own development plans.

And since the most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions are the industrialized nations, the countries of the South insist, and have done so long before the COP21, that richer nations contribute to funding the changes needed to preserve the environment.

It was therefore natural that this dilemma was at the center of discussions in Paris and that efforts were made to find an agreement.

The creation of the Green Climate Fund was one of the keystones for an agreement that practically binds the whole world to the goal of keeping average temperatures at the end of the century from rising more than two degrees Celsius. The agreement will enter into force in 2020 and will be reviewed every five years. In that period, many problems will arise and need to be resolved.

Yet beyond the difficulties we will face on the way, it now seems legitimate to expect that the big problem will be addressed and the future of the planet will be preserved.

(End)

The U.S. agribusiness giant Cargill’s port terminal on the banks of the Tapajós River in the northern Brazilian city of Santarém, where large cargo vessels dwarf the traditional small fishing boats of the Amazon basin. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
SANTARÉM, Brazil, Dec 11 2015 (IPS)

River port terminals in the northern Brazilian city of Santarém are considered strategic by the government. But what some see as an opportunity for development is for others an irreversible change in what was previously a well-preserved part of the Amazon rainforest.

In the evening light on the Tapajós River, whose green-blue waters mix with the darker muddy water of the Amazon River in Santarém, it’s not easy to ignore the silos that overshadow what used to be a public beach, where passenger boats and fishing vessels typical of this part of the Amazon jungle state of Pará tie up.

The port terminal of the U.S. commodities giant Cargill began to operate in 2003 as a centre for the storage, transshipment and loading of soy and corn, in this city of nearly 300,000 people.

The cargo ships and convoys of barges carrying grains are headed for the Amazon River and then the Atlantic Ocean on their way to Europe or China, the biggest markets for Brazil’s main agribusiness exports.

This country is the world’s second-largest producer of soy, after the United States, and the biggest exporter. In the 2014-2015 harvest it produced 95 million tons, 60.7 million of which were exported.

Municipal authorities argue that the river port terminals generate jobs and tax revenue, while they drive the construction and services industries, hotels and fuel supplies.

But Edilberto Sena, a Catholic priest who is the president of the Tapajós Movement Alive, holds a very different view.

“Cargill’s arrival has been a tragedy for Santarém,” he told IPS. “When they began to build the port they argued that it would bring jobs, and while they were building it did create 800 jobs. But as soon as it was completed, most of the workers were fired, and now it employs between 150 and 160 people.”

With a current capacity to export five million tons of grain, the port of Santarém was built to ease the congestion in ports in southern Brazil like Santos in the state of São Paulo, or Paranaguá in the state of Paraná.

This port and the transshipment terminal in Mirituba – 300 km to the south of Santarém – have also cut distances by land and sea for the shipment of soy from the neighbouring state of Mato Grosso, the country’s largest soy producer.

The installation was built by the U.S. agribusiness and food company Bunge, which was later joined by Cargill and other transnational corporations.

“These ports make Brazil more competitive,” the director of planning in the Santarém city government, José de Lima, told IPS.

As an example, he pointed out that with respect to the port in Santos, from Santarém to the port city of Shanghai, China, “the distance was cut from 24,000 km to 19,500 km, and going through the Panama Canal will reduce the cost from 159 to 147 dollars per transported ton.”

As of 2020, with an investment of around 800 million dollars, the transnational corporations project that they will export 20 million tons a year of grains through the Amazon basin.

A fisherman carries the day’s catch in the market in the city of Santarém, from the beach now overshadowed by the silos of the river port at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Credit: Gonzalo Gaudenzi/IPS

Nelio Aguiar, the Santarém secretary of planning, stressed the strategic importance of these ports for the agroexport sector. “Brazil’s GDP is growing, based on agribusiness, which is supporting our economy,” he told IPS.

Most of the cargo arrives by truck, over the BR-163 highway in the process of being repaved, which ends at Cargill’s port terminal.

Currently, during the soy and corn harvest some 350 trucks a day arrive. But Lima estimates that the number will rise to 2,000 a day when other port terminals set to be built in the city are in operation.

That is what worries social organisations and academics who have fought the construction of the port.

“Because the city was not adapted to receive so much cargo traffic, it has caused disruptions and we have seen an increase in the number of accidents due to the intensification of truck traffic,” Raimunda Monteiro, the rector of the Federal University of Western Pará, told IPS.

But despite a number of lawsuits challenging the legality of the Cargill port, construction went ahead with the support of local authorities.

“It destroyed a beach in Santarém and there were also a number of indirect impacts because it attracted more soy producers, who expanded across the Santarém plan. These impacts were not foreseen in the environmental impact study,” Ibis Tapajós, a lawyer who works with social movements, told IPS.

To decongest truck traffic, the city government projects the construction of new access roads and truck parking lots outside of the city.

But there is concern about environmental effects such as contamination of the river and pollution from motor vehicle emissions and from the chemical fertilisers carried by the ships.

“The Cargill port is a clear example of the violation of socioenvironmental rights by large corporations,” said Tapajós.

The construction of at least six new port terminals in Santarém is in the study phase. Two would be next to the Cargill terminal and four would be in the area around Maica Lake.

The most advanced project on the lake – now in the phase of obtaining environmental permits – is to be built by EMBRAPS, a private company.

“Maica Lake is an extremely fragile ecological area,” said Monteiro. “It is at one end of a 50-km series of lakes and canals at the mouth of the Tapajós river and its confluence with the Amazon River.”

The EMBRAPS port is to be built in the Green Area neigbhourhood on the lake, in an area that floods during the rainy season and is without water in the dry season.

There are already signs warning “no trespassers, private property,” and the 480 fisherpersons on the lake are worried about the impact on their activity due to the circulation of the cargo vessels and because a large area will be covered over with soil.

“They’re going to practically privatise the lake,” Ronaldo Souza Costa, the president of the Association of Local Residents of the Perola Neighourhood of Maicá, told IPS. Thirty percent of the fish eaten in Santarém comes from the lake.

“As far as we can tell, there will be a major impact on our fishing, mainly in this area, where we fish in the wintertime. They will mark off no-trespassing areas,” said Raimundo Nonato, the administrator of the Maicá market.
The Santarém city government says the installations will be on dry land and that the companies are not interested in the lake but in the Amazon River, which the waters flow into and which is deep enough for large vessels.

“The entire operation of the trucks will be on ramps. It will not affect the water in the lake at all,” said Aguiar.

But because the local communities have not yet been formally consulted about this and other port projects, fears are growing.

“From what we know, if the ships come near us, our boats will be in trouble because of the big waves, which will be dangerous for our small vessels,” local fisherwoman Telma Almeida told IPS.

After unloading her fish, Almeida casts off and sets out on the Amazon River once again in her small boat. Her silhouette becomes tiny and dim in the shadow of a large cargo vessel.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Large-scale energy and logistical infrastructure initiatives in Brazil are notorious for their delays. The majority of railways, ports, highways and power plants are several years behind schedule. Credit: Darío Montero/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
NEW YORK, Jun 11 2015 (IPS)

According to new data released by the World Bank Tuesday, investments in infrastructure in 139 emerging economies shot up to 107.5 billion dollars in 2014, with just five countries – Brazil, Colombia, India, Peru and Turkey – accounting for 73 percent of the total.

The update, published by the Bank’s Private Participation in Infrastructure (PPI) database, reveals that projects with private participation in the water, energy and transport sectors totaled 51.2 billion in the first half of 2014, compared to 41.7 billion in the first half of 2013.

"The concept of ‘appropriate scale’ has been deleted from […] policy discourse because now instead of ‘small is beautiful’, the catchphrase is ‘big is better’.” -- Nancy Alexander, director of the Economic Governance Program at the Heinrich Böll Foundation
Based on a review of investments in some 6,000 projects in 139 low- and middle-income countries between 1990 and 2014, the data show that the energy sector accounted for the greatest number of new projects, but the transport sector captured the largest amount of investment, securing 55.3 billion dollars or 51 percent of the total.

Some 33 road construction projects attracted 28.5 billion dollars in investment, with four of the top five road projects in Brazil and one in Turkey. Five airport projects secured 13.2 billion dollars in investment commitments.

Driven largely by massive infrastructure booms in Brazil, Colombia and Peru, Latin and America and the Caribbean accounted for 55 percent of global investments, snagging 69.1 billion dollars last year.

These mega-projects include 11 major ventures, eight of them in the energy sector, in Peru alone, amounting to over eight billion dollars, the largest of which, the Lima Metro Line 2, brought in 5.3 billion dollars in investment.

Not all regions are seeing an increase. Both India and China experienced declines last year, with the latter witnessing its lowest infrastructure investment levels since 2010, at 2.5 billion dollars. India’s commitments dropped down to 6.2 billion dollars.

In sub-Saharan Africa investment plunged from 9.3 billion in 2013 to 2.6 billion in 2014, although increased infrastructure activity in Ghana, Kenya and Senegal suggests that the downward trend might soon be reversed.

Despite uneven investment levels globally, the Bank estimates that spending on infrastructure projects in 2014 represents 91 percent of the five-year average between 2009 and 2013.

In a statement released on Jun. 9, Bank officials claimed, “This is the fourth highest level of investment commitments ever recorded, exceeded only by levels seen from 2010 through 2012.”

What this data reveals is that a global consensus to bolster public-private partnerships in mega-projects is bearing fruit.

Practically every major international organisation from the United Nations to multilateral development banks believe that strengthening road, energy and transport networks are crucial at a time when one billion people lack access to an all-weather road, 783 million people live without clean water supplies and 1.3 billion people are not connected to an electricity grid.

But a closer look at the track records of these gigantic infrastructure projects and new plans for financing them suggests that pouring billions of dollars into highways and dams in the developing world not only enriches some of the wealthiest sectors of the population, they also threaten to further impoverish the poorest, thereby widening global inequality.

‘Appropriate Scale’ – a thing of the past

The world’s most cited scholar on mega-project management and planning, Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University, found that on average only one in 1,000 mega-projects is completed on time, within its stated budget and with the ability to deliver what was promised.

Flyvbjerg’s extensive database on the subject reveals that approximately nine out of every 10 large-scale projects incur cost overruns, often over 50 percent of the stated budget – an expense borne primarily by taxpayers.

According to Nancy Alexander, director of the Economic Governance Program at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, these massive projects can cost “potentially billions and trillions of dollars, so when they go over budget and over time, they can devastate the national budget of a country.”

Alexander told IPS that, while there is a very real need for improved infrastructure, particularly in developing countries, there is an equally urgent need to tailor such ventures towards those who would most benefit from the services.

“Whether they are in education, healthcare, water or electricity, projects really need to be appropriate in scale to meet their goals. But the concept of ‘appropriate scale’ has been deleted from […] policy discourse because now instead of ‘small is beautiful’, the catchphrase is ‘big is better’.”

Part of the reason for this change, experts say, is the push to use investment in infrastructure to finance development, particularly by strengthening public-private partnerships and by ‘financialising’ investment.

Research by the Heinrich Böll Foundation reveals that the G20 group of major economies aims to finance the so-called infrastructure gap by tapping into the roughly 80 trillion dollars in long-term private institutional finance – from pension funds to insurance schemes – by creating infrastructure as an “asset class”.

Under this model, governments will undertake a range of public-private partnerships (PPPs) and financial institutions will package and sell financial products “that offer long-term investors a stake in a portfolio of PPPs”.

“When speculators take stakes in physical infrastructure,” the organisation says, “such infrastructure is subject to the whims of herds of investors [and] could trigger instability in the provision of basic services.”

Already, a lack of evidence on the success of PPPs suggests that the current pace of investment in infrastructure with private participation is at best a gamble – and at worst a recipe for disaster.

In a sample of 128 World Bank-financed public-private partnerships, 67 percent of those in the energy distribution sector failed, as did 41 percent of those in the water sector. These are the findings of the World Bank’s own independent evaluation group (IEG).

Other research indicates that mega-projects seldom lead to improvement in access to basic services, since many such ventures are undertaken to serve global, rather than local, demand.

“Energy projects, for instance, are often launched to serve a mine, or you’ll see a dam or power plant built for the same purpose – as is the case with the Inga Dam in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Alexander explained.

The very countries highlighted in the Bank’s latest update have a poor track record of successfully managing mega-projects.

Large-scale energy and logistical infrastructure initiatives in Brazil, for instance, are notorious for their delays, while the majority of railways, ports, highways and power plants are several years behind schedule.

Meanwhile, back in April, an expose published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) revealed that in the course of a single decade, some 3.4 million people were evicted from their homes, torn away from their lands or otherwise displaced by projects funded by the World Bank.

Fifty percent of those displaced by large-scale ventures – ostensibly aimed at improving water and electricity supplies or beefing up transport and energy networks in some of the world’s most impoverished nations – reside in Africa, or one of three Asian nations: China, India and Vietnam.

The investigators further alleged that the Bank and its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corp, pumped 50 billion dollars into projects that financed governments and companies accused of human rights violations.

Brent Blackwelder, president emeritus of Friends of the Earth International, told IPS that “planning bigger and bigger projects despite the failure rate proves what Einstein said: that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

One of the main streets in the town of Cauto Cristo, 730 km east of Havana. Cuba’s rural road problems are another hurdle to the development of agriculture in this Caribbean island nation. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
CAUTO CRISTO, Cuba, Feb 11 2015 (IPS)

When it rains, trucks get stuck in the mud on the poor roads in this rural municipality in eastern Cuba. The local population needs more and better roads to improve their lives and help give a much-needed boost to the country’s farming industry.

“When the roads are fixed, living conditions and opportunities will be bolstered in the lowlands, where most of our agricultural production is concentrated,” the deputy mayor of Cauto Cristo, Alberto López, told IPS.

Most of the 21,000 inhabitants of this rural municipality, located on a broad plain prone to flooding during the May-October rainy season, are scattered around the countryside on individual or state-run farms or in farming cooperatives. The municipality also has a small urban centre and two people’s councils (organs of local government).

The bad state of the roads in Cauto Cristo is just part of a nationwide problem that takes its toll on the country’s ageing vehicle fleet, poses a safety threat, and undermines communication on the island, especially between outlying areas and the cities where services like hospitals and businesses are concentrated.

In rural areas, the deterioration of the roads compounds other factors, such as limited investment in agriculture and the shortage of labour power, all of which have stood in the way of the aim of boosting agricultural production, one of the priorities of the economic reforms introduced by the government of Raúl Castro.

The economic crisis that has plagued Cuba for over 20 years has hindered ambitious plans for expanding and repairing the country’s network of roads, which currently includes 68,395 km of paved and unpaved roads.

Of that total, 17,814 km are paved rural roads (including 655 km of freeway), 16,193 km are urban roads, and 34,387 km are dirt roads.“Sometimes we send a truck to pick up the output and later we have to send two tractors to pull the truck out of the mud. That doubles or even triples the expense in fuel.” -- Reinaldo Naranjo

Thanks to a 40 million dollar investment, state companies acquired machines to pave roads, four new asphalt plants were built, and specialised workers were trained, as part of a road expansion programme that should be completed in 2016.

The project began by putting a priority on roads of national and provincial interest.

Approximately 70 percent of the country’s road network falls under municipal authority, where and maintenance and expansion are the responsibility of local governments.

“Local governments today enjoy greater openness and flexibility for resolving their most pressing problems, which in our case are roads and transportation,” said López, referring to the first decentralising measures of the current reforms, which have slightly expanded the reduced economic autonomy and decision-making power of the municipalities.

“We hope that this year national companies will contribute a percentage of funds to the budget of the municipality where they are located; we hope this will be put into practice,” he said. “That would offer a greater chance to make the costly investment in roads, which involves hauling in materials from quarries that are over 60 km away.”

Farmers on a rural road in the municipality of Cauto Cristo, which becomes impassable in the rainy season, like many other roads in the eastern province of Granma. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Cauto Cristo, 730 km east of Havana, is a big producer of meat, dairy products and various crops. It consumes around 10 percent of the food it produces, and the rest is distributed to other areas of the province of Granma, where it is located.

“Agriculture is our main activity because we have no industrial development,” the official pointed out.

“Sometimes we send a truck to pick up the output and later we have to send two tractors to pull the truck out of the mud. That doubles or even triples the expense in fuel,” said Reinaldo Naranjo, president of the non-governmental National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) in Cauto Cristo.

Of the 151 state companies that in 2014 suffered losses – a combined total of around 18 million dollars – in Cuba, 71 were managed by the Agriculture Ministry.

Naranjo said that milk production is highest precisely during the rainy season, when the roads are impassable and it is difficult to pick up the milk from the farms.

Milk is scarce in the Cuban diet and the agriculture sector has failed to increase production.

From 2007 to 2013, the production of cow’s milk grew 21 percent. But this only represented 52 percent of what was produced in 1989, when demand was met by domestic production.

However last year, Cauto Cristo managed to meet the planned volumes of milk, meat and tubers that are staples of the Cuban diet.

Food production in Cuba must increase to meet internal demand and ease the unsustainable burden of food imports, expected to total 2.25 billion dollars this year.

One illustration: the Empresa de Productos Lácteos Bayamo, a state dairy company – Granma’s flagship company and the biggest of its kind in the country – is producing at one-quarter of capacity due to a lack of raw materials.

“Our peak capacity is processing 80 million litres of milk a year, and we are taking in 20 million,” the director of the company, Rauel Medina, told IPS.

The factory produces different kinds of milk, cheese, ice cream, yogurt and diet products, with a workforce of 1,810, 20 percent of whom are women.

The poor state of the roads is also affecting agricultural production in the municipality of Jesús Menéndez, in the neighbouring province of Las Tunas. “When it rained and it was impossible to reach the most isolated farms and cooperatives, the milk would go sour,” said Nilian Rodríguez, vice president of the local government.

“The temporary solution that we are applying is placing electric dairy refrigeration units on the farms to make it possible to pick up the milk every two days,” he told IPS.

More and better roads and transportation would improve the quality of life in communities in the countryside, where there is untapped agricultural potential: of the country’s 6.34 million hectares of arable land, 1.46 million are lying fallow.

In late November, the ANAP branch in Cauto Cristo had 1,976 members, Naranjo told IPS – more than double the 898 members registered in 2008, the year the authorities began to distribute idle land in usufruct to those interested in working it.

These and other problems prompted Daniel Soto, a 48-year-old farmer, to swap the land he inherited from his father, 18 km away, twice for land closer to his home in town.

“I’m going to stay here now, because I’m close to home,” he said on the 4.7-hectare Villa María farm, where he grows mainly vegetables. “The tense situation we have been experiencing over the last few years in terms of transportation made it hard for me to go to work. My kids are also sickly and can’t live far from town.”

“Now I pay more attention to the land and I’m reaping better economic benefits,” said Soto, who likes to innovate when it comes to farming. With his hands, he made a smaller plow, pulled by a single ox, to obtain better yields.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

People in the city of Bayamo in the eastern Cuban province of Granma use horse-drawn carts as public transportation. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Oct 30 2014 (IPS)

Up and down the streets of towns and cities in Cuba go horse-drawn carriages with black leather tops and large back wheels, alongside more simple carts, operating as public transportation.

This ancient means of transportation can be seen throughout this country, in urban, suburban and rural areas, where motor vehicles are expensive and there are not enough cars and buses. And in the most remote parts of the country carts are virtually the only way to get around.

As he has done every morning for the past 11 years, Bienvenido García waits for customers at the ‘piquera’ or stop in the resort town of Varadero, 121 km east of Havana, to take them in his carriage along a fixed route down the main street of this tourist town.“What are needed first of all are solutions that would strengthen and reorient the public transportation system, improve the road infrastructure and reduce vehicle emissions, which would mean upgrading the vehicle fleet.” -- Lizet Rodríguez

Depending on where, what kind of cart, and the distance to be travelled, the cost ranges from two to 10 pesos per passenger (10 to 50 cents of a dollar). But a jaunt in one of the comfortable fancy traditional carriages is much more costly, because they cater exclusively to foreign tourists.

“I used to work in the ‘guaguas’ (public buses). But with the crisis, there weren’t any spare parts or fuel. So I started driving a carriage,” García, a ‘cuentapropista’ or self-employed worker, told IPS.

Like most sectors of the economy, transportation collapsed in 1991 when the East European socialist bloc, Cuba’s main trade and aid partner, fell apart. Observers say measures aimed at recuperating transport have been slow and inefficient.

Cubans were forced to find ways of getting around that did not depend on fossil fuels – such as horses, carts, bicycles and three-wheeled pedal-powered “bicitaxis”.

In response, as part of the socialist government’s opening up to small private businesses and cuentapropistas, new trades were added by the authorities: ‘cochero’ or carriage driver, and ‘bicitaxista’ and ‘mototaxista’, who drive bicitaxis and motorcycle taxis.

In 2010, the government declared that private enterprise was key to easing the chronic public transportation shortage. Most of the country’s 473,000 cuentapropistas work in the areas of food and restaurants, housing rental or transportation.

There are no specific statistics on the number of cocheros, who are mainly men. But they abound in cities like Bayamo, called “the city of the carriages”, and Guantánamo, in the east; Cárdenas and Varadero in the west; and Santa Clara, Ciego de Ávila and Santi Spíritus in central Cuba.

Bienvenido García has been driving a carriage for 11 years in the resort town of Varadero, in western Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Nor are there clear figures on how many motor vehicles are circulating today in this Caribbean island nation of 11.2 million people. But in July 2013 the local media reported that there were only 7,840 public transport buses – just half of the 15,800 buses serving the population in the 1980s.

And due to the lack of new vehicles, classic U.S. 1950s cars or Soviet-made Ladas are still plying the streets of Cuba’s cities.

“You can just get by on this job as a cochero because the taxes are high,” said García, whose cart carries up to eight people, “the weight that the horse can pull without it being abusive.”

“I keep the ‘culero’ (manure bag) in good shape, to avoid getting the streets dirty, and I taught my horse to make the stops, so we don’t distort traffic on the road,” he said.

But not all of the streets in towns with horse-drawn carts and carriages are as clean as Varadero’s.

“To get something done, people had to complain to the authorities about horses on the streets. There was manure everywhere,” Aliuska Labrada, a young woman who lives in the town of Cayo Ramona, 200 km southeast of Havana, told IPS.

The resurgence of this old means of transportation brought with it problems related to hygiene, the public image of rural and urban areas, traffic safety, and the welfare of draft animals.

Rules established by local authorities included carriage stands that must be kept clean by the drivers, the following of traditional ways of handling carts, and urban areas off-limits to horse-drawn vehicles. And for the drivers to obtain a license, their horses must undergo veterinary exams.

“It’s a more natural means of transportation…but at what price?” wrote a cybernaut who identified herself as Marina in an online IPS forum.

“The horses damage the paved streets and can cause accidents because the drivers don’t have total control over their animals,” she said. “There’s also the question of mistreatment of the animals. Some people exploit them to exhaustion, just to make money from them.”

That is a sensitive issue that animal rights organisations have been complaining about for years. Since 1988, the Scientific Veterinary Council and the Cuban Association for the Protection of Animals and Plants have been presenting a proposed draft law on animal protection to the Agriculture Ministry, without success.

The local scientific community is pressing for the development of green-friendly, sustainable transportation in Cuba.

In an email response to IPS, the engineer Lizet Rodríguez identified several short- and long-term alternatives, although she said the shift to a cleaner transportation system would require an in-depth feasibility study.

“What are needed first of all are solutions that would strengthen and reorient the public transportation system, improve road infrastructure and reduce vehicle emissions, which would mean upgrading the vehicle fleet,” she said.

Rodríguez, a researcher at the Marta Abreu Central University in the city of Villa Clara, 268 km east of Havana, recommended “improving communications over the Internet, to make it possible to carry out a large number of operations online that today require that people physically go somewhere.”

Few people in Cuba have online connection in their homes, most of them dial-up and some wireless. In 2013, there were 2,923,000 users, including both Internet and intranet accounts, which offer access to a limited number of local and international websites.

The engineer said “the use of the bicycle (as long as there are bike paths) would be feasible above all in small and medium-sized towns, and the use of cleaner fuels like natural gas or so-called biofuels – methanol and ethanol, obtained from biomass residue – could be encouraged.”

Last year, renewable energy sources made up 22.4 percent of the country’s primary energy production, according to the latest report by the national statistic institute, ONEI.

Up to now, renewable energy sources have only been used in a handful of industries, mainly for generating electricity, pumping and heating water, and cooking food.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Thanks to the expansion, the Panama Canal will be able to accommodate ships that carry up to 14,000 containers, instead of the current 5,000. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
PANAMA CITY, Oct 3 2014 (IPS)

With the expansion of the canal, Panama hopes to see its share of global maritime trade rise threefold. And many Panamanians hope the mega-engineering project will reduce social inequalities in a country where development is moving ahead at two different speeds.

The expansion is happening one hundred years after the inauguration of the canal that links the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. At the heart of the project is a third set of locks, larger than the current two, which will accommodate ships with a maximum length of 400 metres, a maximum width of 52 metres and a draught of 15 metres.

Currently the 12,000 ships going through the canal every year have a maximum length of 294 metres, a maximum width of 32 metres and a draught of 12 metres, which means the canal handles only about five percent of global seaborne trade.

The construction work, which began in 2007 and is to be completed in December 2015, is 80 percent done, Ilya de Marotta, the engineer in charge of the expansion works in the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), the government agency responsible for the management of the canal, told IPS.

The aim of the expansion is to boost the canal’s share of global shipping traffic to 15 percent, Olmedo García, director of the University of Panama’s Canal Institute, explained in an interview with IPS.

The 5.2-billion-dollar project will mean the 79-km canal will be able to handle larger vessels capable of carrying nearly three times as many containers.

“The canal now contributes 1.1 billion dollars a year to the national budget. Gross revenues are 2.3 billion dollars, but operating the canal absorbs 1.2 billion,” the academic explained.

“As soon as we finish the expansion, we have to think of building a fourth set of locks, which would cost 12 billion dollars,” said García, because the canal “is and will be the country’s main economic and commercial activity.”

De Marotta said “the expansion was indispensable because the canal was reaching the maximum capacity of boats that could go through. The demand for bigger ships is a global tendency, for bulk carriers and liquefied natural gas carriers – a client we don’t have because they are bigger vessels.”

“This is a good business that we’ll be able to attract now,” she said. “The idea is to avoid falling behind in global trade; with the new locks a container ship could carry 12,000 to 14,000 containers,” the engineer said.

According to projections, the country’s canal revenue will have climbed to 2.5 billion dollars by 2019 and to six billion by 2025, García said.

“The big advantage is that we not only have the Panama Canal, but also the logistics centre; together they represent 40 percent of our GDP. We have the best logistics connectivity in Latin America, with ports on each ocean, railways and the free trade zone,” he said.

“We can create multimodal trade with the merchandise distribution ports,” he added.

The neglect of the historic centre of Colón near the Caribbean Sea entrance to the Panama Canal and next to the city’s Free Trade Zone reflects the contrast between the pace of economic growth and social development in this Central American country. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

Social development at another level

But Panama’s priorities must change in order for the promising economic prospects engendered by the expansion of the canal to translate into benefits for the poorest segments of the population.

Despite annual GDP growth of around seven percent, because of the high levels of inequality, 27.6 percent of the population is poor according to figures from Sept. 28, although García and other academic sources told IPS the poverty rate is actually nine percentage points higher.

In rural areas of this country of 3.8 million people poverty stands at 49.4 percent, compared to 12 percent in urban areas. Worst off are the country’s small indigenous minority, who suffer from a poverty rate of 70 to 90 percent.

And according to official figures from August, 38.6 percent of the economically active population is engaged in the informal sector of the economy.

Thousands of families lack piped water and services such as health care and transportation.

Alfredo Herazo, 29, lives in the capital but takes a bus every day to the city of Colón, where he works in a soldering workshop that he and his father set up. “I don’t like this life but I don’t have any other options,” he told IPS at the end of a long day of work, as he got ready for the 79-km commute back to Panama City.

Colón, the second largest city in Panama, is a port near the Caribbean Sea entrance to the canal and is surrounded by the area that was the Panama Canal Zone when it was under U.S. control.

The canal was fully handed over to Panama on Jan. 1, 2000, as stipulated by the “Torrijos- Carter” treaties signed by the two countries in 1977.

The 450-hectare Colón Free Trade Zone is the world’s second largest free trade area after Hong Kong, with 2,500 companies that import and re-export with a total annual business volume of 30 billion dollars – although business dipped in 2013 because of disputes with Colombia and Venezuela, its biggest clients.

The Colón Free Trade Zone receives 250,000 visitors a year from all over the world.

“Like any Panamanian, I would like to work on the canal or in the duty free zone, because of the salaries paid there. The canal is our pride and joy. If I get the chance, I would be a solderer there,” Herazo said.

The young man said “the problem with the canal, from the point of view of the ordinary citizen, is that we don’t see the profits, which aren’t distributed among the population.”

The neglect of the rundown historic buildings in Colón contrasts sharply with the modern free trade zone, illustrating the gap between the vibrant growth of the canal and the country’s financial and trade centres and the desperation of those included from the boom.

Cesar Santos, 32, has been living in Colón for seven years, making a living selling fruit and vegetables in the Municipal Market in the city centre. He sets up his stand early every morning across from the Municipal Park.

“With this I only have enough to live as a poor man. Life in Colón isn’t good,” he told IPS.

He lists the problems in the city, stressing the lack of sanitation and decent drainage systems. “When it rains, everything floods, the streets are impassable, the city is paralysed. After a downpour, everything is flooded,” he said.

Besides the lack of urban infrastructure, what bothers him the most is the living conditions of most of the people living in the city.

“People here are really poor,” he said. “People live in condemned houses. Besides all the assaults and thefts, this is a city that has been forgotten by the governments; good thing we have the free trade zone, otherwise there would be even worse poverty,” Santos said, while three customers nodded their heads in agreement.

García, in Panama City, said “The financial centres have to transfer part of their wealth. There is a serious social fracture. The canal can’t just be a channel for trade, communication and world peace. Panamanians need the social debts to be repaid, and part of the wealth should be transferred to the people.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Vehicles and pedestrians mingle haphazardly on Bolívar avenue, one of the main arteries in Caracas, where traffic rules are regularly flouted. Credit: Raúl Límaco/IPS

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Jan 3 2014 (IPS)

The family of Susana Suárez, a 35-year-old Venezuelan dentist, are still in shock over her death in a traffic accident in May. She and a friend were killed on their way back from the beach, and became just two more of the 130,000 victims who died on Latin America’s roads in 2013.

“I wasn’t prepared for her death,” said her sister, Lilian Suárez, with a catch in her voice. “They were coming home at around 8:00 at night in her car, and they got a flat tire just as they drove onto a bridge. They fell into the Aroa river, at a spot where the water is deep and turbulent.”

It wasn’t the first time that a vehicle fell into the river from that bridge, which is near the town of Tucaras in the western state of Falcón.

“Even a semi-trailer truck fell in once,” on a poorly-lit, badly paved and inadequately signalled spot along the road, “where there is a bridge with a weak railing,” Suárez said.

Added to the 130,000 casualties are “six million people who are injured, including hundreds of thousands who are left with a permanent disability,” Verónica Raffo, a senior infrastructure specialist at the World Bank, told IPS.

There are 19.2 road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants in Latin America, “more than three times the rate of some European countries,” she said, citing the “Global status report on road safety 2013” by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Africa, with 24 fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants, and the Middle East-North Africa, with 21 per 100,000, are the other regions losing the most lives to traffic accidents.

In South America, the rate is 21 per 100,000 inhabitants.

“For young people in the region between the ages of 15 and 44, traffic accidents are the main cause of death,” Raffo said from the World Bank offices in Buenos Aires. “It is an extremely significant loss because the state invests a great deal in their health, education and well-being and loses them at their time of greatest productivity for society.”

Bernardo Baranda, Latin America director for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), told IPS from Mexico City that the lack of road safety “is a major public health problem.”

“Aside from the family and emotional tragedies, the most productive people are dying,” the expert said. “These aren’t accidents, they are preventable occurrences.”

In March 2010, the countries of Latin America signed the United Nations resolution proclaiming 2011-2020 the Decade of Action for Road Safety.

The governments of over 100 countries have committed to cutting down road deaths and injuries, with the aim of reducing by half the predicted increase in global road deaths by 2020. The goal is to save five million lives and five billion dollars in costs.

In Latin America, the projection was 30 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, due to the rise in the number of motor vehicles and the further decline in road safety, and the commitment is to bring the rate down to 15 per 100,000.

“But in many countries, traffic accidents are on the rise, and few have managed to stabilise or reduce the number of victims,” Raffo said.

Argentina, Chile and Uruguay have achieved good results, thanks to “strong political leadership and institutional changes to improve administration and management,” she said.

Five pillars are needed to combat road accidents, she said.

The first is “to improve institutions.” In most countries, responsibility is dispersed and there is a lack of adequate institutions, Raffo said.

Argentina is one model to be followed. In 2008, it created the National Road Safety Agency, with an observatory that monitors policies, campaigns, strategies and results, which has led to significant improvements.

Colombia ended 2013 with the approval of a similar agency, in a country where road accidents represent the second-most frequent cause of violent death, according to the World Bank.

The World Bank and regional institutions report that the countries where traffic accidents have increased since 2011 are Bolivia, Ecuador, Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

In the latter two, the increase was as high as 40 percent, in large part due to accidents involving motorcycles, a vehicle that is in dangerous expansion, even used by parents to transport children.

Pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists account for 70 percent of the victims of urban road accidents.

“Working on road safety means working on equality, because the lack of safety mainly affects the most vulnerable users, who are also the most vulnerable segments of society,” Raffo said.

“The second pillar is safe infrastructure, roads and urban mobility; the third is safe vehicles and drivers; the fourth is educational and awareness-raising policies; and the fifth is a key issue: post-accident response, that so many lives depend on,” she said.

“These five pillars make up the focus of a safe system, which is accompanied by the concept of shared responsibility,” she added. “The state leads and coordinates, the drivers obey the rules, car-makers and insurance agencies put a priority on safety, and civil society works to bring about changes in behaviour.”

“A multisectoral strategy is needed, with very clear goals. Actions must be more forceful,” said Baranda, who called for “reliable data, reduced speeds, measures to fight drunk driving, stricter law enforcement, and prevention through education.”

One piece of good news was the creation of the Ibero-American Road Safety Observatory, which Raffo and other experts see as fundamental for the region to have monitoring, management of data, indicators and policies, and a platform for sharing successful experiences.

Although the first three years of the decade have not provided grounds for optimism, the evidence shows that there are some countries that have brought extremely high road fatality rates down, Raffo said.

“We have to stop holding the fatalistic view that because the region grew economically and the number of motor vehicles has increased as a result, the number of deaths has gone up,” she said. “Things don’t have to be this way, it’s possible to change: the case of Argentina and others show it’s possible.”

Besides, developing countries “lose between one and three percent of GDP [to road accidents], in some cases up to four or five percent; that’s an extremely high cost,” she said.

WHO figures indicate that 90 percent of road accidents occur in the developing South, which has only 50 percent of the world’s vehicles.

Bus rapid transit lanes like this one in the west of Rio de Janeiro are relatively low cost and easy to implement. Credit: ITDP/Leonardo Miguel Silva Martins

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 9 2013 (IPS)

Bus lanes, cycle paths and pedestrian walkways are viable solutions to the transport collapse in Brazil’s big cities. But economic interests, red tape and the lack of strategies for an integrated system are delaying a process that the protests raging across the country for the last few weeks have made an urgent issue.

“Traffic is terrible in Rio de Janeiro; it’s much faster to use my bike, and I get exercise at the same time,” film producer Miriam Gerber, who cycles to and from work, to go shopping or just to go for rides, told IPS.

But traffic and the scarcity of bike paths can often transform a pleasant ride into a hellish experience.

“The traffic is dreadful. Cars drive very close together and they don’t slow down when they see you. A lot of people are hit by cars. Since our bodies are our bumpers, we haven’t got a chance,” said Gerber.

The urban transport policy in this country of over 198 million people has prioritised car use since the 1960s, building more and more freeways and limiting the options for pedestrians and cyclists.

Recent tax exemptions to stimulate car sales had a positive effect on economic growth, income and employment.

But at the same time, they created the spectre of breakneck growth in the national vehicle fleet.

The number of automobiles in Brazil’s 12 largest cities increased by 890,000 a year between 2001 and 2011, according to the Observatório das Metrópoles, a think tank. Whereas Brazil’s population grew by 11 percent in that decade, annual registration of new vehicles rose by 120 percent, says a report by The Economist, a British newspaper.

“In a collapse like this one, cities lose out heavily in economic, productive, environmental and social terms,” Clarisse Linke, the head of the Brazil office of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), which works for sustainable and equitable transport worldwide, told IPS.

“Transport is a key question in making cities socially fair and equitable. This whole wave of demonstrations began precisely because of the debate about transport and social justice. Our country is growing economically, but our cities are increasingly unjust,” she said.

Leftwing Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff announced in 2012 that she would prioritise public transport in big cities, with joint investment with state and municipal governments amounting to 16 billion dollars. The plan would include 600 kilometres of roads, 200 kilometres of railway tracks, 381 terminals and the purchase of light rail carriages.

In the same year a law on urban mobility was passed, setting out guidelines for sustainability and the democratisation of public spaces. The law prioritises collective transport and establishes that all cities of over 20,000 people must draw up transport plans covering up to 2015. However, few cities have begun to get organised.

“This problem is deeply rooted in Brazil, as well as in other Latin American countries: there is corruption, bureaucratic machinery that slows things down, and lack of clarity or vision about the role of transportation in the future of these cities,” Linke said.

Orlando dos Santos Júnior, an expert on urban planning at the Observatório das Metrópoles, added further reasons in an interview with IPS.

For instance, in Rio de Janeiro, “big systems are being built (in the city proper) that are not integrated with outlying areas. It is obvious there are going to be negative effects, because it is a misguided and irrational plan that wastes public money, reflecting the subordination of the municipal government to powerful economic interests.”

ITDP supports investment in bus rapid transit (BRT) lanes, which are relatively low cost and have a short lead time.

The southern city of Curitiba pioneered BRT systems, combining high-quality stations, overland bus transport and real- time information systems with dedicated lanes for buses and high-capacity vehicles. The buses are clean and comfortable, and passengers pay their fare before embarking, reducing the wait time for departures from stops, Linke said.

A score of Brazilian cities have plans to build BRT systems. São Paulo has its Expresso Tiradentes, the southern city of Belo Horizonte is building two lanes, and Rio de Janeiro inaugurated one in 2012 and has three more under construction.

However, the needs of the populace were not met, Santos criticised. “What we are seeing is that the large cities are preparing to welcome the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games,” he said.

ITDP also supports the need for integrating large transport systems like subways or trains with BRT lanes and the promotion of cycling and walking.

Ze Lobo, the head of Transporte Ativo, a local NGO, said bicycles are an immediate solution for transport needs up to distances of five to seven kilometres.

“The more we use them, the quicker the authorities will have to create infrastructure for bicycles,” he told IPS.

Lobo said “the big problem is still the lack of understanding among city engineering departments and other authorities of the importance of bicycles.” In addition to cycle paths, investment is needed on access routes and parking spaces for cycles in train stations.

But the problem is not just transport; it extends to urban planning as well. “People should live and work in the same place, to avoid unnecessary commuting. Increasing multiple use planning permission could bring about a 30 percent decline in average kilometres of car travel per person per day,” said Linke.

Expanding the railway systems is another challenge. According to an industry association report on metropolitan railways, passenger numbers are growing faster than facilities on the network, causing serious overcrowding for the population.

Trains and subways transported nine million passengers a day in 2012, 3.8 percent more than in 2011. This year passenger numbers are forecast to rise by 10 percent, indicating a need for investment over and above existing plans.

In parallel, according to both Linke and Lobo, car use must be actively discouraged, for instance by limiting parking places or restricting vehicle traffic at peak hours.

Otherwise, traffic safety will no longer be a problem for cyclists, Lobo joked. “If nothing is done, in a few years it will be absolutely safe to pedal between cars that are completely stationary, in total gridlock.”

“We came out of Facebook," say two young Brazilians taking part in one of the mass protests that swept Brazil in 2013. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 24 2013 (IPS)

A group of young people touched a nerve in Brazil’s large cities, triggering an outpouring of urban outrage at the deterioration of transportation conditions and of the quality of life.

This is one possible interpretation of the torrent of protests on Thursday Jun. 20, involving close to a million demonstrators in a hundred cities, including Brasilia and nearly all the 26 state capitals. Bus fare increases announced in early June detonated a rebellion by young people, mostly students, which spread to wide sectors of society.

The unrest that has shaken the nation continued all last week and over the weekend to Monday Jun. 24, the day leftwing President Dilma Rousseff planned to meet with delegates of the movement that started the demonstrations. Protest organisers and social media are calling for a general strike on Jul. 1.

The often poor quality of public transport passenger services epitomises what the protesters see as a lack of respect by those responsible for public services for the rights and dignity of Brazilians, who must pay disproportionately high prices for them.

Mario Miranda Gouveia retired at age 61 because he could no longer stand the four to six hour daily commute by bus to cover barely 50 kilometres from Campo Grande, the neighbourhood on the west side of Rio de Janeiro where he has lived for the past 15 years, to his job in the city centre.

Although he wanted to carry on as a mid-level official at the state foundation for fomenting scientific research, Gouveia packed it in two months ago. “It was terrible, I would leave at six in the morning and sometimes I only arrived (at the office) at half past nine,” he said. Added to the length of the journey was the discomfort of travelling standing up, sometimes in buses whose seats had been destroyed by vandals.

Mauriceia de Sousa Silva, a young physiotherapist, sometimes arrives home in tears after two hours on a crowded bus travelling from Ipanema to Tijuca, two residential neighbourhoods in Rio 15 kilometres apart.

A fortnight ago, no one could have predicted that such a specific grievance would trigger spontaneous protests that have spread like wildfire from the south to the north of the country, with demands diversifying from more spending on health and education, the decriminalisation of marihuana, rejection of corruption and protests over the immense costs of preparing for international sports events.

Comparisons were instantly made with the wave of popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa known as the Arab Spring, with the “Indignados” movement in Spain and with the protests raging in Turkey since May 28. But the situation in Brazil is very different to the reality of these other countries.

Brazil is a strong democracy, and there is no economic or political crisis. But there are urban problems. Unemployment is only 5.8 percent, in spite of weakened growth, and President Rousseff still enjoys high popularity, although it is declining.

It all began with four marches convened on Jun. 6 by the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL – Free Fare Movement) in São Paulo, four days after the announcement of a bus fare hike from 3.00 to 3.20 reals (1.40 to 1.50 dollars). A few thousand people took part.

Although smaller demonstrations were held in three other state capitals, the epicentre of the protests was São Paulo, where a police crackdown on Thursday Jun. 13 left dozens of protesters, and some journalists, injured by rubber bullets.

The violent clashes contributed to the proliferation of the protests, now driven by solidarity and the defence of the right to peaceful demonstration.

It is about “rights” and not just the extra “cents” in transport fares, said the activists’ placards and declarations, giving rise to enthusiastic ideas about a Brazilian “awakening,” especially among the young who are calling for political changes. The demands are said to be broad and “diffuse.”

But it is unlikely that the protests would have become so widespread without the uncomfortable living conditions in cities.

The generalised discontent also explains the unexpectedly tolerant attitude among local people, even shopkeepers whose business has been affected by the demonstrations, towards the disruption, the vandalism of buildings, banks and vehicles and even the looting practised by small groups.

Traffic congestion has seriously worsened in recent years because car sales have been vigorously promoted with tax breaks and credit facilities, in order to sustain economic growth. At the same time, little has been invested in urban public transport systems.

Josefa Gomes regrets having moved to São Gonçalo, a large city east of the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro. It takes her two to three hours every day to get to the residential areas near the centre of Rio where she works as a domestic, and the bus journey to and from work costs her up to 24 reals (11 dollars).

Six years ago, when Gomes left a favela or shanty town to move to her present home, which is larger but farther away, “the commute was much easier,” taking half the time it does now. With no sign of improvement on the transport front, Gomes wants to go back to living in the centre of Rio de Janeiro.

Medium sized cities in the provinces are also experiencing terrible traffic jams, and now have an unprecedented wave of protests on their streets, usually besieging mayors’ offices.

In São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, average vehicle speed fell last year to 18.5 km per hour during evening rush hour, 10 percent slower than in 2008. On some avenues the average speed is 6.6 km per hour, barely faster than walking pace.

Citizens of São Paulo have reached their highest level of frustration with public transport since Datafolha, a polling firm, began surveys on the subject in 1987. Currently, 55 percent of respondents in the city say it is bad or terrible, compared to 42 percent in 2011. Only 15 percent of them say it is good.

Respondents said buses, which transported 2.9 billion passengers in 2012, were the worst form of passenger transport.

Stadiums and other facilities built or expanded for the FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) Confederations Cup, under way, the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the 2016 Olympic Games are also a major target of the protests because they are seen as diverting funds needed for education and healthcare, as well as encouraging corruption and exacerbating traffic problems as the construction works block streets and highways.

Although dozens of city governments have reversed the transport fare hikes, the demonstrations have grown and multiplied.

One of the projected routes for Nicaragua’s interoceanic canal. Credit: National Assembly

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Jun 13 2013 (IPS)

A five-century wait could come to an end when the Nicaraguan government grants a concession this year to a Chinese company to build a canal between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, despite local protests and international scepticism.

On Thursday, the single-chamber legislature gave fast-track approval to a controversial law that paves the way for the start next year of construction of a rival to the Panama Canal. The 100-year concession will go to the Hong Kong-based Chinese company HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co. Ltd. (HKND Group).

The company was selected by the government of leftwing President Daniel Ortega to build the massive canal at an estimated cost of over 40 billion dollars.

But many voices in Nicaragua have called for greater transparency in the bidding process for the construction project that will bring to life a dream that has been cherished in this Central American country since the Spanish conquistadors first arrived.

One of the main criticisms is that the state of Nicaragua would grant complete rights over the canal for 50 years, with an option for another 50 years, to a company that was set up in October 2012 and established a holding company in the Cayman Islands that same year.

The Chinese company’s director, Wang Jing, is chairman of the Beijing-based Xinwei Telecom Enterprise Group, which was awarded a 300 million dollar telecommunications contract in Nicaragua in 2012. But Xinwei is at least four months behind in the investment pledged under the contract.

Construction of the canal is slated to begin in May 2014, and is expected to take 10 years. The feasibility studies are not yet ready, but according to the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) government, a London-based firm has been commissioned to carry them out.

The first legal step was taken in July 2012, when at Ortega’s initiative parliament passed the “law for the construction of the interoceanic canal” by a mixed public-private company.

The state would hold a 51 percent stake, and the remaining 49 percent would be in the hands of investors, which could be countries, international bodies, individuals or companies.

HKND plans to build the canal across 190 km of land, while 80 km of the route would go across Cocibolca lake. The canal will be 150 metres wide and will serve larger ships than the Panama Canal.

The project has the firm support of the Ortega administration, which sent the bill – the “special law for the development of Nicaraguan infrastructure and transportation involving the canal, free trade zones and associated infrastructure” – to the legislature on Jun. 5 for fast-track treatment.

The bill approved Thursday modifies the original “law for the construction of the interoceanic canal”, modifies the projected route, and grants the concession exclusively to the Chinese investors.

It also establishes that Nicaragua gives up any claim to or sovereignty over the concession for up to 100 years.

The text was approved by 61 votes in favour, 25 against, and one abstention, after a heated three-hour debate. But the opposition lawmakers withdrew immediately during the separate votes for each one of the law’s 25 articles, to protest what they considered insufficient debate on the bill.

The construction project approved by the new law includes the canal, two deep-water ports, an international airport, a “dry canal” freight railroad, a series of free-trade zones, and an oil pipeline.

Initial estimates indicate that the canal will have the capacity to handle 450 to 500 million metric tonnes of freight a year and ships of up to 250,000 tons that are 400 metres long, 59 metres wide, and with a berth-side depth of 22 metres.

By comparison, the Panama Canal can currently handle vessels 260 metres long, 32 metres wide, with a beam of 19 metres – a size known as Panamax. But the expansion project now underway will double the capacity of the Panama Canal by 2015.

The new law grants 100 percent of the shares to the Chinese investors and establishes that the transfer to Nicaragua will be gradual, starting 10 years after the canal begins to operate. Nicaragua will receive 10 million dollars a year until all of the shares have been handed over a century later.

The business chamber and investors in Nicaragua support the government’s plan, albeit with some reservations. But it is staunchly opposed by the rightwing opposition and Sandinista dissidents, as well as environmentalists.

Eduardo Montealegre, head of the opposition legislators, told IPS that Ortega and his officials were “selling out the country” with the broad concessions granted to foreign investors that, he said, hurt Nicaragua’s current and future interests.

Constitutional lawyer Gabriel Álvarez told IPS that the concession of the project to Chinese investors violated the constitutional article on national sovereignty, and left the country vulnerable to local or international legal action.

Biologist Salvador Montenegro, director of the Research Centre for Aquatic Resources of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, told IPS that any construction project involving Cocibolca lake endangered biodiversity, and Central American society as a whole.

The 8,624-km long lake in southwest Nicaragua is the region’s largest freshwater reserve.

The government’s secretary of public policies, Paul Oquist, dismissed the demands by environmentalists and politicians and anticipated that after construction of the canal started, GDP would grow 10.8 percent in 2014 and 15 percent in 2015, compared to the current four to five percent.

The government projects that GDP will climb from 10 billion dollars today to 24.7 billion dollars in 2018. But without the construction of the canal, GDP would stand at 14.9 billion dollars in 2018.

Ortega informally discussed the idea of the canal with U.S. President Barack Obama at the May 4 summit of presidents of the Central American Integration System in Costa Rica.

The initiative has not drawn official reactions, either positive or negative, from Nicaragua’s Central American neighbours.

Only Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli congratulated Nicaragua for the plan and offered it technical assistance.

By Constanza Vieira
TUCURINCA, Colombia, Jun 11 2013 (IPS)

José “Goyo” Hernández has never been given a mask to keep him from breathing in the coal dust blowing off the 13 trains that pass daily through this village in the municipality of Zona Bananera in the northern Colombian department of Magdalena, during his 12-hour shift at the railway crossing.

The trains speed by at 80 kilometres an hour, with nothing covering the 160,000 tons of coal that pass through the village daily, extracted from the open-pit mines 226 kilometres to the southeast, in the neighbouring department of Cesar, by the U.S. mining company Drummond, Swiss-based Glencore Xstrata (through its subsidiary in Colombia, Prodeco) and Colombian Natural Resources, owned by U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Goyo wears the uniform of a private security firm contracted by Fenoco S.A., the private railway company awarded the Atlantic railway concession in 1999, whose shareholders include the same mining companies.

He guards the railway crossing where the coal train tracks cross the main street of Tucurinca.

Signs painted in English on the 120 train cars pulled by three engines indicate that each weighs 19.1 tons and has a maximum cargo limit of 60,750 kilograms.

The cars are filled to the brim with high-grade thermal coal. In compliance with an environmental permit for the coal’s transport, the surface layers have been moistened to minimise the amount of coal particles blown off by the wind.

But a report released by the Comptroller General’s Office in December 2012 concluded that this moistening is not sufficiently effective “in neutralising the release of coal particles.”

Studies have only been conducted on the land-based operations and activities in ports, the report stresses, which means there is no way of determining the “synergistic impacts” of all of the activities related to the export of coal, include its transportation on trucks, trains and ships.

When the train is approaching, Goyo sets up the “crossing signal”: two orange plastic traffic cones connected by a rope, and hanging from the middle of the rope, a small red metal plate with hand-painted white letters proclaiming “PARE” (STOP).

There is nothing even remotely resembling a safety barrier at this level crossing. Only a one-square-metre sign posted six metres from the railway line warns of the danger.

The people of Tucurinca love Goyo. They say that he and his co-worker, who handles the other 12-hour shift, have saved the lives of three people who attempted to throw themselves in front of the train.

Tucurinca has no sewer system, but it does have an aqueduct, although it only operates for six hours every two days. That is why it is not unusual to see women washing clothes at 10:20 in the morning in the ditch that runs alongside the railway tracks.

This is when the day starts heating up, with temperatures rising to 34 or 36 degrees Celsius by midday.

The women stand in the water up to their waists, soaping, scrubbing and rinsing the clothes. They also wash their hair. They smile and chat while they work. One of the women in the water, Amparo Padilla, says the coal dust doesn’t produce soot, so when clothes are hung up to dry they don’t get dirty.

Ana Rosa Figueras explains that the aqueduct does not reach her hut on the other side of the tracks from the ditch. “I live all alone, and where would I get the strength to haul water?” she commented to Tierramérica*.

In her yard there is an air quality meter, housed beneath a metal cover. “A couple of men come every two days, open it up, look at a paper and write something down. They come to check on the coal dust,” says Figueras.

“They study it, to see if it makes people sick,” she added, never pausing in her scrubbing and rinsing, as if worried that the ditch water would run out.

While she is washing, the slender woman picks her way with difficulty across the railway tracks carrying the clean clothes back to her yard. There she hangs them on the scaffolding where the meter is installed, which she uses as a clothesline.

María Josefa Arteaga, an elderly woman in a bright orange t-shirt, points out that the big coal companies do not pay any compensation for disturbing the life of the village.

People now complain of ailments that were not as widespread before, “when there used to be a train” – in other words, when the train was a passenger train, which carried people and goods to and from the village. Now the train comes but it never arrives: it just keeps on going with its cargo of coal.

People in the region say that the trains spread “illness” and that everything is contaminated by the coal dust, which breeds asthma and chronic bronchitis.

But there are no statistics, or they are not reliable, as noted in the Comptroller General’s report with regard to studies on the different impacts of the coal industry.

The environmental permits do not require the monitoring of suspended particulates smaller than 2.5 microns, something that is “essential for the adoption of measures that could decrease or mitigate the effects on human health that could result from the presence of particulate matter produced by coal export activities,” the report stresses.

Other more obvious impacts of the trains are the continual vibrations, which causes cracks in houses, and the noise, with decibel levels between 10 and 85 times greater than “normal” noise.

“The doors and windows shake. There are houses that are cracked. The owners fill in the cracks, and they split open again,” says cattle merchant Luis González, leaning against the wall outside his home across from the railway tracks.

“At night, the train passes every 15 minutes, 20 minutes at most. I’m used to it now and I don’t wake up anymore. It used to blow its whistle at night. You could hear it coming,” he recounts.

“Of course the train bothers me,” says his neighbour Ramona María Moreno, who was born in 1924 and adds that, if she had protested alone, she would never have reached such an old age.

“If the people don’t take action, there’s nothing that can be done. What good would it do me to complain if the others don’t join in?”

Colombia exports between 92 and 95 percent of the coal it produces and is the world’s fifth largest producer. According to the British Petroleum Statistical Review of World Energy 2012, 35.3 percent of the coal consumed in Europe is Colombian.

But the industry’s production chain is minimal, which is why it does not directly stimulate the economy, “at least in any appreciable way relative to the value exploited,” states another report from the Comptroller General’s Office, “Minería en Colombia: Fundamentos para superar el modelo extractivista” (Mining in Colombia: A basis for moving beyond the extractivist model), released in May 2013.

That is why in Tucurinca, as in other towns along the way as Colombian coal travels to the world market, the train passes, but it never arrives.

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

Excerpt:

Articulated bus in dedicated lane, part of the BRT system in Curitiba, Brazil. Credit: Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz Mariordo CC BY 3.0

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 30 2013 (IPS)

Brazil, and especially the city of Rio de Janeiro, is experiencing a boom in bus rapid transit (BRT), a public transport system that now has an internationally-recognised quality standard.

According to Brazil’s National Association of Urban Transport (NTU), there are 113 BRT projects in 25 cities, with 1,270 kilometres of dedicated bus lanes. By 2016 they should all be operative.

“BRT is the star of sustainable transport; it is an environmentally friendly, economical solution for big cities that have serious congestion problems,” Helena Orenstein, the country director for Brazil of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), told IPS.

The system does not exclude other methods of transport; on the contrary, it creates an integrated network of different kinds of transportation, Orenstein said.

But a common definition and quality assurance were previously lacking, she added.

The ITDP helped formulate quality guidelines known as the BRT Standard, in partnership with a commission of experts and various organisations.

The BRT Standard, launched in March, analyses and gives points for 32 items divided into six categories, such as service planning, infrastructure, integration and access, as well as others which carry negative points, like overcrowding or lack of maintenance.

The result is a tool with common parameters of quality control for BRT all over the world, which will also guide and motivate improvements in these transport systems, according to Orenstein.

“The idea is that BRT should deliver an excellent form of transport, paying attention to the requirements of safety, comfort and practicality. It’s about time people no longer had to waste three hours a day to commute across cities,” said the head of the Brazilian office of the ITDP, an NGO that offers technical support in a number of countries.

The quality certification functions as a checklist that adds or subtracts points and is easily understood by authorities, consultants and operators.

The BRT Standard issues bronze (55-69 points), silver (70-84 points) or gold (85-100 points) certificates.

The aim is “to certify BRT systems that are already operating in order to correct any flaws and reward good examples,” Orenstein said.

Pedro Torres, the ITDP’s urban development manager in Brazil, explained that a technical committee would carry out annual reviews and updating of the certifications.

Following pilot trials in 2012, the first full certification exercise this year analysed 67 BRT systems in 41 cities in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Ecuador, France, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, South Africa and the United States. Twelve of them were awarded gold certificates, 28 silver and 24 bronze.

The remaining three systems, two in the U.S. city of Pittsburgh and one in New Delhi, India, did not earn enough points for the bronze certificate but met the minimum requirements to be regarded as “basic BRT systems.”

Among those that won gold, the highest points were earned by the Zhongshan Avenue BRT in the Chinese city of Guangzhou; four TransMilenio services in Bogotá, Colombia; and the Linha Verde (Green Line) in Curitiba, the Brazilian city that pioneered this type of mass transport in 1974.

“It was a very positive experience. It’s an opportunity for society, governments and companies to have a public evaluation and monitoring tool for these systems,” Torres told IPS.

The head of NTU, Otávio Cunha, praised the BRT Standard initiative and said the NTU has passed the list of items to be evaluated on to its members.

“We are in favour of dedicated bus lanes as a sustainable transport option that has a higher cost-benefit ratio. The idea of a quality standard is a good one,” Cunha told IPS.

Traffic creates stress, increases the accident rate and causes economic “disbenefits” because of the waste of fuel and time involved in urban transportation, he said.

“Brazil is going through a mobility crisis and there is too much fuel and time wasted in cities because of traffic. Dedicated bus lanes can make journeys faster. BRTs are a new concept in surface public transport, inspired by the requirements for excellence in underground rail systems,” he said.

A dedicated corridor can transport 10,000 passengers an hour by bus, compared to only 750 by car. A bus can take all its passengers on board in barely 15 seconds before leaving a station.

In many cities, the time interval between buses can be as little as 20 seconds, making the service highly efficient. In Brazilian BRT systems, the interval between buses may be two minutes, Cunha said. One busload of passengers can replace 120 cars, he said.

Another benefit is the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from vehicle traffic. In Mexico City the BRT system, which is 20 kilometres long, has reduced the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from traffic by 80,000 tonnes a year, according to the ITDP.

Constructing BRT systems takes time and money, but much less of both than a subway line, which can take up to 10 years to build.

Building and equipping 10 kilometres of BRT takes an average of 18 months and 10 times less money than a metro line.

Brazil’s 113 BRT projects, operating in 25 cities, represent 30 percent of total BRT systems already functioning all over the world, according to NTU estimates.

The government’s current investment commitments amount to six billion dollars, including what it has already spent. By the end of 2013, more projects in medium-sized cities will bring the total to nearly nine billion dollars.

Four new BRT projects are under way in Rio de Janeiro: TransCarioca, with 39 stations, which is to be inaugurated in December at a cost of 900 million dollars; TransBrasil, with 25 stations, which began to be constructed in 2012 at a cost of 600 million dollars; TransOeste, with 64 stations, the second phase of which will be completed in August, at a cost of 380 million dollars; and TransOlímpica, with 18 stations, which is due to begin operating in January 2016 at a cost of 1.1 billion dollars.

TransOeste was awarded a gold BRT Standard classification, in spite of problems with overcrowding and poor road surfacing along some stretches of the bus corridor.

However, Torres said, the average journey time was halved from two hours to one, and TransOeste has new units with air conditioning and onboard cameras, is accessible and offers frequent service.

TransBrasil promises to be one of the biggest rapid transit corridors in the world in terms of passenger numbers, transporting close to 820,000 passengers a day, according to the project.

Ecobici, the government bike share system launched in 2010, has nearly 50,000 users in Mexico City. Credit: EMBARQ Brasil/CC-BY-2.0

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jan 17 2013 (IPS)

Latin America’s big cities should cooperate with each other in order to overcome shared challenges in transport issues, such as sustainability and a more human-centered approach to urban development, experts say.

“Challenges in the cities are very similar. Car use was favoured and the cities’ growth suffered from planning deficiencies, and now they have to make the public transport sector a priority,” Bernardo Baranda, Latin America regional director for the U.S. Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), told IPS.

“Cooperation is an interesting approach, because a lot can be learned from what other cities are doing. Nowadays projects are being taken up to give priority to public transportation, improving quality and giving users alternatives so that they leave their cars at home,” he said.

On Tuesday Jan. 15, ITDP and eight other international organisations presented the 2013 Sustainable Transport Award to the Mexico City Federal District, the country’s capital, which was represented by the city’s heads of Transport and Highways and of Environment, Rufino León and Tania Müller, respectively.

Nine million people live in the Federal District, and 20.4 million in the Mexico City metropolitan area, which spills over into part of the adjacent state of Mexico, one of the 31 states in the country. The size of its population puts Mexico City in third place among global megacities, after Tokyo and Delhi, according to the United Nations.

The other four finalists for the award were the cities of Rosario, Argentina; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Bremen, Germany; and Kiev, Ukraine. They had been selected from among nine candidates in eight countries.

ITDP and the Centre for Sustainable Transport-EMBARQ nominated Mexico City in August for adding an extra route to the Metro Collective Transport System, extending the public Ecobici bike share programme, and installing parking metres in some neighbourhoods.

In 2012 the cities of San Francisco, California in the United States and Medellín, Colombia shared the award, while in 2011 the winner was Guangzhou, China and in 2010, Ahmedabad, India.

Consultant Roberto Remes told IPS that the award for sustainable transport is a special opportunity for Latin American cities – nominated or not – to get together to share their experiences and discuss possible solutions.

“Best practices are an incentive, but one must understand that suppliers of technology carry out intense lobbying that is not always in line with best practices. This leads to governments looking for ways of using the technology, instead of looking for a solution for a specific problem, which is a flawed approach,” he said.

“It would be better for governments to act according to state-of-the-art knowledge and best practices,” Remes said.

In April 2012, Metrobus Line 4, covering 28 kilometres in the Mexican capital, came into operation, expanding the bus rapid transit (BRT) system that uses dedicated lanes, while Metrobus Line 12, covering 24 kilometres, opened in October 2012.

Ecobici, the bike share system launched in 2010 by the metropolitan government, has nearly 50,000 users who have made close to five million trips. The scheme has 264 bike stations and 3,670 bicycles in the centre and west of the capital.

Finally, the Ecoparq system of parking metres has been in operation since January 2012 in two neighbourhoods in the west of the capital, and is about to expand into other areas.

These measures taken by the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which has governed the Federal District since 1997, seek to reduce the use of private vehicles that leads to chaotic urban transport, and create environmental benefits such as pollution reduction.

In the metropolitan area of the Valley of Mexico, where the Federal District and several municipalities of the adjacent state of Mexico are located, citizens make 49 million journeys daily, 53 percent of them on public transport and 17 percent in private vehicles, according to the Centre for Sustainable Transport-EMBARQ.

The creation of BRT-type systems in the region’s megacities has shown a marked increase over the last decade, to the point that they now exist in at least 17 cities. The same has happened with public bicycle share programmes.

The award is “a recognition and a call for continuity, to make (the programmes) more aggressive in the coming years, in order to give citizens better transport options,” Baranda said.

“There is still a great deal to be done to integrate different modes of transport, to make it easier for users to change from one mode to another,” said the ITDP regional director, who is currently negotiating a collaboration agreement with the capital city government.

In 2009, transportation expert Carlos Pardo wrote a report titled “Los cambios en los sistemas integrados de transporte masivo en las principales ciudades de América Latina” (Changes in integrated mass transport systems in the major cities of Latin America) for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

In it he identified challenges in this field among cities in the region, including integration and coherence with other modes of public transport, with non-motorised transport, with urban policies and with public and private investments in public transport, and the corresponding priorities.

The study also discusses the need for synchronising project execution timing and politically determined timing; and the importance of feasibility studies and the analysis of alternatives, in order to carry out projects that are successful in the medium to long term.

In 2012, Rio de Janeiro, which has 11.8 million people and is the Brazilian city with the second highest population after São Paulo, opened its first BRT corridor, called TransOeste. It also expanded the shared bicycle programme it launched in 2011, and started a project for improving public spaces.

The Argentine city of Rosario, which has nearly 1.2 million people, has concentrated on improving transport, the bicycle programme and public spaces.

In October, ITDP presented a plan titled “Perspectivas de crecimiento de la red de Metrobús y transporte integrado del Distrito Federal a 2018” (Prospects for growth in the Metrobus network and integrated transport in the Federal District to 2018) which proposes annual growth in the system of between 25 and 30 kilometres and the addition of 10 new routes by 2018, benefiting some two million additional passengers.

This year, the Mexico City government intends to extend the Metrobus and Ecobici systems, strengthening multimodal integration.

“We have to make the leap to an integrated transport system. The modality and the route do not matter as much as the user having access to a system of smooth transfers, with discounted fares. The connectivity of all the systems is very important,” said Remes.

(END)

Bicycles are mushrooming around Buenos Aires. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Dec 30 2012 (IPS)

A programme launched in Buenos Aires three years ago to encourage the use of bicycles has already brought results: the use of this environment-friendly means of transport has increased fivefold in the Argentine capital.

“Buenos Aires, mejor en bici” (Buenos Aires, Better by Bike) is the name of the project that emerged in 2009 in the Healthy Mobility Office of the Transport Subscretariat of the Argentine capital, with the aim of extending protected bike lanes in the city.

“When we started to work on the idea of making bicycles an alternative means of transportation here, they only accounted for 0.4 percent of all trips. That has now gone up to two percent,” the director of Healthy Mobility, Paula Bisiau, told IPS.

To achieve this, work was carried out on three fronts: the creation of a network of bike lanes; the establishment of a free, public bicycle sharing system; and a campaign to encourage bicycle use.

“Buenos Aires is flat; the climate, except for the occasional rainy day, is mild; there are many students and people who practice sports…this was a city that could become very bicycle-friendly,” the official explained.

In a survey carried out by the government of centre-right Mayor Mauricio Macri, 61 percent of respondents said they were prepared to use the bicycle as a means of transport, as long as they could ride in safe bike lanes.

A total of 95 km of two-way bike lanes have been built on the left shoulder of roads that are free of bus traffic, set off by a raised yellow concrete curb.

The public bicycle sharing service was later put into effect, with three stations and 50 bicycles. Users can borrow bikes for an hour, after leaving their address and identification card number.

Today there are 28 stations, 1,000 bicycles and 60,000 registered users, who generally use the service to commute to and from work or school, according to the Healthy Mobility Office.
With the growing affluence in Buenos Aires, traffic lights for cyclists have been installed, to make traffic safer, and special green lanes have been created for bicycles to cross at intersections, alongside the pedestrian lanes.

The programme’s goal is to reach 100 stations and 2,000 bicycles in the free bike hire system, and 130 km of bike lanes by the end of 2013.

To finance this new means of transport, the state-owned Banco Ciudad launched a line of soft loans for bicycle purchases, payable in up to four years, with fixed rates.
Bisiau explained that, besides the creation of infrastructure, the government is working on promoting a “cultural change” with the help, for example, of students from the public University of Buenos Aires.

In an industrial design class, students worked on a prototype of a bicycle that could be used to carry merchandise. And apparel design students came up with proposals for garments for cyclists.

The Healthy Mobility Office offers talks in schools, gives courses to taxi drivers about cyclists, and added a chapter of rules on bicycles to the driver’s license test.

To make the programme more visible, guarded bike parking facilities are set up during public and private events that draw large numbers of people, like concerts or open-air conferences, and an effort is being made to get companies involved as well.

A total of 130 agreements have been signed so far with companies interested in fomenting the use of bicycles among their employees. The businesses assume a commitment to provide a bicycle parking space, bicycles, and in some cases, showers.

Andrés Fingeret, country director for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), said the Buenos Aires programme had brought about a change: that people no longer see bicycles merely as a form of weekend fun and recreation.

“Today there is a real community of bike riders who use the bicycle as their first choice of transport. And there are even clubs of cyclists who get together to go on rides,” he commented to IPS.

He said that when riders discover that there is a safe network of routes, or that they are able to try out the free bike-sharing system, demand immediately goes up.

Fingeret recommended moving towards “greater integration” between bicycles and the rest of the transportation system, to further bolster their use.

He suggested, for example, making it easier for people to take bikes on trains, building ramps in train stations with stairs, or fomenting the opening of new bicycle stores and centres that offer services and accessories for cyclists.

Buenos Aires has thus joined the global trend towards a more sustainable, clean means of transportation, in which Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro clearly stand out in Latin America.
Fingeret agreed that a cultural change is taking place. “Traditionally, people who used bicycles to get about were so poor that they couldn’t even afford a motorcycle. Today, the bicycle has taken on status and there is a broad segment of society, especially among people under 40, who are actively choosing it,” he said.

The Rofue community centre, covered with slogans from the Mapuche struggle for land and rights. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
TEMUCO, Chile , Nov 28 2012 (IPS)

“This is a project that reflects the occupation…of Mapuche territory,” said Iván Reyes, an indigenous leader staunchly opposed to the construction of an international airport in the southern Chilean region of Araucanía.

Reyes, an agricultural technician, said the construction project was approved thanks to an environmental impact study “based on lies” that was carried out by Arcadis Geotécnica, the Chilean subsidiary of a Netherlands-based international consulting and engineering company.

The study “says there will be no impact on communities in the area. But in a later analysis, we detected that the base line and measurements had been manipulated,” he said.

The new airport, whose construction was actually approved in 2005, is now one of the most high-profile projects of the right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera. It is being built in Quepe, 20 km from the city of Temuco and nearly 700 km south of Santiago.

The La Araucanía New International Airport, which will replace the Maquehue Airport, will have a 2,440-metre runway and a 5,000-square-metre passenger terminal.

The Chilean company Belfi, which was granted the concession for 20 years, is building the new airport.

“This is an emblematic project for this region,” the governor of La Araucanía, Andrés Molina, told IPS.

“Our Maquehue Airport is one of the worst-situated in the country, with a runway that is hard to land on, and with a difficult approach, because of the fog over the hills of Temuco,” he said.

Temuco, which is halfway between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes foothills, is in the middle of prairies, pasture and farmland, and forests.

The new airport will be built in this agricultural and forested area, at a cost of more than 120 million dollars. “Tourism in this area is growing by 30 percent a year, which offers interesting prospects,” Molina said.

He proudly noted that 700 million dollars were invested in projects in the region in 2012, up from 79 million dollars in 2009.

Although a few Mapuche communities support the new airport, which they see as a step forward for the region in terms of economic and cultural development, many others are staunchly opposed, arguing that it will undermine biodiversity and the environment, and will destroy their ancestral territory.

The Mapuche, Chile’s largest indigenous group, number nearly one million in this country of over 16 million people, and the struggle for their ancestral land in the south of the country has frequently pitted them against large landholders, logging companies and other private interests.

“This is the straw that broke the camel’s back, in terms of economic interference in Mapuche territory,” Fidel Tranamil, a traditional “machi” or healer, told IPS. “We already have the logging and hydroelectric companies…We are culturally invaded by politics and religion, and the life of the Mapuche people would be put at further risk by the new airport.”

At the age of 23, Tranamil is already a Mapuche leader, in charge of the religious life of his community, Rofue. He is tenaciously opposed to the construction of the airport, which he describes as “a gateway to invade Mapuche territory.”

Tranamil, or “machi Fidel” as he is known by the local community, is one of the most active indigenous leaders in the area. He has been arrested several times, and his home is frequently searched by the police. Since 2005, his mother has been living with seven pellets in her right knee, after a harsh police crackdown on a protest.

Many of Tranamil’s “peñis” (brothers and sisters) have been prosecuted under Chile’s draconian counter-terrorism law, inherited from the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

The law, which has been widely criticised by international bodies such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, has been used to squelch activism by Mapuche people demanding the return of their ancestral land.

The house where Tranamil and his mother live is warm and quiet. They raise pigs and chickens, and have a small vegetable garden.

“But soon, airliners will be landing every minute. That will not only violate our spiritual life but also our culture and harmony,” he said.

He also said that to build the airport, “between 200 and 300 hectares of native (old-growth) forest will be cut down, and lost forever. It would take 400 years for the trees to grow back to their current height.”

But Molina argued that opposition to large projects like the airport is the work of “leaders who have emerged under the wing of leftist parties, and who don’t care about their communities, but are motivated by ideological concerns.”

Meanwhile, construction of the airport is moving ahead, despite attempts by Mapuche activists to block it, including cases brought in court, which were dismissed.

In September 2011, Tranamil himself turned to the United Nations Human Rights Council to denounce that the airport was being built “without consultation with the concerned communities, in contravention of” International Labour Organisation Convention 169 concerning indigenous and tribal peoples.

But Molina maintained that the communities were consulted. He said that a working group was set up and that the government had been providing support “in the areas of productive development, infrastructure and housing.”

Despite his opposition to the project, Reyes said “the world is not going to end because an airport is built.

“Do you hear the noise from the highway? Later we’ll have the noise of the airplanes, just like we have the high-voltage power lines, and the railroad,” he said, with a resigned tone.

“The important thing is that the airport has reawakened the dormant Mapuche activism and mobilised our communities once again,” he said. “In the wider context, planes flying 100 or 50 metres over our heads are a minor problem.”

Greater integration of public passenger transport is a major challenge facing the next government of the Mexican capital, one of the most traffic-congested cities in the world, if it wants to guarantee people the right to mobility.

The authorities of the Mexico City Federal District have invested billions in collective transport, but have failed to create a balanced, multi-modal transportation system.

“Part of integration is physical – making it much easier to move from one system to another,” said Bernardo Baranda, the director for Latin America of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP).

“It also has to do with the design of stations, and improving the integration of multimodal transport,” Baranda, whose office is based in Mexico City, told IPS.

ITDP, a U.S.-based non-governmental organisation that provides technical assistance to cities on sustainable transportation development throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas, advises the Mexico City government.

The Metrobus system carries 800,000 passengers a day in Mexico City. Mariana Gil/ EMBARQ Brasil/CC BY 2.0

In the metropolitan area of Mexico City, made up of the Federal District and several municipalities in the surrounding Mexico state, there are 49 million daily trips, of which 53 percent are carried out on public transport and 17 percent in private vehicles, according to the Centre for Sustainable Transport for Mexico City (CTS-Mexico).

The transport system in this area of over 20 million people is made up of buses, minibuses, the Metro Collective Transport System and the Metrobus, which are often disconnected from each other. They transport 14.8 million people a day.

Mayor Marcelo Ebrard of the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), in office since 1997, will be succeeded on Dec. 5 by his PRD colleague Miguel Mancera.

The metro system, with a network of 11 lines totalling 201 kilometres, moves five million passengers a day, a number only surpassed by the 6.8 million people who travel in private cars, according to figures from the road and transport secretariat.
The Metrobus, with four routes and a total of 95 kilometres, transports some 800,000 passengers a day.

Among the main factors contributing to the lack of integration in the expanding public transport system is the proliferation of shanty towns on the outskirts of Mexico City, according to experts, who are offering the next city administration different formulas for creating a more humanised mass transit system.

“A major concern is the lack of public policies for controlled urban development,” Daniel Zamudio, an expert with El Poder Ciudadano (Citizen Power), told IPS.

“Continual housing development means journeys are getting longer and longer, less safe and more costly,” said Zamudio, the public transport coordinator for the NGO.

In its comprehensive transport and mobility programme for 2007-2012, the government of the capital promised to create 10 routes for Metrobus and a bus rapid transit (BRT) system with pre-paid cards, exclusive lanes and articulated vehicles.

But only four Metrobus routes were built, and the authorities opted instead to build the 12th line of the metro, 24 kilometres long, at a cost of two billion dollars, to link the west and east sides of Mexico City. It is about to be inaugurated.

Ebrard also chose to build new stretches of elevated highway, which promote the use of private cars, according to critics of this move.

Total public and private investment in transport infrastructure has amounted to 4.7 billion dollars over Ebrard’s six-year term.

Even so, some of the plans for 2007-2012 remain pending for the Mancera administration to complete.

“We must ask the incoming government to be more aggressive in expanding Metrobus and improving current operations. The priority has got to be quality public transport. Work must begin in the most underprivileged areas, like the east of the city,” Baranda said.

On Tuesday Oct. 23, ITDP presented a plan titled “Perspectivas de crecimiento de la red de Metrobus y transporte integrado del Distrito Federal a 2018” (Prospects for growth in the Metrobus network and integrated transport in the Federal District to 2018), which proposes annual growth in the system of between 25 and 30 kilometres and the addition of 10 new routes by 2018, benefiting two million additional passengers.

The report estimates an annual investment of 117 million dollars. In 2013 a network linking the east and south of the capital could be built, a project that the city government has already planned.

The 10 new routes would save 290,000 hours a day in commuting time; signify a reduction in emissions of 11,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming; and reduce traffic accidents by 30 percent.

“It is necessary to create additional routes that feed into the Metrobus system, so that more people will start using mass public transport. Furthermore, bus stops and metro stations must be restructured to make them accessible and promote the right to mobility,” Zamudio said.

Since Oct. 17, commuters have been able to purchase the Federal District card and use it to ride both the metro and Metrobus. In future, it will also be possible to use the card to pay for bus transport, taxis and parking meters, as well as to rent bicycles.

Mancera has already been given the “Acuerdos para la Movilidad” (Agreements on Mobility) drawn up by “Citizens with a Vision,” made up of six civil society organisations that suggest expanding, modernising and integrating a quality public transport network.

They also point out the need to consolidate a legal and institutional framework for better public transport.

In terms of mobility, the group recommends articulating urban development and mobility policies; moving towards a more compact and orderly city; and achieving efficient and sustainable public investment in transport.

The measures proposed by ITDP would improve public spaces and passenger safety, reduce transit times, expand coverage by the mass transport network, decongest saturated transport corridors and improve the connectivity of the network.

“Mobility problems are solved by prioritising public transport. A good transport system serves the needs of the people,” Baranda said.

Direct benefits of Cape Town’s MyCiTi early phase Bus Rapid Transit system are skewed in favour of middle rather than lower income residents. Credit: Gail Jennings/IPS

By Gail Jennings
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Oct 2 2012 (IPS)

In South Africa, Bus Rapid Transit systems, which were pioneered to great effect in Latin American countries such as Colombia and Brazil, are being promoted as potentially effective ways of delivering improved public transport services to the urban poor. But experts question whether systems such as these can alleviate poverty to any meaningful extent.

Bus Rapid Transit, sometimes referred to as “rail on road” systems, are high-quality, high-capacity bus systems with their own right-of-way, dedicated bus lanes.

Today the TransMilenio in Bogota, Colombia carries around 1.6 million passengers every day, over 84 kilometres of segregated busway. In Curitiba, Brazil, about 70 percent of commuters use the BRT, and around 30 percent of passengers are “converted” private car users.

It is upon purportedly transformative systems such as these that the cities of Johannesburg, Tshwane and Cape Town in South Africa, Lagos in Nigeria and Nairobi in Kenya have pinned their transport hopes and dreams.

Early phases of multi-million dollar capital projects are operating in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and are set to soon launch in at least four other cities in South Africa.

But while it is too early to draw long-term conclusions about the impact of these transport systems, a number of researchers are asking questions and coming up with some answers about their ability to contribute to national goals of alleviating poverty.

James Chakwizira, a senior researcher in the built infrastructure department at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), told IPS that although these high-quality services do have great potential for addressing public transport challenges within communities, the current initiatives such as Johannesburg’s three-year-old system, Rea Vaya, fall short of expectations.

He said because terminal infrastructure developments are located away from the marginal communities’ location, people from these areas need to use a minimum of two transport modes in order to access and use the routes.

Councilor Rehana Moosajee, who is on the Mayoral Committee Member for Transport for the City of Johannesburg, and is a Rea Vaya champion, told IPS that initially one of the key imperatives of the Rea Vaya system was to overcome apartheid’s spatial legacy and promote access and social cohesion.

“I think that now a lot more work will have to be done over a period of time in assessing impacts on poverty, as based on the city’s own multiple deprivation indices, the areas of highest multiple deprivation are further south of Soweto – a township to the south of Johannesburg – and therefore not yet reached by the service.

“Our own experience suggests that Rea Vaya commuters are certainly saving time, though, and we have also had some interesting accounts of property availability and take-up on certain parts of routes and the creation of economic activity,” she said.

At a December 2011 conference on Land Passenger Transport, Karen Lucas, an international researcher on transportation equity, supported the implementation of BRT to the extent that “these major infrastructure projects are needed to bring high quality, modern and efficient mainstream public transport services to inner cities.”

However, she noted “these services will serve only a minority of the travel needs of urban populations.”

Research released in July by the University of Pretoria’s Christo Venter and Eunice Vaz reached a similar conclusion. Using data from a small-sample household survey conducted in Soweto, they found that the time and cost benefits of the system “accrue largely to medium-income households rather than to the poorest commuters in the area.”

“To the extent that passengers can spend time and fare savings on other goods, Rea Vaya contributes to poverty reduction,” they found. The researchers also noted that Rea Vaya is priced higher than the cheapest available public transport alternative, commuter rail, which remains the mode of choice for the poorest commuters.

The average travel cost for Rea Vaya users comes to R10.20 (about 1.24 dollars) per one-way trip to work, as compared to R11.70 (about 1.42 dollars) for other modes of transport like mini-bus taxis, which most people used to take before Rea Vaya.

Overall, the direct benefits of Rea Vaya are skewed in favour of middle- rather than lower-income residents, the researchers concluded. They suggested that more specific targeting was needed for the BRT to deliver significant poverty reduction benefits.

The situation is similar with the City of Cape Town’s MyCiTi early phase BRT service.
African Centre of Excellence for Studies in Public and Non-motorised Transport (ACET) researchers Lorita Maunganidze and Romano Del Mistro used ACET Household Survey data to conclude that MyCiTi might not be of value to poor commuters.

“While poor commuters may benefit from more accessible, frequent and fast BRT services, ironically, these will be more expensive and in some cases unaffordable to them and therefore of no benefit,” the researchers said.

They recommend that the routing structure be revised and rationalised to make in-vehicle and trip distances shorter, particularly for the poor commuters who face the longest commuting distances and times; and that local BRT be tailored more specifically to work within the South African environment or under South African conditions.

Councilor Brett Herron, City of Cape Town’s Mayoral Committee Member for Transport, Roads and Stormwater, told IPS that it is not possible to look at the impact of a new BRT service on poverty, or on poor communities, in isolation from the entire public transport network.

“BRT is just one mode of transport and this mode alone cannot have expansive direct economic benefits to poor communities … BRT trunks alone are not going to bring about the level of change we require in order to universally benefit the urban poor.

“We will seriously address poverty only when we piece together all the complicated components of this puzzle; public transport is one piece – with changed land use, densification, transit-orientated development, all responding to new or improved public transport corridors, we will start to bring people to opportunities and take opportunities to people.”

Pauline Froschauer, project manager for Rustenburg Rapid Transport, which is currently in the construction phase, told IPS that instead of poverty alleviation, a transport project such as a BRT should be measured against what is usually its primary objective: the effect it has on levels of mobility and accessibility.

“At best one could say that by improving mobility and accessibility, there are positive ‘externalities’, such as city development, local economic development and poverty alleviation. But to try to measure this in one BRT corridor (such as the Soweto-CBD Rea Vaya) is, I think, misrepresentative. Until one has a reasonable network effect, improved mobility and accessibility will not be achieved.”

Electric cars reduce urban air pollution. Credit: Tinus de Jager/IPS

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Aug 29 2012 (IPS)

A 120-million-dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to the nationwide Electric Vehicle (EV) Project aims to promote and expand the use of electric vehicles in the United States.

The EV Project has a goal of handing out 14,000 free electric vehicle chargers, including commercial host stations as well as home smart chargers, that households can use to charge electric vehicles at home.

The programme is currently being run by a company called Ecotality in nine states: Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Washington.

The grant is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic stimulus package enacted by President Barack Obama and Congress to invest government dollars in programmes to create jobs, and, among other things, make green investments.

Free smart chargers are available to anybody who purchases a Nissan LEAF or Chevy Volt, the two most common models of electric vehicles, while businesses can host commercial chargers for free.

Shifting towards renewable energy

Proponents of the programme point out that increasing the use of electric vehicles in the United States will reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

However, the electricity still must be produced somehow, and in many cases still, it is done through coal and nuclear power plants.

A recent report by Environment Georgia has found that nevertheless, switching from gasoline-powered cars to electric ones still has benefits in reducing global warming, even in a state such as Georgia, which is far behind other states in moving to renewable energy.

According to the report, over 30,000 electric vehicles are already on the road in the United States. If national projected electric vehicle sales are met, 628,773 metric tonnes of global-warming emissions will be prevented each year, based on the current energy grid across the United States.

And if the vehicles are powered solely with renewable energy, the report projects that these emissions could be reduced by more than 1.9 million metric tonnes each year.

“There are still (pollution) savings. Obviously you would see greater savings if the grid mix were to change and improve,” Jennette Gayer, executive director of Environment Georgia, told IPS.

“The great benefit to electric cars is…that they’re the only vehicle that over time gets cleaner,” Ben Echols, electric transportation program manager for Georgia Power, told IPS.

“A normal internal combustion vehicle – the cleanest it’s going to be is the day you drive off the lot….The older it gets, the dirtier it gets,” Echols said.

“The electric vehicle is going to get cleaner. We are, as a company, going to continue to lower our emissions. We’re required by federal regulations to add cleaner generation to our mix. Our mix is going to get cleaner over time,” Echols said.

Partnering to save

Georgia Power is one of the industry groups that is partnering with Ecotality. The company is offering a reduced energy rate for customers who use most of their energy at night; the rate is designed for customers with electric vehicles who are charging their cars between the hours of 11 pm and 7 am, which are considered extremely off-peak hours.

Utility companies undoubtedly stand to gain by promoting electric vehicles, which, after all, boost demand for electricity. But even though consumers must pay for electricity, the cost must also be compared to the prospect of paying for gasoline instead.

The Environment Georgia report pointed out some of the many costs of relying on oil, recalling the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 along the Gulf of Mexico. Electric cars have the potential to reduce such costs by shifting the reliance onto renewable energy.

“I think that electric vehicles actually help the deployment of renewables,” Gayer explained. “If we go to electric vehicles, it will be easier to go later on to renewables.”

Cleaning up the grid

Yet there are risks. “If you do a huge roll-out of electric vehicles and don’t change the grid, Georgia Power and companies can use it as excuse to push really dirty proposals. But we’re headed as a country overall – not necessarily in Georgia – we’re heading in the right direction,” Gayer said. “There are (Environmental Protection Agency) rules coming down the pike that will continue to push towards cleaning up our grid.”

Electric vehicles are indeed making a comeback. A 2006 documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car,” shows how the oil and automobile industry conspired to prevent an electric car model, the General Motors EV1, from becoming popular in the mid-1990’s.

By comparison, the success of electric vehicles today is a stark turnabout from nearly twenty years ago, when the EV1 died young. Environment Georgia reported that in 2011, the first year electric vehicles came back on the market in the United States, over 17,000 were purchased.