The
Amazon: IIRSA thinks big, seeking business
Infrastructure development in the name
of regional economic integration poses one of the greatest challenges
to environmental sustainability and social justice today. The
initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South
America (IIRSA) is a striking example of this new trend. IIRSA
proposes a series of large-scale, high-risk and debt-heavy mega-projects
that would result in extensive alterations to landscapes and livelihoods
in the region. In this development framework, mountains, forests,
and wetlands are seen as barriers to economic development and
rivers become the means for extracting natural resources.
The IIRSA initiative is coordinated
by all 12 South American governments, with the technical and financial
support of multilateral and national banks. It consists of 10
hubs of economic integration cutting across the continent and
requiring major investment in transport, energy and telecommunications;
and at least 7 sectoral integration processes designed to harmonize
regulatory frameworks amongst the countries.
So far IIRSA has identified over 40
composite mega-projects for funding together with hundreds of
smaller infrastructure improvement projects, with an aggregate
cost in the tens of billions of US dollars. Given its magnitude
and the scale of its potential impacts, many environmental organizations
are referring to IIRSA as a “gigaproject.”
IIRSA is in fact a forum for innumerable
conflicts and controversies that bear little relationship to alleged
benefits for the poor. This is nothing new considering the political
and economic interests involved and the amount of financial resources
circulating. In addition to the governments of the 12 South
American governments, other old and new actors from the financial
area are involved, such as the Inter-American Development Bank
(IDB), the Andean Development Corporation (ADC), the Financial
Fund for the Development of the River Plate Basin (Fonplata),
the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES),
the World Bank (IBRD), and major corporations.
The combination of investment in highway
construction, widespread dredging, and dams proposed under IIRSA,
with significant investment from the private sector in resource
extraction and agro-industry (for example soy-bean) will not only
have direct effects on biodiversity, but also indirect effects
on peasant and farm workers.
Historically, this has led to the displacement
of rural and indigenous peoples, massive migration and deforestation.
All of these developments potentially undermine the viability
of the region’s small-farm sector, established national parks,
indigenous territories, and biodiversity reserves. Many of the
projects proposed by IIRSA are in fact old national infrastructure
projects that are being integrated into the regional framework
in the hopes of reviving them. The environmental, social, cultural
and economic impacts of these projects on areas such as the Andes,
the Amazon Basin, Mato Grosso, Pantanal and the Paraguay and Parana
Rivers will be significant and, in many cases, irreversible.
The Amazon is being incorporated by
force in the integration strategy sponsored by IIRSA. Parts of
the Amazon territory of interest to big capital are the target
of investment seeking to insert them in the capitalist globalization
dynamics, with its rationale of inequality and exclusion. The
Amazon hub covers almost 1,000 miles of the Amazon Basin, from
the Pacific to the Atlantic coast. It includes part of Brazil,
Colombia, Ecuador and Peru as well as the Amazon River and most
of its main tributaries. This is an area covering 4,500
million square kilometres and involving approximately 52 million
inhabitants. It contains almost half of the world’s total biological
diversity and between 15 and 20 percent of its fresh water supply.
Presently the Amazon hub contains 54
IIRSA projects, divided into 7 project clusters, most of them
organized around the watersheds of tributaries to the Amazon River.
The Brazilian Amazon is part of three hubs foreseen by IIRSA:
the Amazon hub (Amazonas, Para and Amapa) the Guyanes Shield (Roraima
and Amapa) and the Peru-Brazil-Bolivia hub (Acre, Rondônia, Amazonas
and Mato Grosso). In the Brazilian Amazon the IIRSA list includes
the construction of hydroelectric plants, lines of transmission
between hydroelectric plants, construction and rehabilitation
of highways, construction of ports, a pulp-mill, soy bean and
instant coffee processing plants, a meat packing plant and transport
works along over 6,000 km of navigable waterways as a way of increasing
the movement of products and exit of natural resources.
The construction of new hydroelectric
plants in the Amazon will have the function of generating energy
to be used mainly by the most dynamic economic centres, enabling
the expansion of waterways as well as of activities producing
highly commercial export-oriented crops (for example soy beans)
and supplying industrial plants that need large amounts of energy.
A characteristic element of IIRSA is
that it is usually totally unknown, not only to local community
leaders but also to the business community, leaders of federal
bodies, members of the Judicial Power and parliamentarians, among
others. The decisions on this new land planning and on infrastructure
projects aimed at the region are not discussed with local state
and municipal governments, and still less with social movements,
non-governmental organizations, or Amazon educational and research
institutions among others.
The struggle for access and control
of the Amazon’s natural resources is becoming increasingly acrimonious.
Today this type of conflict is widespread in the region. A classical
vision of the expansion of the southern frontier towards the north
and of the eastern frontier to the west is not enough to explain
the nature and dynamics of conflicts in the Northern Brazil, as
the present trend is that of conflicts disseminated all over the
Amazon territory, covering areas that are not necessarily contiguous
and involving people and institutions from different countries.
However, the creation and consolidation
of networks and fora of social movements, pastoral groups, non-governmental
organizations and the academic community are increasing in a necessary
and comprehensive response to a threat that is global in nature.
Article based on information from: “Amazon
Hub”, Building Informed Civic Engagement for Conservation in the
Andes-Amazon (BICECA),
http://www.biceca.org/en/Index.aspx; “Incorporação compulsória
de territórios”, e “IIRSA: os riscos da integração”, Guilherme
Carvalho, Máster en Planificación del Desarrollo (NAEA/UFPA)
y técnico de FASE Amazônia – Núcleo Cidadania, published in Orçamento
y Política Socioambiental, Nº 17, September 2006, Instituto
de Estudos Socioeconômicos – INESC,
http://www.inesc.org.br/pt/publicacoes/boletins/boletim.php?oid=XGyKPM5ozIOetvHwajV6FgCFnwST07xN
