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



Bolivia: Brazilian dam project threatens the lives of Amazon communities

On 11 September 2006 the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) (the Brazilian environmental authority) approved the Environmental Impact Assessment on the construction of two dams in Brazilian territory on the Madera River, the largest tributary to the Amazon River.

This issue had cause concern amongst Bolivian and Brazilian scientists because, according to the data from the study itself, the dams will slow down the speed of the river flow, causing changes in the river itself and deteriorating the water quality, in addition to the impacts on smaller rivers flowing into the Madera river, an aspect not considered in the Environmental Impact Assessment. The flood area will reach as far as Bolivia and with time, the river bed will rise, with further negative effects on the flood problem.

Additionally, the expected changes will affect the living conditions of the inhabitants of the Bolivian Amazon, who obtain most of their food and sustenance from the rivers and the forest. Representatives of organizations and institutions from the northern Amazon region have stated with alarm that "these changes are going to frighten off the fish and bring them disease and death and the same will happen with the birds and other river animals and forest animals. The gathering of Brazil nuts and timber-yielding species will be seriously affected."

The tropical forest remaining in the hands of Bolivia is still in a good state of preservation. Apart from agriculture, hunting and fishing, the population basically subsists on extractive activities such as gathering Brazil nuts (Bertholletia excelsa), of which Bolivia is the greatest exporter in the world. Brazil nut economy requires unaltered forests. Unlike Bolivia, in the Brazilian zone of the Amazon the environment has been greatly destroyed with forests replaced by grazing lands for cattle and displacement, very often under duress, of communities further increasing the ranks of the shanty-towns in the Brazilian mega-cities. For them development has signified becoming city poor and in many cases for the indigenous peoples of the region, it has signified their physical extermination. The inhabitants of the rural area of the Amazon region grow crops in the wetlands left by the rivers following the rainy season. The projected dams will flood these areas permanently, thus eliminating the agricultural base for many communities. Furthermore, this permanent flooding will contaminate their drinking water, bringing with it greater problems of malaria, dengue, leishmaniasis (an infectious parasitic skin disease), diarrhoea in children and possibly other diseases as was the case in Brazil with the construction of other dams.

The construction of hydroelectric plants is usually accompanied by the promise of cheap energy but, as in other cases, the astronomical cost of the dam and its installations may well convert the myth of cheap energy from the rivers into a sad reality of high costs and greater foreign indebtedness for the countries involved.

The two dams and their transmission line will in fact be part of a larger project including two other dams, one in waters shared between Brazil and Bolivia and the other in the latter country in addition to a 4000 km long waterway that will oblige major changes to be made in the region’s river system to convert them into canals.

Considering the serious threat facing the Amazon region, representatives of organizations and institutions from the northern Amazon region –municipal councillors, the university community, representatives of fisherfolk associations, indigenous peoples’ associations, rural school teachers, CARITAS, IPHAE, Foro Regional Norte Amazónico, FOBOMADE, among others - gathered in the City of Riberalta, Bolivia, on 12 October 2006, resolved:

"To request the National Government to intervene immediately before the Government of Brazil and international organizations, such as the United Nations, in defence of our territory, our rivers, our flora and fauna, the environment and our way of life. We also request that our right to timely information on the formalities and results of these formalities be recognized and taken into account.

To warn the Brazilian government that we will defend our territory at all international proceedings and show the world how major works are planned, regardless of the populations inhabiting the Amazon and regardless of the environment.

To convene our Brazilian brothers and sisters who are concerned and likely to be affected by the works, to join us in a world protest together with all the peoples and nations of the world, in defence of our Amazon territory."

Article based on information from: "Pronunciamiento de la región amazónica de Bolivia en torno a las represas proyectadas sobre el Río Madera", 12 October 2006, sent by Foro Boliviano sobre Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo (FOBOMADE), e-mail: comunicación@fobomade.org.bo,http://www.fobomade.org.bo; "Destrucción de la Amazonía: Brasil aprueba EIA de represas que inundarán territorio boliviano", Pablo Villegas, FOBOMADE, http://www.fobomade.org.bo/foro/doc/brasil_madera_bolivia.pdf