Altamira, Brazil – Nearly 2,000 miles to the south, in the huge cities of
Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, electricity is being rationed and blackouts
are a greater threat. But government planners say they see a solution here
in the heart of the Amazon basin, where they hope to harness its network of
rivers into a new source of power.
As a starter, Brazil is speeding up plans to build the world’s third-largest
dam east of here on a bend in the Xingu River; if built, that would increase
the country’s hydroelectric capacity 15 percent.
Thus far, the only thing that the government’s ambitious program has managed
to generate is fierce opposition among people living in the region. “The
Brazilian government is about to commit another crime against the Amazon,”
local environmental and religious groups argued in S O S Xingu, a call to
resistance. In responding to the power crisis, they say, the government is
investing in “megaprojects whose target of priority is the rivers of the
Amazon because the rivers of other regions are in a state of collapse.”
Opponents of the dam project maintain that it is economically inefficient
and would devastate jungles, rivers and wildlife, uproot Indians and
settlers, and impede navigation. To the contrary, government planners say,
not only can the region’s huge energy resources be safely tapped, but also
the necessity to do so is mounting.
Over the last five years, electricity consumption in this nation of 170
million has grown at a 5.3 percent annual pace, far exceeding the growth of
supply. This year, a severe drought has lowered water levels in the
reservoirs used to generate electricity, and mandatory rationing was imposed
in June. That required consumers around the nation, business and
individuals, to cut their consumption by varying amounts or face fines or a
suspension of service; in most of the country the mandated cut was 20
percent.
“Not all of the potential of the Amazon basin can or should be developed,”
said Paulo Cesar Magalhaes Domingues, energy planning manager for
Eletronorte, the state- run power company overseeing the dam project, which
is known as the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Complex.
But he said that since the government had decided it needed new generating
capacity, Belo Monte had become “an indispensable part of that effort.”
Everything about the project is cast in a huge scale, beginning with an
annual output of 11,000 megawatts. In addition, to minimize the area to be
flooded, a pair of canals about a quarter-mile wide and seven and a half
miles long are to be built to connect two sections of the Xingu River in
what company officials describe as perhaps the largest excavation project
since the Panama Canal.
Belo Monte is budgeted at $6.6 billion and scheduled to begin producing
power in 2008.
Of that total cost, $3.9 billion is for construction of the dam complex
itself and $2.7 billion is to string transmission lines to the industrial
cities in the south, which will be main consumers of the new supply.
Critics of the project say those projections are wildly optimistic and point
to the Tucurui project, also in the Amazon, 175 miles east of here on the
Tocantins River. Budgeted at $4.7 billion when construction began in the
late 1970’s, that project has now cost more than $10 billion, according to
independent estimates.
In addition, opponents dismiss as a ruse the government’s statement that
Belo Monte will generate 11,000 megawatts. In reality, they say and
Eletronorte officials acknowledge, the plant’s production will be severely
curtailed during five months of the Amazon dry season, giving the plant an
average annual production of less than 5,000 megawatts and raising doubts
about its economic viability.
In contrast to previous gigantic dam projects in Brazil like Itaipu, at
12,600 megawatts the world’s second largest hydroelectric power plant, built
with Paraguay, and Tucurui, the government hopes to keep costs down by
bringing in private investors as majority partners. But that has fanned
doubt about the government’s willingness to keep the promises it is making
and its ability to control the activities of the managing company.
“Up north, it is more complicated to attract capital to this sort of thing,”
President Fernando Henrique Cardoso said in a recent interview. “But we want
to attract investment to new undertakings like Belo Monte, which can be
another Itaipu and which we are determined to carry out.”
Opponents of the project also argue that Brazil, which relies on dams to
generate more than 90 percent of its electricity, needs to diversify into
sources of energy like solar and wind power and biomass. But Eletronorte
officials say hydropower is much cheaper than those and safer than nuclear
energy, which Brazil is also developing.
Company officials say they have made a good-faith effort to minimize
disruption to the Amazon’s delicate environment and to address local
concerns, for instance, redesigning the project so the area to be flooded
has fallen by more than two-thirds, to 155 square miles. They also dispute
local complaints about environmental damage that construction might cause.
“The truth is that a lot of the area that is going to be flooded has already
been deforested,” said Silvia Goncalves Ramos, a sociologist and economist
who is in charge of community outreach for the project.
Indeed, that is true, the critics say. They fear that Belo Monte will only
worsen the devastation. New development, they say, will bring an influx of
sharp business practices from the south and increase in social tension, as
they say occurred at Tucurui.
“Belo Monte can only accelerate the exodus of small farmers and unleash a
whole process in which large ranching and logging interests would come in,”
said Bruno Kempner, coordinator of the Movement for the Development of the
Trans-Amazon and the Xingu, a farmers’ rights group. “They’ve already marked
out parcels of land as large as 2.5 million acres around the dam site, some
of which are occupied by settlers who have lived there for many years.”
There is also talk of building an industrial park in order to attract
manufacturers to the area, which is far from good highways or other
transport links. Local people say they fear the only companies likely to be
interested are heavily subsidized, intensive users of energy, like aluminum
producers.
“If this project is only going to produce energy, then it is not good for
us,” said Vilmar Soares, president of the local Commercial, Industrial and
Agricultural Association. “There has to be some value added, in the form of
new jobs being generated, that improves the quality of life.” He hopes for
an infusion of good-paying, permanent jobs.
Those objections notwithstanding, the government seems determined to move
ahead. The National Council for Energy Policy, which is charged with dealing
with the electricity crisis, issued a decree last month declaring Belo Monte
to be of “strategic interest” to Brazil; it ordered Eletronorte to complete
all impact and feasibility studies by the middle of December.
“This project really shows what the rest of Brazil really wants from the
Amazon,” said Lucio Flavio Pinto, editor of Amazon Agenda, an independent
newsletter that covers the region. “It’s a colonial model in which we supply
brute energy and all other kinds of raw materials to the south, but don’t
get any of the benefits of development and remain poor and backward.”
