Peru and Brazil Messing around with dams

Nov 19th 2009 | INAMBARI
From The Economist print edition

First build a road, then flood it

JOSÉ CHÁVEZ, a farmer, is one of the few people in the Inambari area who welcomes a plan to build a huge hydroelectric dam where the departments of Madre de Dios, Cusco and Puno meet in Peru’s south-eastern jungle. He says that the waters of the Araza and Inambari rivers, which merge a stone’s throw from his back porch, regularly flood his rambling wooden house. It would be permanently flooded if the dam is built. Mr Chávez trusts in the promise he has received of relocation.

Inambari is one of up to six proposed hydroelectricity schemes on Peru’s jungle rivers, costing around $16 billion, contained in an agreement signed in April by the president, Alan García, and his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Inambari dam would be the first to be built. It would generate 2,000 megawatts of electricity—twice the output of Peru’s largest existing hydroelectric plant, and almost half its current electricity consumption. Most of the power would be exported to Brazil to start with, but the proportions would slowly reverse and after 30 years Peru would own the $4 billion project.

The dam would create a lake of up to 450 square kms (175 square miles), flooding some 60 villages, as well as roads and forest. Egasur, a Brazilian-owned consortium promoting the scheme, says that people displaced by the dam would be rehoused in better conditions.

Peru’s environment minister, Antonio Brack, has dropped his earlier opposition to the scheme. He says it offers benefits, including fish farming. The government claims local politicians are whipping up dissent ahead of local elections next year.

But for whatever reason, opposition is growing. Locals are keener on another big project, the paving of the grandly named Inter-Oceanic Highway linking Pacific ports in southern Peru to the Brazilian city of Rio Branco, from where a highway goes on to São Paulo, 3,600 kms (2,250 miles) from Cusco. The two governments agreed in 2005 to asphalt the road. Work is proceeding rapidly and both presidents would like it to be finished before they leave office in 2011. Inconveniently, the Inambari dam would flood 120 kms of the highway, on which upgrading work has already begun. It seems that in both Peru and Brazil the ministries of transport and of energy don’t talk to each other.

peruvianlawyer wrote: Nov 24th 2009 12:45 GMT Dear Sir.
Probably project planners in Peru and Brazil, have been inspired by a nymph and plan to build a pharaonic and lavish glass dome with neon lights and video projectors intertwined with advertising clips, news and stories of ghosts over the 120 miles of road to avoid being flooded with water from the new dam and also to serve as a tourist attraction for drivers of trucks that eventually venture to carry goods across the continent by land at a cost of gold for delivery in a Peruvian port a ship that comes from crossing the Straits of Magellan and the Panama Canal and going back. Hopefully this time the reality no more than fiction, for the sake of the Amazon.