Welcome to the No Belo Monte blog. The first few posts are copied from a blog about the meeting of all those people – Indians, riverside dwellers and rural agriculturalists – who will be affected by this monstrous dam. They came together in May 2008, in the town of Altamira, Pará, Brazil.
For anyone who has come to this blog by chance, first a little background. This blog is specifically to cover a large gathering of tribal indigenous people and small farmers in the Amazon ‘frontier’ town of Altamira. The event will see a thousand Indians, in war-paint and feathers, gathered together with riverside dwellers and small farmers to show their opposition to a series of hydroelectric dams which threaten to destroy their lives and huge swathes of the Amazon environment. The largest of these is Belo Monte, which will be the third largest in the world if it goes ahead.
Brazil is a fast developing country which is in many ways an example to the rest of the world.
It has set aside almost 30% of its Amazon territory as protected areas, a combination of indigenous reserves, national parks, national forests, biological reserves, extractive reserves, etc. Excluding emissions from land use change it produces a very modest level of greenhouse gases per head of population, helped partly by a longstanding reliance on alcohol produced from sugar cane to fuel its road vehicles.
But when you add the emissions from the destruction of the forests, Brazil rises to become the fourth worst polluter per head of population in the world. After several years of decreasing deforestation, 2007 saw a dramatic rise, and commentators expect 2008 to be substantially worse still.
Brazil has recently discovered huge offshore oil deposits, but it used to be thought to have very little oil so successive governments have sought to reduce its dependence on oil imports by promoting alternative sources of energy.
One of the sources most favoured has long been hydroelectricity, provided mainly by huge dams like Itaipu, Balbina and Tucurui. Although today these supply nearly 80% of Brazil’s electricity, they have attracted substantial criticism.
Each of these huge schemes has come at huge environmental and social cost. The first was Itaipu, on the border with Argentina and Paraguay. It destroyed a beautiful series of waterfalls called ‘Sete Quedas’ (Seven Falls). Itaipu flooded 1,350 square kilometres and displaced 10,000 families.
The development of Balbina was far more destructive. Here, the valley was wide and shallow, and the dam flooded a huge area, 2,360 square kilmetres, including significant parts of the demarcated reserve of the Waimiri-Atroari, who received little by way of compensation. The shallow reservoir has since been shown to emit huge amounts of methane and nitrous oxide, both very powerful greenhouse gases. It has been estimated that shallow dams in tropical areas produce between four and ten times as much greenhouse gas as would be produced in generating the same amount of electricity from fossil fuels.
In the case of Tucurui, the closest large dam to Belo Monte, the electricity company failed to clear the vegetation before the reservoir was flooded, leading to even higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, the water became acidic as the vegetation rotted, resulting in the death of huge numbers of fish and problems caused by corrosion of the turbines.
In social terms, Tucurui has been a disaster. Thousands of small farmers were displaced as the water rose, and twenty years on many are still fighting for promised compensation which has never been paid.
Two Indian tribes were forced to move from their ancestral lands and continue to this day to suffer the effects of the move. Being unable to live in the traditional way, they are now dependent on subsidies from the electricity company and handouts from the government. But monetary payments can never compensate them for the permanent destruction of their traditional lifestyles and the decimation of their culture. These once proud and self-sufficient people have been all but destroyed.
Now the government and the state electricity company want to bring the same chaos and destruction to the Xingu, one of the last intact riverine ecosystems in the Amazon.
Plans to dam the Xingu go back to the 1980s, when the dam was ironically called Karaoari, after an Indian village which would have been drowned under the rising water. Then the plan was dropped when the World Bank withdrew funding on environmental and social grounds, following a demonstration similar to the one which is happening this week.
© Patrick Cunningham
No Belo Monte Dam 