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Introduction What will be left of the Xingu river for the people of Xingu?
– Ademir Alfeu Federicci,
opponent of the Belo Monte Dam murdered in 2001
The Brazilian government is moving ahead "at any cost" with plans to build the third-largest dam in the world and one of the Amazon's most controversial development projects – the Belo Monte dam on the Xingu River in the state of Pará. The Belo Monte dam complex dates back to Brazil's military dictatorship and the government has attempted to build it through various series of national investment programs including Brasil em Ação and the Program to Accelerate Growth. The original plans have been green-washed through multiple public relations programs over the course of two decades in the face of massive international and national protest.
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What the Electricity Is For
The government claims that Belo Monte's cheap energy will power the houses of the poor across Brazil. The reality is that energy exported from Belo Monte would be consumed at the Carajás, Jurutí, and Alumar aluminum smelting mines in Pará and Maranhão before traveling through transmission lines to São Paulo and the Southeast. The state of Pará is Brazil's leading producer of bauxite, the raw material for the production of aluminum.
The electricity may be exported in large part to eight industrial mining and construction companies: Alcoa, ArcelorMittal, Camargo Corrêa, CSN, Gerdau, Samarco, Vale, and Votorantim. These companies consume 25% of all energy produced in Brazil but only reproduce half the energy they consume.
Impacts on Environment and People
Belo Monte's three reservoirs will flood 400 square kilometers of agricultural land and forest and cause a permanent drought on the Xingu River's "Big Bend," directly affecting the Paquiçamba territory of the Juruna indigenous people. Over 20,000 people will be relocated from the municipalities of Altamira and Vitoria do Xingu. In addition, two huge channels 500 meters wide by 75 km long will be excavated to divert water from the main dam to the power plant, unearthing more land than was removed to build the Panama Canal.
Hydroelectric production is touted as both a solution to Brazil's periodic blackouts and as the "clean development" approach to global climate change. However, the National Amazon Research Institute (INPA) calculated that during its first 10 years of operation, Belo Monte would emit 112 million Megagrams (Mg) of CO2 equivalent, equal to the CO2 emissions of 2,156,460 passenger vehicles per year.1
Belo Monte will also attract 100,000 migrants to the region. However, at the height of construction, only 40,000 jobs – only 2,000 of them long-term – will have been created. The remaining labor pool will find jobs in illegal logging and cattle ranching, the two largest causes of deforestation in the Amazon. Meanwhile, the housing and services needs of those who do become employed will add pressure to faulty infrastructure in Altamira and Vitoria do Xingú.
For the Xingu's poor farmers, temporary employment created by the dam is not a viable replacement for lost agricultural lands and the river's fish supply. Considered an 'obstacle' to business interests, indigenous peoples are particularly vulnerable. Mega-projects typically confront indigenous communities with disease, loss of food and clean water sources, cultural disintegration and human rights abuses by lumber cutters, migrant workers and land speculators. The indirect and long term impacts of Belo Monte are of even greater concern as other unsustainable industries such as aluminum and metal refineries, soy plantations, logging, and mining expand into the area.
Energy Inefficiency and Future Upstream Dams
Belo Monte will be one of the most energy inefficient dams in the history of Brazil. It will produce only 10% of its 11,233 MW installed capacity during the 3-5 month-long dry season, an average of only 4,462 MW throughout the year, or 39% of its nominal capacity. To guarantee a year-round flow of water, the government would need to construct another series of large dams on the Xingu and tributaries that will impact forests and forest peoples.
The original plans for Belo Monte included six dams: Kararão (11000 MW), Babaquara (6590 MW), Jarina (620 MW), Ipixuna (1900 MW), Iriri (770 MW), and Kokraimoro (1490 MW). However, when the indigenous people of the Xingú rejected the dams and defended the river in 1989, the government changed their approach: the name Kararão (a war cry in Kayapó) became "Belo Monte," the name Babaquara became "Altamira," and so forth.
At the Second Historical Encounter in Defense of the Xingú in May 2008, the government announced it would reduce the number of dams to four: Belo Monte, Altamira, Pombal, and São Felix. Then, in 2009, the government announced it would only license and auction one dam complex – "Belo Monte" – which in reality contains the main dam at Ilha Pimental, two water diversion channels, a complementary reinforcement dam on the "Big Bend," and the main turbine house at Belo Monte do Pontal. However, because of the wild swings in water load of the Xingú River between the rainy season and dry season, the government knows that building Belo Monte is economically unviable unless more dams are built upstream. As such, project plans continue to point to five dams: Belo Monte, Ilha do Pimental, Altamira, Pombal, and São Felix.
These upstream dams would impact numerous Kayapó territories, flood the lands of peoples such as the Araweté, Assuriní and Arara, and flood an additional 6,000 km2 of forests in the municipality of Altamira.
Sustainable Alternatives
WWF-Brazil released a report in 2007 stating that Brazil could cut its expected demand for electricity by 40% by 2020 by investing in energy efficiency. The power saved would be equivalent to 14 Belo Monte hydroelectric plants and would result in national electricity savings of up to R$33 billion (US$19 billion).2
Retrofitting existing hydroelectric infrastructure would also add thousands of megawatts to the energy grid without needing to dam another river. A first step would be to reduce the amount of energy lost during transmission, replace energy inefficient household products, and to update old and failing generators. Rather than invest in large, inefficient dams, Brazil has the potential to be a global leader in energy efficiency and renewables, conserving the Amazon ecosystem, and drastically cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Project Finance and Cost
The Belo Monte dam complex is expected to cost upwards of USD $20 billion, including $2.5 billion for the transmission lines. The project has been developed by the state-owned energy company Eletronorte, and would be funded largely by the Brazilian Development Bank, which has publicly committed to financing up to 70% of the project cost. However, the government has used public pension funds to spark more competition among investors ahead of the auction. So far, investors have been put off by the artificially low tender price of R$83 ($47 USD) per megawatt-hour, since they feel it does not reflect Belo Monte's true economic, social, and environmental costs. 3
Investors interested in the project tender include mining giants Alcoa and Vale, construction conglomerates Andrade Gutierrez and Votorantim, and energy companies GDF Suez and Neoenergia, The project tender will take place in Brasilia on April 20, 2010. Odebrecht and Correa-Camârgo, originally expected to vie for the tender, dropped out in early April 2010. State energy company Eletrobras is expected to form a 49% partnership with whichever consortia wins the auction.
Grave Omissions in the Environmental Impact Assessment
In February 2010, Brazilian environmental agency IBAMA granted the provisional environmental license for the construction of the dam despite uproar from within the agency about incomplete information in Eletrobras' environmental assessment. 4 The IBAMA technical team assigned to the project declared that "there are insufficient elements to attest to the environmental viability of the project" due to the omission of data in the EIA. Data was missing regarding water quality, socioeconomic indicators, and fish populations, and flimsy plans to mitigate the direct impacts on riverine families were devised last minute. Despite this, the head of IBAMA approved the EIA and stipulated the winning consortium to monitor the project impacts over a six-year "trial period" of operation. This "wait and see" attitude is no way to manage the environmental impacts of the world's third-largest dam.
In protest, two senior technicians at IBAMA, Leozildo Tabajara da Silva Benjamin and Sebastião Custódio Pires, resigned their posts in 2009 after citing high-level political pressure to approve the project despite the obvious omissions in the EIA. 5
140 organizations and movements from Brazil and across the globe decried the decision-making process in granting the environmental license for the dams in a letter to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2010. 6
Lack of Public Consultation
The government claims that proper public hearings were held to consult indigenous people and river dwellers about the impacts of Belo Monte. Indeed, Minister of the Environment Carlos Minc claimed that the public hearings were "pedagogic." However, this could not be farther from the truth. Only four public hearings were held in the cities of Altamira and Vitória do Xingú, destinations that take days for indigenous people traveling by boat to reach. Even so, at the public hearings security forces impeded the entrance of civil society representatives, and the few public queries that were asked were dismissed, ridiculed, and answered evasively by Eletrobras experts.
Legal Challenges
Brazil's Federal Attorney General filed two judicial actions in 2010 against IBAMA for having granted the provisional environmental license without responding to the omissions in Eletrobras' environmental assessment. The judicial actions argue that the missing water quality data violates National Environmental Council (CONAMA) Resolution 357, which establishes the standards for water quality to avoid eutrophication, and article 176 of the Brazilian Federal Constitution, which prohibits the development of hydrological energy potential on indigenous lands without a previous fulfillment of regulatory mechanisms. 7
The Federal Injunctions of the Belo Monte Auction
The Belo Monte auction took place on April 20, 2010 amidst the street protests taking place in major cities across Brazil. Leading up to the auction date three injunctions (restraining orders) were issued by a federal judge of Altamira. Favoring the civil action lawsuits filed by the Brazilian Federal Public Prosecutors Office and human rights and environmentalist NGOs, the injunctions were struck down by a regional appellate court judge, under heavy political pressure from the Lula government. It is important to stress that the auction took place while the third restraining order was in full effect (as explained below).
The first injunction suspended the projects first phase of the environmental license and the auction on the grounds that proper regulations were not followed according to Article 176 of the Brazilian constitution, which regulates mining and hydroelectric activity on indigenous peoples' lands.
The second injunction temporarily canceled the environmental license granted by the environmental agency IBAMA (The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) and the auction on the grounds that the extent of social and environmental impacts and the viability of the project were still unknown. Furthermore, proper consultations with the communities that would be affected by the dam were not undertaken, ignoring Brazilian law supported by ILO Convention 169 stipulating the need for free, prior, informed consent of the affected indigenous peoples.
The third injuction claimed that the auction was held with different data for the reservoir size than the data approved by the provisional license. The projected area of Belo Monte's reservoir size in the project auction would be 29,47% greater than that for which the provisional license had been granted. On those grounds, the third injunction asked for the auction to be cancelled. The injunction also asked for a new comprehensive environmental impact assessment.
Each injunction was overturned in a matter of hours by the President of the Appellate Court for 'Region 1' - which covers the entire Amazon basin - succumbing to political pressure from the Lula administration The third injunction was served on April 20th, minutes before the Belo Monte auction began, entering the public domain somewhere between 12.25 pm and 1pm, and the auction starting at 1.20 or 1.24 pm). The Attorney General's office claims that the parties were notified before the auction started, yet ANEEL disregarded the message and held the project auction anyways.
The Attorney General's office has since claimed it will investigate whether the injunction was received before the auction began. If this was the case, and the injunction was ignored as has been claimed, there is the possibility that the auction may be considered illegal and its outcome therefore cancelled.
References
- Periódicos UFPA, As hidrelétricas de Belo Monte e Altamira (Babaquara) como fontes de gases de efeito estufa
- WWF-Brazil and Greenpeace, Brazil's Sustainable Power Sector Vision 2020
- Canal Energia, Medeiros, C., Belo Monte: agentes consideram baixo preço-teto de R$ 68/MWh (accessed February 10, 2010)
- British Broadcasting Corporation, Brazil grants environmental licence for Belo Monte dam (accessed February 2, 2010)
- Huntingtonnews.net, "Shame on Brazil: Stop the Amazon Mega-Dam Project Belo Monte"
- International Rivers, Appeal to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
- Agência Brasil, MPF afirma que projeto de Belo Monte viola Constituição (accessed April 9, 2010)
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