Brazil’s Dredging Raises Doubts About Promise to Protect Vast Wetlands

Day after day, a dredger sucks sand off the bottom of the Paraguay River along Brazil’s far western border and shoots it downstream in a muddy swirl.

It’s just routine channel maintenance, operators say.

But environmentalists are skeptical. They fear the dredging is part of an unspoken plan to sidestep ecological protests and build, little by little, a commercial waterway that could doom the world’s largest wetlands and kill endangered birds and animals.

In March, the Brazilian government announced it was dropping plans for the “hidrovia,” a long-sought shipping route into South America’s heartland that would cut through the vast Pantanal wetlands, which are three times the size of the Florida Everglades.

Eduardo Martins, head of Brazil’s Environmental Protection Agency, said at the time that the hidrovia “does not have much strategic value and would put the Pantanal at risk.”

But as months have passed and dredging goes on, the cheering of environmentalists has given way to dismay.

“Our big fear is they’ve abandoned the mega-project only to have it done in stages,” says Alcides Faria, president of Ecology in Action. “It’s easier to do in stages. It will just take longer to get it all done.”

Everything was “mega” about the hidrovia, a $2-billion, five-nation project designed to open the center of the continent to the Atlantic Ocean.

The original plan was to link the Paraguay and Parana rivers in a 2,134-mile-long waterway stretching from Caceres, in western Brazil, to the Uruguayan seaport of Nueva Palmira.

For landlocked Bolivia and Paraguay, as well as western Brazil, the hidrovia would give farmers and miners a cheaper route to get their goods to market. Bolivia estimated its soy exports could quadruple to 8 million tons a year.

Downriver, in Uruguay and Argentina, the project promised millions of dollars in shipping business and port fees.

The problem was the hidrovia would have to go through the Pantanal, a 56,000-square-mile, nearly pristine wetland on Brazil’s western frontier. It is home to thousands of types of plants and animals, including endangered species like jaguars, marsh deer and giant anteaters.

Today, barges can navigate the waterway only during eight or nine months each year because of the Pantanal’s seasonal flooding and draining. Making the hidrovia navigable year-round would require deepening, straightening and broadening the rivers to as much as three times their current width at some points.

A series of studies, including one by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, warned that the hidrovia would drain large areas of the Pantanal, upsetting the delicate ecosystem and possibly affecting migration patterns and even the weather.

When ecologists complained, Brazil’s government announced it would scale back the original project to a $120-million version that eliminated the most radical change--the straightening of a northern section of the Paraguay River.

That idea is little better than the original plan, says Stephen Hamilton, a scientist at Michigan State University who has studied tropical flood plains and who contributed to the Pantanal study financed by the Inter-American Development Bank.

He says that merely deepening the Paraguay River would be enough to throw the Pantanal’s ecosystem out of whack.

And if the waterway is pushed through piecemeal, environmentalists may become victims of their own success in opposing the mammoth hidrovia project, Hamilton says.

“Really, that’s the worst way to go about it,” he says. “The whole system is interdependent, and with no comprehensive plan--with Bolivia doing one thing and Paraguay doing another--it will be even worse than if there was a carefully planned project that encompassed the entire river system.”

Opposition to even the scaled-down plan led Brazil to announce that the hidrovia was suspended.

But the dredger still pumps away at the Tamengo Channel, a tract of the hidrovia in Bolivia near Corumba, a Brazilian river city 1,100 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro.

Faria, the Ecology in Action leader, points out that although the dredger is based in Bolivia, that doesn’t stop the craft from crossing over to the Brazilian side of the river.

Environmental protests are noticeably quieter in other countries interested in the waterway, and Brazil is sensitive to the pro-hidrovia sentiment among its partners in the Mercosur common market: Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Despite its March announcement, Brazil has not formally communicated its intention to stop the project to the other countries involved. The Foreign Ministry declines to comment on the project’s final status.

Some Brazilian officials remain openly bullish on the hidrovia.

“We want a waterway and we still don’t have it,” Jose Alex Botelho Oliva, policy coordinator for the Transportation Ministry, said at a recent seminar. “That’s what the Intergovernmental Waterway Committee is doing. We are working, and we will continue to work.”

Shipping companies say failure to build the waterway would cost the region $1 billion in annual exports.

“The question isn’t whether or not there will be a waterway--the waterway is already there. Not going ahead with the project is like not fixing a road that has holes in it,” says Michel Chaim, director of CINCO-Bacia, one of the region’s biggest shippers.

Angelo Rabelo, Corumba’s secretary of environment and tourism, says the dredging is not part of the larger waterway project. But he hedges when asked if the hidrovia is going ahead.

“We can’t put ecological concerns in front of commerce. Nor can we put commerce in front of ecological concerns,” Rabelo says. “If we have to wait another year to make sure [environmental damage] doesn’t happen, we’ll wait another year, because there are enough examples of projects like this that didn’t work.”