The combination of investment in highway construction, widespread dredging, and dams proposed under IIRSA, with significant private sector investments in resource extraction and large-scale agricultural production (e.g. soybeans) will not only have direct effects on biodiversity conservation, but also disruptive indirect effects on the small farm and agricultural labor sectors. Historically, this has led to the displacement of rural and indigenous and traditional peoples, massive migration, and deforestation. All of these developments potentially undermine the viability of the region’s small-farm sector, established national parks, indigenous territories, and biodiversity reserves.
Many of the projects proposed under IIRSA are in fact old, unfinished national infrastructure projects that are being integrated into the regional framework in the hopes of breathing new life into them. The environmental, social, cultural, and economic impacts of these projects on such areas as the Andes piedmont, the Amazon Basin, Brazil’s Matto Grosso and Pantanal, and the Paraguay and Parana rivers will be significant, and in many cases, irreversible.
Experience shows that negative impacts from large infrastructure projects occur because of:
- Inadequate environmental, social, and cultural protection standards (and at times the lack of standards altogether) for addressing the complex dimensions of infrastructure development;
- Lack of government and/or multilateral development bank (MDB) commitment to fulfilling these standards;
- Lack of government and/or MDB capacity for meeting the standards; and
- Absence of independent accountability processes to provide means for appropriate redress when standards are not met.
Large infrastructure projects financed by the International Finance Institutions (IFIs) continue to cause significant harm to indigenous communities (Camisea Natural Gas Project) and to the environment (Bolivia-Brazil Pipeline). They can also incur crushing national debt (Yacyreta Hydroelectric Project). IIRSA appears poised to repeat the same mistakes made in past projects.
Significant shortcomings in IIRSA include:
- Limited access to information about proposed projects and policy reforms;
- Weak environmental and social safeguards and, by extension, inadequate impact mitigation programs;
- Limited institutional accountability;
- Lack of open and transparent participation of civil society in development decision making;
- Inadequate project monitoring programs; and
- An absence of demonstrable linkages to poverty reduction.
The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) are also promoting a variety of complementary policy reforms and FTAA-driven free trade agreements. These operations, taken together, easily overwhelm other potentially neutral or positive reforms and investments in food security, agriculture, forest policy, biodiversity conservation, environmental governance, and land distribution.
“Excess Liquidity,” Regional Leadership, and Sustainable Alternatives
Though IIRSA’s framework for “open regionalism” is presented as a means to regional integration and improved global competitiveness, it is not at all clear that its constituent projects will enhance the type of intra-regional trade needed to support local development. Even the former President of the IDB, Enrique Iglesias, admitted that “excess liquidity” is the impetus behind these huge infrastructure projects, not, as IIRSA coordinators would like one to believe, the Bolivarian dream of a unified South America. The easy solution for the problem of “too much money with nothing to buy” is to finance large infrastructure projects. Therefore, while the IIRSA discourse is integrationist, its logic is mainly financial.
Other observers have advanced the view that IIRSA is driven mainly by energy demand and by the “leadership ambitions” of the Brazilian state. Rather than encouraging trade with one another, what the South American nations really want is to link up their more productive sub-regions with global markets (e.g. the “soy nation” of southern Brazil, Paraguay, eastern Bolivia, northern Argentina), thereby generating the export earnings they need to promote their respective national-level interests. IIRSA provides them with a convenient platform from which to do this. See the latest BICECA Review for more information on this argument.
Whatever the ultimate forces driving IIRSA may be, its sheer magnitude poses a serious challenge to conservation and sustainable development. Even the best environmental and social safeguard framework cannot guarantee the permanent conservation of biological and cultural diversity. Preventing devastating impacts to the South American region will require sustained, informed, and effective citizen involvement in IIRSA, particularly in regards to project and policy assessment, and for establishing, monitoring, and enforcing social and environmental safeguards.
IIRSA Projects Database
Here are available lists of all the official projects that IIRSA has selected to implement in each South American country. There are in total around 335 official IIRSA projects with a cost of $37.5 billion US dollars. This amount is almost thirty times the Gross Domestic Product of South America, and represents an enormous debt for the 12 countries participating in the initiative.
Some projects are already under construction. Others have just received funding. But the majority of IIRSA projects have not yet been financed. Available data about these projects is now available in a database launched recently by BIC and its partners in the region. At this stage, a good deal of information is tentative or missing. Regardless, one can easily see how IIRSA will impact a certain country.
If you have information about some of these projects, or if you would like to know more about IIRSA, we invite you to contact us through our project “Building Informed Civic Engagement for Conservation in the Andes-Amazon” or BICECA. To learn more you can contact the director of BIC’s Latin America Program or visit BIC’s BICECA website.
Articulación frente a IIRSA
In mid-July 2005, 29 civil society organizations from a diverse group of South American and European countries and the United States met in Lima, Peru to do a stock taking of the situation with IIRSA and to outline strategies to address the initiative’s most controversial projects. The group strongly questioned the sustainability of the initiative, noting the lack of studies, information, transparency, and alternatives and the almost nonexistent role of civil society in the discussions and decisions regarding the 335 proposed IIRSA projects.
Out of this meeting, the “Articulación frente a IIRSA” emerged. The Articulación is a broad network of cooperating entities that seeks to coordinate efforts between its members in the areas of information collection, organization, dissemination, and disclosure and capacity building. Members of the Articulación are collecting and sharing knowledge, analysis, and experiences about the diverse aspects and activities relevant to IIRSA, such as the monitoring of projects, popular consultations with affected groups, and alternative projects. Various commissions are in charge of coordinating efforts for research, capacity building, and campaigns for engagement around IIRSA. The Articulación is maintaining the database of IIRSA projects that is itself part of a web portal created to systematize, analyze, and share knowledge about the initiative. BIC collaborates directly with the Articulación through its BICECA project, which supports these efforts in the Andes-Amazon, while the Articulación members work in all the regions of South America.
If you would like to know more about the Articulación frente a IIRSA or the BICECA project, or if you are interested in working with us, go to our BICECA webpage to learn more and to see the contacts for the members of the Articulación.