Mega-Dam in Peruvian Amazon Cancelled

Decision by Peruvian government a blow to Brazil’s regional energy plans

The Peruvian government has announced that the massive Inambari Dam, planned on a major Amazonian tributary, had been cancelled after years of strong community opposition. For the past 36 days, close to 2,000 people in the Puno area had been on strike in an effort to convince the government to cancel mining concessions and the dam project. They blocked access roads to the region and held mass protests. 

To appease the strikers, the government established a high-level commission to review the Inambari Dam. After a tense meeting with local communities on June 13, Commission Chair and Vice-Minister of Energy Luis Gonzales Talledo definitively cancelled the project, stating that the Brazilian EGASUR consortium’s rights to develop the project had been revoked.

“Although this resolution does not prevent the construction of all dams in the Inambari Basin, it is very important because it clearly cancels EGASUR’s participation. The resolution states that all future proposed projects must be subjected to prior consultation with local communities according to ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, which is an important precedent,” said Aldo Santos, from local NGO SER (Rural Educational Services).

For over three years, affected communities have opposed the Inambari Dam, which would flood 410 square kilometers of forest, including part of the Bahujan Sonene National Park buffer zone. The project would leave more than 15,000 people without agricultural lands and thus their main source of livelihoods. Flooding of 120 km of the recently built Inter-Oceanic Highway would sever access to markets and affect the economic development of the district of San Gaban and the province of Carabaya in Puno State.

“This is a great triumph for the communities and the Peasant Patrols (rondas campesinas), and we will continue to defend our lands and our culture. Even though the project is cancelled we know that we have won the battle but not the war. We know there are too many interests behind construction of Inambari, especially the interests of the Brazilians and their energy thirst,” said Olga Cutipa, President of the Front to Defend the Inambari-San Gaban.

The cancellation of the project is a blow to the Brazilian government, which signed an Energy Agreement with Peru last year committing to purchase electricity from six dams in the Peruvian Amazon. The US$4.9 billion Inambari Dam was expected to be financed by the Brazilian National Development Bank and to be built by Brazilian construction companies. The recently-released Brazil Energy Expansion Plan for 2011-2020 includes a total of 7,000 MW of imported hydropower from the Peruvian Amazon. The Inambari Dam, which until now was at the most advanced stage of planning, was expected to produce 2,000 megawatts, equal to about a quarter of the country’s current installed capacity. The second proposed dam under the Brazil-Peru Agreement, the Pakitzapango Dam, was stopped in 2010 by an administrative legal action by the Central Ashaninka del Rio Ene, an indigenous organization.

Earlier this month, Peruvian NGOs demanded a public debate to review the Peru-Brazil Energy Agreement when the new Congress meets in July. In a communiqué, NGOs stated that “with the Agreement, we would be choosing to give away our energy to external markets at the expense of serious environmental and social impacts for the country. The approval of the agreement adversely compromises any serious effort to planning for long-term sustainable development of the country.”

Monti Aguirre, Latin America Program Coordinator for International Rivers, said: “This is a great day for the Peruvian Amazon and the communities who have fought for so long to protect their rights and their environment. Both Brazil and Peru are rich in alternative energy sources. If Brazil invested in energy efficiency, it could avoid the need for any dams to be built in the Amazon Basin and save billions of dollars in the process. The Amazon is simply too precious a resource to squander.”

Although it has become clear that EGASUR will not build Inambari, Puno’s population is still protesting the issuance of mining and oil concessions in the province.

By Internationalrivers organization, Monti Aguirre

Kenya: 2011 is the region’s driest year since 1995

KENYA: Severe drought, high food prices hit pastoralists

Photo: Kenneth Odiwour/IRIN

2011 is the region’s driest year since 1995

NAIROBI, 16 June 2011 (IRIN) – Successive poor rains coupled with rising food and fuel prices are leading to a worsening food security situation with alarming levels of acute malnutrition being recorded in drought affected parts of Kenya, mainly in the north of the country, say experts.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2011 is the driest period in the eastern Horn of Africa since 1995 “with no likelihood of improvement until early 2012”.

“From the nutrition point of view, it is possibly the worst we have seen in the last 20 years,” Noreen Prendiville, chief of nutrition at the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Kenya office, told IRIN, noting that increased global acute malnutrition rates of over 35 percent are being seen in some drought-affected areas.

“In less serious situations, one would hear so many requests for assistance with livestock or water, but just now, the number one request is food and the need is substantial and urgent.”

While past droughts have been longer, such as the 2008-09 one, “the current drought is severe, and its impacts have been exacerbated by extremely high food prices, reduced coping capacity, and a limited humanitarian response,” said the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET). 

“The high food and fuel prices have affected the capacity of the very poor to buy food and to access basic services… The international response has been affected by the global economic crisis,” Prendiville said. “The problem of insecurity too has caused a lot of displacement.” she added.

The predominantly northern pastoral region is often the scene of resource-based clashes leading to the displacement of some communities. In May alone in Turkana, 16 armed livestock raids took place with thousands of heads of livestock stolen, according to data compiled by the UN.

Failed harvests

According to UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), two consecutive below-average rainfall seasons have resulted in failed harvests, depletion of grazing resources and significant livestock mortality in the Horn of Africa region. In Kenya, FAO added in a statement, the food security situation is expected to further deteriorate as milk production in the drought-affected areas has collapsed and will not recover until October when the short rains are expected to start.

In the northeastern Garissa region, the food scarcity has led to an increase in the number of people relying on food aid. “Most farmers have lost their livestock. The situation is moving from bad to worse,” Garissa District Commissioner Samson Macharia told IRIN.

Photo: Siegfried Modola/IRIN

The price of many basic foodstuffs has soared

Macharia said the number of food aid recipients in Garissa County, excluding those in the Ijara area, had risen to 116,850 – up from 101,600 in March. This total represents about 40 percent of the county’s population.

A planned food security assessment is expected to further increase this number, he said.

Food prices have shot up in Garissa, like elsewhere, with a kilogramme of meat selling at about 400 shillings (US$4.7) compared to 250-300 ($3-$3.5) in 2010. The price of a litre of milk has also almost tripled to 80 shillings (95 US cents) over a similar period, Garissa trader Hassan Ali Ibrahim, told IRIN.

“There is no milk, no meat. The livestock have died or migrated to Somalia,” said Ibrahim. “The children are emaciated and having diarrhoea. If you are human, you would be affected by the situation here.”

According to FAO, wholesale maize prices in Kenya in May in the main urban markets of Nairobi and Mombasa were 60-85 percent above the levels of May 2010.

Gloomy outlook

The food security of an estimated 2.4 million people is likely to decline after June in most northern pastoral and the southeastern and coastal marginal agricultural areas, said FEWSNET, which further warned that food security could decline to emergency levels among pastoralists.

At present, UNICEF and partners are scaling up nutrition and health outreach and clinic services in the affected areas to deal with the high number of malnourished children needing therapeutic and supplementary feeding. A low human resource capacity, long distances to affected regions and few health resources are, however, challenges.

The government also announced, on 14 June, a doubling of the monthly allocation of famine relief food (maize, beans and rice) to affected areas. Other interventions include livestock offtake programmes and maize importation to boost declining food reserves.

With drought being a cyclic event in the Horn of Africa region, experts are calling for longer-term approaches in mitigation.

“Food insecurity in the northern Kenya region is a running emergency. There is a need for more thinking on what can be done in the long term,” Misheck Laibuta, Oxfam GB Kenya livelihoods and food security adviser, told IRIN. “There is a need for well-thought out solutions. There will need to be investment in initiatives such as alternative livelihoods and water management.”

According to FAO’s regional emergency coordinator for Eastern and Central Africa, Rod Charters, “the challenge ahead is to empower farmers and pastoralists to adapt to the new realities of high variability of weather patterns and more frequent extreme weather events.”

aw/am/cb source www.irinnews.org

Livestock is important for the Bedouins

EGYPT: Bedouins begin to demand equal citizenship rights

Photo: Adel Yahya/IRIN

Livestock is important for the Bedouins (file photo)

SINAI, 16 June 2011 (IRIN) – Moussa Al Dalah, a 35-year-old tribal leader from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, knew it would be a risky step to try and take his employer to court over alleged discrimination: He could easily end up in prison.

“I had to tell the employer that the Bedouins won’t be able to accept humiliation forever,” Al Dalah told IRIN. “He used to give factory workers from other parts of Egypt higher salaries and better treatment.”

Egypt’s Bedouins who inhabit the triangular Sinai Peninsula which links Africa with Asia and covers an area of 23,500 square miles, say they do not enjoy full citizenship rights and are treated as second class citizens. They say they are not allowed to join the army, study in police or military colleges, hold key government positions or form their own political parties.

Locked in this arid expanse, the Bedouins claim they have have been left to fend for themselves. Mistrust between the government and the Bedouins, some of whom allegedly collaborated with the Israeli military when it occupied Sinai in 1967, continues to fuel negative stereotypes about them.

Khalid Al-Gheitany, an independent political analyst, blames the situation on past Egyptian governments. “The former government [of Hosni Mubarak] and the Bedouins were at bitter odds for decades. leading to a gulf between the two sides,” he said.

Despite government assistance to some Bedouin communities to try and get them to settle (cooperative societies were set up; farmers of almond, olive, and fig trees were given subsidies; there has also been help with land reclamation) many remain much poorer than the average Egyptian.

Government programmes include the National Project for the Development of Sinai project that is due for completion by 2017. An earlier plan, the Al Salam Canal project, which was meant to deliver water to dry areas was not completed.

The name Bedouin is derived from the Arabic word `bedu’, which means “inhabitant of the desert”. Generally, it refers to the desert-dwelling nomads of Saudi Arabia, the Negev, and Sinai. The Bedouins in Sinai are currently estimated at about 380,000.

Bitterness

Discrimination against the Bedouins has persisted for decades, not only inside the Sinai itself, but in the rest of Egypt as well. Even in projects established in Sinai, including the cement factory where Al Dalah used to work, most of the jobs went to people from other parts of Egypt, while the Bedouin population – poor and unemployed – were excluded.

Thousands of Bedouins also found themselves detained whenever a security incident occurred. “This happened following terrorist incidents in the tourist areas in Sinai between 2004 and 2006,” said Mona Barhoma, a Sinai local and a human rights activist. “These arrests account for the Bedouins’ feelings of estrangement and bitterness.”

After signing a landmark peace deal with Israel in 1979, Egypt regained all of the Sinai, which quickly emerged as a new tourism centre in a country already generating a sizable portion of its income from historic sites, such as the pyramids and Luxor. Part of southern Sinai, namely Sharm Al-Sheikh, became a top international tourism destination, meaning that Sinai now accounts for almost a third of the country’s tourism revenue, according to tourism experts.

But the Bedouins have not really benefited. Al-Dalah, who was jailed for a year and a half for “inciting” fellow Bedouin workers, for example, tried to find a job in the resorts. He failed, though thousands of other Egyptians were successful.

“None of the owners of the tourist villages were ready to accept a Bedouin worker,” he said. “This happened wherever I tried to get a job.”

Promises, promises

Since the full return of Sinai to Egypt in 1982, its geographic and political isolation has led to much of the area becoming a tribal backwater with ethnic infighting, and no rule of law.

Rights activists believe that simmering conflicts in the Sinai stem from the lack of economic opportunities, something that has prompted some Bedouins to turn to illegal activities such as drug and human trafficking, and the smuggling of goods and weapons into the Gaza Strip. In recent years, the Bedouins have increasingly become involved in the trafficking of African migrants into Israel. 

Recently Egypt’s new government has sent out positive signals to the Bedouins.

Representatives from the Sinai met Interior Minister Mansour Al Essawi who promised to reconsider the verdicts against thousands of Bedouins accused of taking part in bombings in the resort area of Dahab in 2004; and Agriculture Minister Ayman Farid Abu Hadidtoo promised to give plots of agricultural land to the Bedouins of Sinai, but nothing concrete has happened so far.

“We have been getting promises for years, but I’m afraid to say none came to fruition,” said Al Daha. “The government needs to realize that we are Egyptian too.”

ae/eo/cb source www.irinnews.org

A boat carrying sub-Saharan African migrant workers arrives in Lampedusa from Tripoli

LIBYA-ITALY: By boat to Lampedusa and a new life

Photo: Kate Thomas/IRIN

A boat carrying sub-Saharan African migrant workers arrives in Lampedusa from Tripoli

LAMPEDUSA, 16 June 2011 (IRIN) – When Sonny Johnson left Tripoli for the Italian island Lampedusa in a wooden fishing boat, he feared he might never set foot on dry land again. But for Johnson, from a small village in eastern Sierra Leone, it was worth the risk.

“I had been working in Tripoli for four years, after travelling there overland from Freetown [Sierra Leone capital],” he told IRIN shortly after arriving on the island. “I had a well-paid job, but when the situation broke down in Libya, I started to suffer abuse because I was African. I started to get tired in my soul. Then I knew I had to leave, and I decided to try to come by boat.

“On the boat, nobody talked about where we were going,” he said. “I don’t think anyone wanted to jinx our arrival. We talked about other things, like family and football. All we knew was that we were going to Italy.”

Johnson left on a boat with 110 other migrants, among them several women and children, at 4am on 11 June. After being tracked by Lampedusa’s coastguards, the boat was escorted into port at midday the following day. “The sea was a little bit rough,” he said. “But I believed we would arrive.”

Johnson paid US$800. The boat captains are usually also migrants who have paid a slightly reduced rate to agents who ask them to operate the boats. Often they have limited experience at sea and are treated like the other migrants. The boats are often impounded and a “boat graveyard” is appearing by the port.

There is also a small museum on Lampedusa where local artists have turned belongings that were previously owned by migrants – shoes, korans, photos, letters, fuel containers, life jackets – into an art collection.

Lampedusa’s sandy shores have been a landing point for migrants from North Africa for centuries. But the island was overwhelmed by a surge of more than 30,000 migrants between February and April this year. Aid workers based on the island say the situation, although difficult, has since improved.

“Lampedusa’s two processing centres are crowded but the situation is not critical,” said Barbara Molinario, spokesperson for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Lampedusa. “But logistically it is difficult when we receive large influxes.”

In the 10 days prior to 12 June, Lampedusa had received no boats from North Africa, but on 12 June UNHCR registered 1,500 migrants in seven boats during a 12-hour period.

As each boat arrived at the port, anxious smiles were clearly visible on the faces of the migrants. Some dropped to their knees and prayed on the edge of the dock. “There is a kind of euphoria,” said Johnson. “We cannot believe we have arrived.”

But arriving on Lampedusa is only the first step in a registration process that can take up to one month. Of this week’s 1,500 new arrivals, 1,000 departed on 12 June after undergoing registration by Italian immigration officials and police.

“The two processing centres on Lampedusa are quite small and people need to be identified by police in a short period of time,” said Molinario. “For the migrants, that usually means long waiting hours. It can be quite harsh for them when they have to wait for an entire day to shower and change their clothes, after coming by sea all the way from Libya.”

Photo: Kate Thomas/IRIN

Paramedics from the Italian Red Cross treat an injured migrant worker at Lampedusa’s port

Migrants are first processed by Italian police at Lampedusa’s two centres and are given hot meals, access to showers and beds. A designated ferry then transports migrants from Lampedusa to Sicily several times a week. Next, they are allocated to holding centres in places such as Mineo, Naples or Bari, where it takes 7-30 days to receive a six-month visa.

New shoes

Italian police on Lampedusa told IRIN that migrants are issued with new shoes and clothes before they leave the holding centres. According to personal choice, they are separated into groups and driven to Italian towns and cities. After six months, if they have not left the country, been sponsored for work or applied for refugee status, they become illegal immigrants.

A small number of Libyans are also among those travelling to Lampedusa. Thirty-six-year-old Babacar told IRIN he left Tripoli after being treated badly because he is of African descent.

“I hid my identity card inside my shoe in case Libyan authorities stopped me from leaving,” he said. “They are happy for the African workers to leave. But I was afraid they would ask for my documents, find out I was Libyan and send me back. Or something worse,” he said.

Aid workers say the number of Tunisian migrants has decreased dramatically in recent months, largely due to an Italian government policy which now states that Tunisian migrants should, in most cases, be repatriated rather than processed on temporary visas. According to Italian police on Lampedusa, those who do arrive from Tunisia are usually sent back by chartered plane from Lampedusa airport.

Molinario said most of the boats that arrive are now coming from Libya, carrying migrant workers mostly from African countries trapped in Tripoli and other western cities.

According to Ennio Ciuffi, Lampedusa spokesman for the Italian Red Cross, the humanitarian situation on Lampedusa has improved since April. “Then, the whole island was full of migrants looking for food and a place to sleep. With 7,000 migrants here it was very difficult to organize everyone,” he said.

Risky journey

Among the Red Cross’s 22-strong team of medical staff is Ivo Crosato, a doctor. Most cases he treats at the port are not serious. “Generally I see one or two patients from each boatload of new arrivals,” he said. “The most common problems are dehydration, hypothermia, sunstroke, seasickness and fainting, which are usually straightforward to treat. More serious cases are referred to Lampedusa Hospital or to Sicily by helicopter transfer.”

The journey has its risks. In April, 213 migrants travelling from Libya drowned off the coast of Lampedusa when their boat stalled without fuel and later capsized in rough seas. Some 47 passengers, including a pregnant woman, were rescued from the water and brought to Lampedusa by the island’s search and rescue team.

On 8 May, a boat carrying migrants crashed onto rocks on Lampedusa. The Italian Red Cross, which has set up a temporary hospital at the island’s main port, was able to pull some people from the sea. Three passengers were crushed to death between the underside of the boat and the rocks. They are buried in the island’s main cemetery.

Ciuffi said the captains of boats carrying migrants are now only travelling in exceptionally calm waters. Numbers, he said, swell on days when the sea is calm. When there is a strong cross-wind there are usually no boats at all.

“People are paying more attention to the weather and sea forecast before travelling,” he said. “They usually leave in the early hours and take about 16 hours to arrive, and their coordinates are relayed to us by the police and coastguards, so we have time to prepare for possible medical emergencies.”

kt/eo/cb source www.irinnews.org