Artigo: Amazon Projects Undercut Brazil’s New Green Path
12.14.09
O Jornal New York Times apresentou um artigo sobre a construção da Usina Santo Antônio na capital de Rondônia, Porto Velho. E apresentou oportunidades de negócios, desafios e problemas que esta empreitada de desenvolvimento econômico por parte do Estado trouxe para a região.
Fonte: The NY Times
Data: 13/12/2009
Autor: Claudia Parsons
PORTO VELHO, Brazil (Reuters) - Straddling one the Amazon’s main tributaries and flanked by dense jungle, a construction pit the size of a small town bustles with bulldozers and nearly 10,000 workers blasting huge slabs of rock off the river bank.
While blue-and-yellow macaws fly overhead, a network of pipes fed by a constant flow of trucks pours enough concrete to build 37 football stadiums.
The $7.7 billion (4.7 billion pound) Santo Antonio dam on the Madeira river is part of Brazil’s largest concerted development plan for the Amazon since the country’s military government cut highways through the rain forest to settle the vast region during its two-decade reign starting in 1964.
In the coming years, dams, roads, gas pipelines, and power grids worth more than $30 billion will be built to tap the region’s vast raw materials, and transport its agricultural products in coming years.
The Santo Antonio dam in the western Amazon’s Rondonia state, which goes online in December 2011, will pave the way for a trade route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by making more of the Madeira river navigable.
But the behemoth project may also make it tougher for the nation to steer a new course as a leader of the global green movement.
Brazil’s government says such development is needed to improve the lives of the region’s 25 million inhabitants, who remain among the poorest in Latin America’s biggest economy. Leia o restante desta matéria »