business & economy

Ngobe woman objects to dams in her neighborhood. Photo by Eric Jackson

 

What's missing and recent history suggest intentions

New rules on environmental impact studies for dams

by Eric Jackson

 

Let's first understand some larger political contexts and some history before taking a look at new rules for the environmental impact studies on hydroelectric dams that were announced in a National Environmental Authority (ANAM) resolution that was published in the March 7 edition of the Gaceta Oficial:

• There has been an application for a hydroelectric dam on virtually every river or stream in Panama;

• Most of the dams that are under construction or about to be are in indigenous areas, especially the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca;

• Successive national governments have had a hard time with the concept of collectively owned property, presuming as they have that if everyone (in the whole country or in an ethnic comarca) owns something then nobody owns it and thus nobody has a right to compensation if it is taken away;

• Panama does not have an overall electricity shortage, but electric companies have threatened to create one by scrapping plants if they don't get the high power rates that they want;

• An integral part of the Plan Puebla Panama to which the Panamanian, Central American and Mexican governments are committed is a regional power grid that allows Mexico to sell electricity to the United States, particularly to California. Although power transmission over very long distances is not too practical because energy is lost just putting the electricity through the wires, it is perfectly possible for Mexico to produce power for California, replacing any shortfall in its own needs when it does so with power imported from Guatemala, while Guatemala can replace this power with imports from Honduras, Honduras can import from Nicaragua, Nicaragua can get power from Costa Rica and if the the Ticos run the risk of brownouts they can buy power from us;

• While the indigenous comarcas are supposedly autonomous commonwealths, the national government retains a claim to all the water and mineral resources in them, a claim to which every one of Panama's seven indigenous nations objects;

• The expectations that rural Panamanians in general and indigenous people in particular have with respect to hydroelectric dams were set in the 1970s, when the dictatorship led by the president's father, General Omar Torrijos, drove mostly Kuna and Embera residents out of the upper reaches of the Bayano River to build the Bayano Dam. Some of those whose houses were actually flooded got housing assistance, generally by being relocated to Ipeti. Some farmers got assistance, but notions like the quality of good flood plain soils, traditional access to timber and other forest products, and hunting, gathering and fishing rights were never taken into account and such losses were not compensated. Just this past year, police fired upon indigenous protesters attempting to block the Pan-American Highway at the Bayano Bridge (also wounding a journalist in the process) and then conducted mass arrests. The protest was about unmet demands for compensation for those displaced by the Bayano Dam; and

• The biggest single swing voting demographic group in Panama is found in the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca. The PRD usually loses the Kuna vote and although the Embera-Wounaan Comarca is politically volatile its population is too small to make much of an impact on most national elections. But whether the PRD wins or loses among the Ngobe can mean a swing of 10 points in a national election. The party swept the comarca in 2004 and 1994, but was crushed there in 1989 and didn't do all that well in the area in 1999. The PRD has won when it carried the Ngobe vote by a substantial margin, and lost when it has not. (The Bugle vote is much smaller and that minority within the comarca has very different social dynamics.)

Thus, when there is discontent in the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca, a PRD government will at least go through the motions of doing something to ameliorate the situations of which people complain. At first glance, that's what the new ANAM regulations are about. They are at least a partial admission that something has been wrong with the deeply unpopular process of installing hydroelectric dams, and a demonstration that something is being done to correct the problems.

 

When one looks at literacy and school dropout rates, there are few places in Panama where people on average have less formal education in than the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca. However, there is a core group of Ngobes with university degrees or current studying at universities, and in their resistance to strip mining and hydroelectric dam projects they have long had some well educated allies.

 

Catholic priests assisted and chronicled the defeat of Omar Torrijos's and Ernesto Pérez Balladares's attempts to strip mine Cerro Colorado for copper and even if under the current right-wing pope the church tends to support the companies the Liberation Theology folks still maintain their ties to people in the comarca. The environmental activists are a newer phenomenon but one with many international contacts and the ability to report on things to a global audience via the Internet.

 

These groups can be quite influential in key circles, especially considering that in an attempt to get the US Congress to ratify the US-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement the government here made certain representations to the Democrats in particular about environmental laws and standards being respected in Panama. Thus it's no surprise that around the site of one hydroelectric dam project in Bocas del Toro police have been given orders to arrest "suspicious foreigners."

 

So what are these new rules, and should they mollify anybody?

 

First of all, they don't apply to projects that have already been approved, which would make some US corporate investors feel better about the "judicial security" situation in Panama but won't placate people who stand to be dispossessed as the waters gather behind the hydroelectric dams in progress.

 

However, the rules do require environmental studies to include a map of current water and land uses in the watershed to be affected. The studies do have to delve into what the dam will do to the water supplies both above and below.

 

A remaining problem with the water supply data required in the new rules, however, is best illustrated by the series of four dams on the Changuinola River and its tributaries. The studies for these dams all actually address the water supply issue in a general way even without the new requirements. But they all refer to just the one dam in particular, never mentioning the combined effect of the contemplated series of dams on the water flow below. That combined effect probably matters a great deal with respect to Panama's great wetland, the San San Pond Sack, which is watered by the Changuinola and three other rivers and is home to 133 species of birds and this country's only manatees.

Dam every river and stream for which a hydroelectric concession has been applied and havoc will have been wreaked with the nation's fisheries, but in each study it would be alleged that any effect would be minor at most and there wouldn't be any need to consider cumulative effects.

 

Certain basic things like rainfall, water flow averages per each month of the year in the river to be dammed, expected sedimentation or creation of suspended material in the water that would be caused by the dam, climate data that could predict how much evaporation there would be from the reservoir at different times of the year, a map of what gets flooded above the dam and hydrological studies about what gets flooded when they open the gates to spill water from the dam are all in the new rules.

 

But hold on a minute --- weren't all these things required before?

 

Implicitly they were, but ANAM, having routinely issued permits for all sorts of projects on the basis of environmental impact studies that wouldn't pass muster before an informed lay person, let alone a disinterested expert, is now pretending that it was a bad set of rules rather than an environmental protection agency taking dives in the fight to protect nature. The additional rules are a layer of specificity about details that ANAM could have demanded under the old rules.

 

And notice what's still lacking in the new rules: any more specificity about whom a project would affect and the ways that they live their lives.

 

Some environmentalists are taking a wait and see approach to the new regulations, but none of their organizations here are declaring any victory because of the new rules. And people who oppose the dams in their neighborhoods are still camped out in Plaza Catedral to protest.

 

Protesters who are camping in Plaza Catedral. Photo by Eric Jackson