Dateline Dispatches: Around the World in Ten Days
DAY NINE Monday, 27 November 2000

São Paulo - Tokyo

BRAZIL: Behind the Headlines

Commissioner José Goldemberg promotes Dams & Development

By morning, the powerful economic newspaper, Gazeta Mercantil, ran a story under the exaggerated headline Commission recommends no more dams

But the lively, productive discussion that day revealed the issues of water and energy resource development in all its diverse complexity.

The WCD presentation took place at the University of São Paulo, with 80 significant actors in the dams debate in Brazil present, including Eletronorte, Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB), Eletrobrás, Itaipu Authority, Tucuruí.

The Rector of the University presided, as:

• Sadi Baron gave a factual presentation of MAB and the situation of affected people and closed by proposing a Brazilian Commission on Dams (BCD).
• Luciano Varela, director of engineering and environment at Electrobras agreed that the BCD would be a worthwhile idea, but that a first step would be for the utility to revise guidelines for new dam construction.
• Emilio LaRovere, leader of the WCD Tucurui Case Study, presented lessons and also supported the BCD idea.
• WCD Commissioner Jose Goldemberg replied that based on the WCD example he figured that a BCD would need $2 million, would need to be kept small and would require a very skilled leader

From the floor, Cassio Viotti, the chair of Brazilian ICOLD asked how the Cross-check dams were selected and stated that he did not feel that they were a basis for extrapolating to Brazilian dams as a whole.

This lead to the suggestion of further case studies in Brazil picked jointly by Electrobras and MAB (for instance).

Which, interestingly, was almost exactly how the WCD began three years earlier, in Gland.

TOKYO, JAPAN: Catalyst for Co-operation?

During the morning the WCD met 25 representatives of Japanese government agencies ranging from the Ministries of Construction, Agriculture, Environment, the Japan Bank for International Co-operation, the Dam Engineering Centre and JANCOLD.

In the afternoon another 45 people attended a meeting organised by Wetlands International and WWF Japan.

The discussion focussed on what the WCD Report meant for water resources development in both Japan, which has a large portfolio of dams in the planning stage, and also in those countries that receive development assistance from Japan.

Of particular interest to JBIC was the extent to which the Report's recommendations should be incorporated into their environmnetal guidelines and they indicated that this would be the subject of a review over the coming months.

Some expressed concern over the additional burden that the new decision making framework would place on limited institutional capacity in many countries.

At the same time, there was a recognition that technical assistance programmes would need to adapt to the new challenge.