NOVEMBER 1997 · VOLUME 18 · NUMBER 11
T H E F R O N T
NOVEMBER 1997 · VOLUME 18 · NUMBER 11
T H E F R O N T
MATíAS ROMERO, Mexico -- With the Panama Canal scheduled to switch to Panamanian control in two years, the countries in and bordering the Central America isthmus are rushing to seize a perceived opportunity to cash in on trans-continental traffic. Many multinational corporations that rely on the movement of freight through the Panama Canal are nervous about the U.S. government giving up management of it and may be open to considering alternative transcontinental routes. Seeing an opportunity, the governments of Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras (in a joint effort with El Salvador) and Nicaragua are pushing plans for new waterways, highways and railways to move freight between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
In Mexico, the government is quietly circulating proposals for the "Trans-Isthmus Project," a plan to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with an overland transit corridor across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec -- the sliver of land where the southern Mexican states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco and Veracruz meet. While Mexican business people excitedly promote the idea, many of the two million residents of the isthmus -- the majority of whom belong to one of six indigenous groups -- fear cultural, economic and environmental devastation.
While details of the government's plans remain murky, grassroots opposition to the project is growing rapidly.
THE PLAN
The proposal for a transit corridor through the states of Veracruz and Oaxaca, officially called "The Integrated Regional Development Plan for the Isthmus of Tehuantepec," includes improving and selling concessions for much of the southeast's railroad system, along with the re-development of the ports of Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico, and Salina Cruz, Oaxaca, on the Pacific Ocean. More grandiose proposals being floated include a new double-track railroad equipped with high-speed "bullet trains," new superhighways connecting the remote isthmus with Mexico's commercial centers, two power plants and massive industrial and resource exploitation projects. The development of infrastructure for container shipments between the oceans is a relatively small part of the more ambitious plans devised by Ochoa and Associates, the Mexico City-based engineering consultants hired by the Mexican government to develop a plan for the Trans-Isthmus Project. The direct costs of inter-oceanic transport development would be less than 3 percent of the estimated $2 billion total expense, which itself may be an underestimate.
Other "development" projects included in the Ochoa and Associates proposal, almost 140 in all, include eucalyptus plantations, mining operations, prawn farms, tourist resorts and textile industry maquiladoras. The single biggest budget item is a petrochemical refinery.
Project proponents tout Mexico's proximity to the United States as one of the country's advantages in the contest to attract the foreign capital needed to build a transit corridor to compete with the Panama Canal. "The one closest to the U.S. will have an edge..., [with it] you are saving time, and time is money," claims Felipe Ochoa, head of Ochoa and Associates.
Actual foreign investor interest in the project is harder to gauge. For the past two years, the Mexican press has followed the Trans-Isthmus Project closely. Newspaper articles have connected everyone from Bechtel Power Corporation to individuals from the United Arab Emirates to dozens of railroad and freight companies to the effort. But because the project is still at the planning stage -- and perhaps because other countries are vying to build a new transit corridor -- few companies are speaking publicly about any involvement. Several of the engineering and container shipping corporations mentioned in the Mexican press deny any connection with the project. A representative of one of those companies, the Texas-based Eagle Marine, for example, refused to comment on any involvement, saying only, "You will probably be reading something about that in the papers."
The lack of detailed, consistent information about the Trans-Isthmus Project has become a key frustration for both its supporters and its critics. In a December 1996 letter to a Mexican environmental organization, the Ministry of Communications and Transport denied it was working on any kind of transit corridor in the isthmus. Two months later, an article appeared in a national newspaper entitled: "Everything ready for auctioning off the trans-isthmus corridor."
MOUNTING OPPOSITION
Citizen opposition to the project is emerging much more openly and directly. In late August, three isthmus groups -- the Union of Indigenous Communities in the Northern Zone of the Isthmus (UCIZONI); Forests for the People of the Southeast; and the local branch of El Barzón, the national debtors alliance -- organized a national grassroots forum. Entitled "The Isthmus is Our Own," the forum here in Matías Romero brought together 600 isthmus residents, local government officials, activists from across Mexico and representatives of national non-governmental organizations. During three days of roundtable discussions, the participants took a close look at the details of the Trans-Isthmus Project and plotted their resistance. Late the night before the forum began, organizer Carlos Beas Torres sat in his humid, cramped living room, in front of a large collection of Zapatista dolls. The usually dynamic, animated leader of UCIZONI looked spent and slightly agitated. He explained that he was just getting over his third bout with dengue fever -- an illness that is often fatal in poor communities like his home town of Matías Romero.
Beas Torres said that this was the third grassroots gathering on the Trans-Isthmus Project, "but this is the first time that it has been national." He reported with disappointment that renowned author Carlos Fuentes had changed his mind about attending when he learned there was no airport in Matías Romero.
The next morning, however, there was no trace of fatigue on Beas Torres' face as he welcomed forum participants, many of whom had walked for hours or taken all-night buses to attend.
One of the forum's first speakers, prominent environmentalist Alejandro Toledo, implored the audience, "Development cannot be our only objective." This became the central issue of the forum: What kind of development do the people of the isthmus want? At what cost? In the end, many declared their unequivocal opposition to the Trans-Isthmus Project, while others expressed hope for mitigating its negative impacts.
In spite of the heated debate, the forum ended with a consensus position that rejected the Trans-Isthmus Project as currently conceived, demanding "its immediate suspension." The forum's final declaration noted that "the proposals included in the Trans-Isthmus Project are are in no way compatible with environmental balance" and would "intensify" the "historical problems" of the isthmus' indigenous majority.
The proposed path of the transit corridor borders the largest stand of virgin forest in Mesoamerica, forest which is currently owned communally by local indigenous groups. Many fear that the transit corridor, along with proposed investments by timber companies and eucalyptus plantations, threaten the survival of the forest -- and those who depend upon it. Municipal leaders in many indigenous communities of the isthmus also charge that the inevitable influx of foreign workers and tourists will break down community cohesion. Both critics and proponents of the project agree that the trans-isthmus project is part of a larger strategy to move indigenous Mexicans off the land and into foreign-owned manufacturing assembly factories.
Even some of the consultants on the project have conceded that it threatens large-scale deforestation, a sharp increase in industrial pollution and the displacement of several indigenous communities.
"If we want garbage ... or more dead bodies from the actions of PEMEX [Mexico's oil company], that is what this project will bring us," Beas Torres maintains.
The people of the isthmus are intimately familiar with the human cost of oil development. Ninety percent of the nation's crude petroleum and 80 percent of the refined petrochemicals come from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The isthmus' Coatzacoalcos River is now more polluted with hydrocarbons than any other waterway in the world -- but little oil wealth has spilled into this poor region.
That history makes it easier for impoverished local residents to spurn the promises of employment dangled in front of them. So does the fact that the project's job bait is surprisingly meager: even the blueprint predicts the creation of no more than 11,000 to 12,000 permanent jobs.
These jobs would be wildly expensive: in a country where the daily minimum wage is around three dollars, the government's proposal involves spending more than $191,000 for each job created.
BLOCKING THE CORRIDOR
Even the Trans-Isthmus Project's most ardent champions acknowledge the opposition's impact. Plan author Felipe Ochoa admits that project implementation has been slowed down by "pressure" from "local community leaders and social groups." "The change in congress [in the July 1997 elections] may have an impact. There is more political opposition," notes a Mexican consular official.
The conveners of the August forum are stepping into this political opening; they are now organizing workshops across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to develop an alternative proposal for ecologically sustainable development of the region.
-- Wendy Call
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA -- Among the rolling yellow fields of Godino, some 50 kilometers south of Ethiopia's capital, Tadessa Tesemma is separating the wheat from the chaff. Wearing a straw hat and a tattered sport coat, he kneels on a cow-skin mat to beat his grains with a wooden stick. "The crop is good and I did not use fertilizer," says Tesemma, sifting the seeds with his calloused hands. The 400 birr (US$66) he saved on the chemicals will go towards buying new oxen, or paying the tuition for his eight children at the nearby school.
The decision Tesemma faced -- to grow indigenous seeds without fertilizer, or to use a package of high-yield seeds, pesticides and fertilizers -- is at the heart of a growing conflict over agricultural policy in Ethiopia.
PUSHING PESTICIDES
Following his election in May 1995, Prime Minster Meles Zenawi pledged that Ethiopia would be food self-sufficient within five years. More than 85 percent of Ethiopians live as subsistence farmers. Major crops include wheat, teff, sorghum, barley, maize and pulses. The government has adopted a Green Revolution-style strategy, in which extension workers give farmers packages of scientifically derived high-yield seeds and the fertilizers and pesticides they require. This policy has won the government some well-placed friends.
Most notably, the Sasakawa Global 2000, a joint venture of two international organizations headed by Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Prize-winning father of Asia's Green Revolution, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, is carrying out an ambitious program in Ethiopia.
With funding from Japan's Nippon Foundation, Sasakawa Global 2000 is training thousands of government extension workers and setting up demonstration plots to promote "modern" farming.
The government has already declared the extension program a great success, and is boasting a 10-fold increase in yield per hectare.
"Seeing the drastic increase in food production in one year, it is likely we would reach the goal of self-sufficiency in three years," says Ghebre-Medhin Belay, head of planning at the Ministry of Agriculture.
REVOLUTIONARY DISCORD
Critics, however, charge that the government's strategy is economically self-defeating and environmentally destructive. Their most obvious criticism is that, in a country where the average per capital income stood at $100 in 1995, the majority of farmers cannot afford to purchase necessary chemicals, even at current government-subsidized prices. They reject the Ministry's argument that if farmers use fertilizers and improved seeds they will realize higher yields and cash profits that in turn will allow them to buy more seeds and chemicals.
"It is not a question of whether the methods work. With optimal fertilizer, improved seeds can produce higher yields. The question is whether these yields can be sustained," says Hailu Getu. Getu is field manager for Seeds of Survival, a program aimed at conserving and improving local crop varieties that do not depend on external inputs.
A representative from Ethiopian Pioneer Hybrid Seeds, a recently privatized company which sells hybrid seeds, admits that while the seeds can give stunning results one year, they may show little the next. "If you plant improved seeds two years in a row, there will be a 25 to 30 percent yield reduction," says company representative Melakou Admassu.
If they do not use any fertilizer at all, farmers planting improved seeds will only see bare ground at harvest time.
"Improved" seeds are designed for uniform, stable environments. Unlike the relatively unvarying plains of, say, the U.S. Midwest, the farming areas in Ethiopia are highly diverse, with soil, water and pest conditions varying from field to field. This diversity makes the "improved" seed crops extremely vulnerable to failure, according to Getu, and puts Ethiopia's millions of subsistence farmers at risk of famine.
Another fear is that promoting the new seeds will endanger the rich and unique biodiversity of Ethiopia, and possibly wipe out varieties of local seeds.
"You are simplifying life to a single variety, and that's what Westerners are suffering from," warns Melakou Worede, one of Africa's first geneticists. "We need a policy that ensures freedom of choice on what farmers plant, because they are the ones who know best."
Freedom of choice is constricted by pressure from extension workers to use the chemical package, says Dessalegn Rahmato, a senior research fellow at Addis Ababa University. Although many farmers are reluctant to use the improved seeds and their attendant chemicals, Dessalegn says, they are sometimes coerced into accepting the package.
AN ETHIOPIAN ALTERNATIVE
As an alternative to the chemical strategy, Seeds of Survival is promoting the use of "land-races," the highly diverse crops that Ethiopian farmers have developed over the centuries. Within a single field of land-race wheat, for example, more than 15 varieties grow side by side. According to Tesfaye Tesemma, senior plant breeder at Seeds of Survival, the crop's diversity means food security for the farmer: if one variety is felled by disease or pest, the others will survive.
Seeds of Survival's strategy is to boost the productivity of land-races. They have started by giving out the diverse seeds as a loan, which farmers pay back after harvest. The long-term solution, the group believes, is for local seed exchanges to evolve among farmers.
-- Andrea Useem
African Agenda/
Third World Network Features