Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 14 2007 (IPS) – The contrasts are striking, and are plain to visitors from the moment they arrive in Rio. From the plane they can see the sparkling jewel of Guanabara bay, as they land on its largest island, but then they have to drive past the fetid waters of a sluggish channel and a number of favelas or shanty towns to get to the city centre and tourist areas.
The Canal do Fundao, between the mainland and another island which is the site of Rio de Janeiro s main university, is five kilometres long, but its waters have ceased to flow freely due to the build-up of sediment from industrial waste, rubbish and sewage from several densely populated neighbourhoods.
The situation could be worse. But groups of local residents are improvising barriers right across the rivers which bring most of the pollution to the bay, using steel cables, wires and branches. These barriers catch plastic bottles and containers, cardboard and other floating materials.
These are the Guardiaes dos Ríos (Guardians of the Rivers), members of a project created in 2001 by the Río de Janeiro city government.
Selected from among the residents of nearby low-income communities, the Guardians earn 520 reals (290 dollars) a month, collecting rubbish thrown beside or into rivers and streams on a daily basis, and periodically planting trees along the banks.
Sometimes they find mattresses, household appliances and furniture, like sofas, said Sidnei Martins, 47, the coordinator of a group of nine workers cleaning up a stretch of the Yacaré and Faria-Timbó rivers, a few kilometres from where they flow into the Canal do Fundao. And in August and September, we pulled out 35 shells of wrecked cars.
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People in the area are thoughtless and irresponsible. They throw everything into the river, even aborted foetuses, Martins told IPS, spruce in his green municipal uniform. His group was formed three years ago from residents in the Nelson Mandela Complex, one of the local favelas.
At first we collected a ton of rubbish every day, he said. Nearly 90 percent of the waste they collect is recyclable, but it is not reused because there are no incentives to do so. One of his former colleagues, however, now makes his living selling rubbish for recycling.
The improvement since the programme began is appreciable. The rivers don t flood as frequently as before, the mice and rats are gone and there are fewer cases of diseases such as dengue, diarrhoea and mycosis, said Ana Paula Ferreira, who left Martins group after two years and took a permanent job in a hospital.
The river s still unsightly, but it s not as dirty as it was, she said.
The programme to clean up the rivers in the city planned to employ 640 people from 86 communities this year, expanding gradually to 960 people from 136 communities in 2012.
It should be expanded further, since people are in need of work, and because of the environmental and health benefits, said Ferreira, a 31-year-old mother of three who lives 30 metres from the Yacaré river.
LACK OF SANITATION
The Guardians work seeks to prevent urban disasters. It also prevents many tons of waste a day from adding to the pollution of Guanabara bay. But it is only a drop in the ocean.
Untreated sewage is the main source of pollution in the bay. Thirty-five rivers cross the metropolitan area of Rio, which is home to 11 million people, and flow into the sea, said Dora Negreiros, the head of the non-governmental Guanabara Bay Institute (IGB).
The Guanabara Bay Clean-Up Programme (PDBG) has failed to make headway against the sewage problem. Begun in 1995 with a budget of 793 million dollars, including loans from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Japan, it was to finish its work by 1999, but in fact several actions are still pending.
The mud in the Canal do Fundao is a permanent reproach to the programme s ineffectiveness, largely due to lack of coordination of its operations.
The main sewage treatment plant, called Alegría (Happiness), is one illustration. It was designed to process 5,000 litres per second, but the inflow is only 1,000 litres per second. Drain systems are needed to pipe the sewage to the plant, said Vilmar Berna, a journalist and environmentalist who assisted a parliamentary investigation of irregularities in the PDBG.
Before the programme got underway, an estimated 20,000 litres per second of untreated waste water was pouring into the bay.
The Alegría plant serves the city centre and neighbourhoods near the Canal do Fundao, where close to 1.5 million people live. The state government of Rio de Janeiro did not make the matching investments it pledged against the IDB funding, for drainage installation, complained Alfredo Sirkis, former municipal secretary for the environment and urban planning.
In the favelas there is a different problem. Drain systems were installed, but not connected to homes, because the sanitation authorities wanted the residents to do that, as if they were like Swedish citizens in terms of income, civic culture and technical ability, said Berna with ironic humour.
As a result, there is open sewage in the streets and the drain system is unused.
In her view, the PDBG was a great opportunity lost, because of inept implementation, at a time of hopeful enthusiasm in this city which hosted the Earth Summit (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development) in 1992.
But the loss of the sanitation system was not all. The worst disaster was the accumulation of rubbish. Plants for waste classification and making organic compost were built but never operated, while plastic bottles and car tires are still bobbing about in the bay, she said.
On balance, she said, it was a semi-failure, because it can be rectified with additional investments to correct the mistakes.
HOPE FOR THE FUTURE
This positive course of action is being taken by the state water and sewage company CEDAE, according to its head, Wagner Victer.
The Alegría plant is now processing 1,500 litres per second and in March this will be stepped up to 2,500 litres per second, the maximum demand for its catchment area, yet only half its total capacity, because it was designed on too large a scale and will only be used fully in the future, he told IPS.
Victer acknowledged the lack of coordination between the different activities of the PDBG, and said that it would be irresponsible to propose a second phase of the programme and request more external funding, without first concluding the delayed works with local investment, as originally conceived.
Now there are signs at every construction site announcing its date of completion, which will be met, he promised.
Further remedial measures not originally included in the programme will also be taken, such as dredging the Canal do Fundao, as well as the Canal da Cunha, which carries the water from several polluted rivers like the Yacaré and Faria-Timbó into the Canal do Fundao.
That will not totally clean the bay, but it will reduce the flow of organic matter that is choking it, so that nature can carry out its natural cleansing and regeneration, he said.
Guanabara bay is a Brazilian icon, a gift that makes Rio de Janeiro stand out as a centre of development and national culture, and as such, it must be cleaned up, said the official, who added that he is proud to have been born and lived on Ilha do Governador, the island where Rio s international airport is located and 400,000 people live.
In spite of trouble spots where pollution is extreme, like the Canal do Fundao, Guanabara bay is still teeming with life under its 381 square kilometres of surface area, especially on the northeast side where an environmental protection area was created.
This is what ensures the survival of 20,000 fisherfolk who live in five communities around the bay, in spite of the reduction of fish populations due to pollution, according to Alex dos Santos, a leader of the Tubiacanga Fisherfolk Association on Ilha do Governador.
Fishing was hit hard by an oil spill in 2000, whose damages can still be seen in the mangroves along the shore. The state company responsible, Petrobras, has still not indemnified the fisherfolk for their lost income, amounting to 550,000 dollars, Santos told IPS. In his view, fisherfolk have the cheapest and most efficient techniques to clean the bay, because no one knows it better than we do. But first the sources of chemical and organic pollution must be eliminated by sanitary engineering, he concluded.