Common Ground/April issue

April 1, 2002

Common Ground, a Vancouver-based health and environment magazine, highlights the Canadian threat to Central American wildlife with the construction of the Chalillo dam.

In January, 2002, bulldozers began illegally clearing a road through the rainforests of Belize to make way for the construction of the Chalillo dam which would flood the rainforest valley of the Upper Macal River, one of the wildest places left in Central America. Belizean environmental and tourism business groups brought the first environmental lawsuit in the country against this Canadian-backed project, and have succeeded in temporarily halting construction.

The 49-meter high hydro dam is a project of Fortis, a billion-dollar Newfoundland-based corporation which owns electric utilities in three provinces, and is also the majority owner of Belize Electricity Ltd.

The Chalillo project, also known as the Macal River Upstream Storage Facility, is expected to flood 1,100 hectares (2,718 acres) of pristine forest; engulfing the remote jungle valleys of the Macal and Raspaculo rivers, nestled between the Central Maya mountains near the Guatemalan border.

Conservation groups are opposed to the scheme because the area to be flooded is home to rare and endangered species, including the scarlet macaw – fewer than 250 of which remain in Belize – and the tapir, an ancient relative of the horse and Belize’s national animal, as well as the jaguar, Central American river otter, Morelet’s crocodile and the Central American spider monkey.

“This is arguably the wildest place left in Central America,” said Sharon Matola, Director of the Belize Zoo and Tropical Education Center, and an expert on the scarlet macaw and tapir. “It is the cradle for biodiversity for Central America where [scarlet macaws] live unmolested. Nowhere else do you see these species in such pristine habitat, and it is unconscionable that a Canadian company plans to flood this area.” She added, “Trading off millions of years of biological evolution for a hydro scheme which, at best, would last 50 years, is an environmental crime of the highest degree.”

This area forms part of Central America’s best remaining habitat for jaguars, which roam 40 miles a day in search of food. According to one of the world’s leading jaguar experts, Dr. Alan Rabinowitz of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, flooding the valley would “disrupt the integrity of the jaguar’s habitat in Belize,” making it “a festering wound in the body of one of the largest intact jaguar sites.” Many of the area’s wildlife species are already extinct in other parts of Central America. The Chalillo dam would fracture the Meso-American Biological Corridor, a vast tract of forest stretching from Mexico to Panama, established by the nations of Central America to protect migration routes and breeding grounds for predatory cats, migratory birds, and other species. The dam would also submerge two ancient Maya settlements.

The Fortis corporation’s own consultants told it that the project’s overall impacts on wildlife populations would be “major, negative, long term and local to regional.” Moreover, the same consultants advised that “the benefits of the Chalillo dam project are signifciantly lower than the costs.” Other studies show that is is cheaper to import electricity from gas-fired producers in Mexico than to build Chalillo. Cogeneration using sugar and citrus waste by-products is another more reliable and economical alternative. But Fortis has monopoly power over Belizean electricity consumers, which allows Fortis to charge Belizeans monopoly prices to ensure a profit.

CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency, is our federal government’s foreign aid agency. Using the Access to Information Act, Probe International has learned that CIDA is backing the Fortis bid. In the name of foreign aid, CIDA, gave almost $500,000 to the world’s third largest engineering company, Toronto-based AMEC, to prepare a “project justification report,” and an environmental impact assessment. Amazingly, CIDA is refusing to release this assessment, arguing that it has no legal obligation to do so.

Opposition to this catastrophic dam is growing worldwide. Robert Bateman, Harrison Ford, scientists and environmental groups from Belize, Canada, and the U.S. are united in demanding it be stopped. More than 20,000 ordinary citizens have sent letters, postcards, e-mail messages and faxes of protest to Fortis President Stanley Marshall. Two-thousand-four-hundred representatives of governments and conservation organizations, as members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, resolved as their 2000 World Conservation Congress that Fortis should scrap plans for the dam unless it can show that wildlife habitat would not be significantly harmed.

Sharon Matola says there is more than enough evidence to show that the dam should not be built, but “with funding from Canadian taxpayers, Fortis is trying to sweep the evidence under the rug in an attempt to promote the dam.”

Probe International says that Fortis and its partners are breaking the law in Belize, rushing ahead with no permits and no public hearings. Gráinne Ryder, Probe International’s Policy Director says, “Fortis has abused our foreign aid, and stands to profit much more from Belizean ratepayers, who already pay electricity rates three times higher than those in Canada.”

Belizean environmental and business groups have filed a lawsuit to block the project. The suit challenges the Belizean government’s conditional approval for the hydroelectric dam, charging that the government failed to hold public hearings or consider comments from scientists as required by Belizean law. The lawsuit also charges the dam’s proponents, Fortis Inc., and its partner, the Belize government, with breaking the country’s environmental law by allowing preparation work to begin at the dam site before the project’s environmental review is completed.

An online petition to stop the Chalillo project and save Belize wildlife is available at the Web site http://www.stopfortis.org.

Probe International is a Toronto-based citizens’ group investigating the economic and environmental effects of Canadian aid and companies in developing countries. For more information, visit https://journal.probeinternational.org/.

A photo essay of the Macal River and its people is available online at http://www.internationaljournalism.com.