Nicaragua's
Canal, shallow science and phony environmentalism
Tortilla con Sal
Enviado
por tortilla en Dom, 07/12/2014 - 10:23
Tortilla con Sal,
December 6th 2014
Western media coverage
of Nicaragua's interoceanic canal has been almost uniformly hostile and often
woefully ill-informed since the project was announced in 2013. The most recent
attacks have focused on the alleged disaster the canal represents for
Nicaragua's natural environment, mixed in with largely gratuitous attacks on
the Nicaraguan government and the Canal's Chinese main contractor, HKND. A
casual reader could be forgiven for concluding that the project is hopelessly
misconceived and highly likely to ruin an untouched natural environment.
Some specific criticisms by environmentalists have already been accepted and
incorporated into the Canal's still developing planning stages. But the wider
general arguments are often confused, flawed on matters of fact, generally
unscientific and blatantly biased in what they argue and almost without
exception downright dishonest in terms of what they omit. The article by
Matthew Shaer is a good place to start.
The article's first
couple of paragraphs set the tone and include a couple of subtle, misleading
falsehoods. Shaer begins by complaining that the environmental studies of the
Canal have yet to be released. This is true, because they are not yet finished.
Shaer ignores that fact, eliding his text quickly into the falsehood that work
on the excavation of the Canal is scheduled to begin in December. That is not
true
In fact, work will begin
in December on two of the Canal's auxiliary projects, a deep-water port on
Nicaragua's Pacific Coast and related highway infrastructure. Both projects are
necessary to receive the massive machinery expected, much later, to excavate
the Canal. The other auxiliary projects are on Nicaragua's Pacific Coast, an
international airport, a manufacturing and commercial zone, a tourism complex,
and, on Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast, a second deep-water port.
The Nicaraguan
government and HKND, the Chinese company managing this huge set of projects
have consistently repeated and demonstrated their commitment to listen to
criticisms so as to minimize environmental and social impacts. This means it is
extremely unlikely that work on the Canal itself will begin before the
environmental and social studies are complete. Shaer thus begins his article by
misleading his readers over the environmental studies and then falsely claiming
that work excavating the Canal will go ahead in any case.
Shaer compounds that
intellectual sleight of hand by unfairly stating that the Nicaraguan government
has “dodged neighboring Costa Rica’s request to share disaster plans”. On the
contrary, a true and fair account of the matter would explain that Costa Rica
and Nicaragua have been involved for years in a bitter legal dispute over
Nicaragua's Rio San Juan, currently before the International Court of Justice.
Throughout that time Costa Rica has resolutely and repeatedly refused
persistent requests from the Nicaraguan government to negotiate the two
countries' respective concerns.
The countries'
differences include complaints from Costa Rica about alleged Nicaraguan
infringement of a few hectares of territory in the Rio San Juan delta, claimed
by Costa Rica. Nicaragua cites long term environmental depredation resulting
from Costa Rican government policies and irresponsible practices by mining
companies and farmers in Costa Rican territory close to Nicaragua's Rio San
Juan. Rather than negotiate a settlement, the Costa Rican authorities
deliberately provoked further environmental damage to the Rio San Juan by
recklessly building a poorly conceived and badly implemented highway along the
Costa Rican side of the river. That project ended in a notorious corruption
scandal much to the discredit of the government of then President Laura
Chinchilla.
Nicaragua has presented
that grievance as well to the International Court of Justice. Self-evidently,
the Nicaraguan government has decided to take its time considering Costa Rica's
complaints in relation to the Canal. From a Nicaraguan point of view, Shaer's
language that Nicaragua has “dodged”a request from its homely “neighbour”
effectively whitewashes Costa Rica's disgraceful environmentally damaging
behaviour in relation to the Rio San Juan over the last decade and more.
Shaer then summarizes
complaints by critics relating to the Canal's overall economic benefits. “The
canal’s true costs/benefits can’t be calculated as long as the costs to
Nicaragua’s forests, waterways and wildlife remain hidden.” For anyone familiar
with Nicaragua's environmental problems and genuinely concerned about them that
statement is deeply disingenuous. Nicaragua's fundamental environmental
problems are intimately and inextricably bound up with its problems of economic
development.
Contrary to Schaer's
assertion, Nicaragua is not a pristine paradise about to be violated by a
poorly planned Canal. Nicaragua already suffers chronic and accelerating
deforestation.
Also, Nicaragua's major
water resources, Lake Nicaragua and the Rio San Juan already suffer chronic,
steadily worsening problems of sedimentation and contamination.
In that pressingly
urgent context, a more correct and honest formulation of Shaer's complaint
would be very different. The Canal's true cost/benefits can only be calculated
by factoring in the costs of the massive irreparable damage that will
undoubtedly occur if the Canal is not, in fact, built. Shaer's premise, derived
from other foreign and Nicaraguan critics of the Canal, is completely false
because he deliberately omits Nicaragua's already tremendously depressing
existing environmental reality. Neither Shaer nor any other of the Canal's
opponents for environmental have engaged the positive environmental arguments
for the Canal.
By the end of 2014,
studies of the Canal project will have lasted two years. The Dutch Ecorys companyconducted
pre-feasibility studies from December 2012 until June 2013. On the basis of
those studies, HKND has funded more detailed studies, still to be completed,
costing well over US$100 million over eighteen months. That two year process
contradicts critics who complain that the Canal project has been rushed and
poorly conceived. Those critics invariably omit the participation throughout
that period of appraisal and evaluation of some of the world's most successful
engineering construction and consultancy companies.
Nicaragua's government
argues that the final route of the Canal, announced in July this year, is a
more costly route chosen precisely so as to minimize environmental damage and
social disruption. Even so, Shaer sceptically skims over the government's
economic arguments for the Canal without stating what they are and what they
mean for Nicaragua's natural environment. In fact, based on the experience
gained from the widening of Panama's canal, the Nicaraguan government argues
that over a ten year period the overall Canal project will at the very least
double Nicaragua's gross domestic product.
From an environmental
point of view, that fact is significant for two main reasons. Firstly, if
Nicaragua doubles its GDP over the next ten years, the government's current and
future redistributive policies will enable it to eliminate extreme poverty in Nicaragua.
Extreme poverty is one of the main causes forcing rural families to migrate
eastwards, advancing the agricultural frontier into very important protected
areas like Bosawas and Indio Maíz, with all that implies for Nicaragua's
woodlands and water resources. Secondly, the likely increased revenue for the
government will finally enable the Nicaraguan authorities to reverse current
deforestation and improve decades-long inadequate and under-funded water
resource management.
Water resource
management has been problematic for the Nicaraguan authorities for decades.
Efficient and responsible water resource management is vital for the operation
of the Canal's reservoirs and locks. The issue of water management is a theme
on which critics of the Canal are perhaps even more dishonest than in relation
to the issue of deforestation. Schaer makes the inaccurate claim that Lake
Nicaragua “provides most Nicaraguans with drinking water”.
This is just silly.
Almost a third of Nicaragua's population live in Managua and get their water
from lakes and reservoirs around the capital. The population around Lake
Nicaragua is barely 240,000 out of Nicaragua's total population of six million.
As well as this kind of inaccuracy, Shaer's article offers hypothetical
disaster scenarios suggesting the Nicaraguan Canal is at risk from catastrophic
damage by a massive hurricane or earthquake. That is true. It is also true of
population centres and infrastructure around the world in innumerable areas at
risk from natural phenomena, from San Francisco to Venice to Dhaka to Tohoku.
The job of the engineers and actuaries working on the Canal projects is to
manage and minimize those risks the same as their global counterparts do in
other vulnerable areas around the world.
Shaer also states that
the Nicaraguan Canal is being built for boats that could not currently dock at
ports in the US. He seems to be unaware of major new port infrastructure
developments to receive post-Panamax container ships and tankers all along the
US Atlantic coast. New York, Baltimore, Miami, Savannah andCharleston are all
either now completing, shortly will complete or contemplate completing port
development to accommodate those ships. By 2020, when the Nicaraguan Canal
should be in full operation, port authorities in North America and Europe will
have had six years to develop the necessary infrastructure.
If Shaer's article is
generally inaccurate and tendentious, Rachel Nuwer's latest article and an earlier article attacking the Canal are even more so. Unlike Matthew Shaer, Rachel
Nuwer correctly notes that the final environmental and social feasibility
studies are unlikely to be completed for another four months. Even so, in her
latest article, she goes ahead and states as fact, presumably on the basis of
clairvoyance, the outcomes these uncompleted studies may have to acknowledge.
Nuwer sources much of
her reports on a resolution of the Association for Tropical Biology and
Conservation. This document,
currently dated October 2014, purports to be based on scientific criteria. But
its authors betray their clear political ideological bias when they state “The
development of the Canal violates the Nicaraguan Constitution and its
fundamental principles, including Law 28 of 1987 and Law 445 of 2003, which
recognize and guarantee the inalienability of indigenous’ and afro-descendants’
lands, which cannot be sold, donated nor leased.”
Nicaragua is a sovereign
country whose laws and constitution are interpreted by its Supreme Court, not
by a relatively obscure foreign organization claiming to be scientific. In
Nicaragua, various legal challenges to the Canal were made through the second
half of 2013 and all were rejected by the country's Supreme Court. Not to
acknowledge that fact in a document dated October 2014 suggests that the
authors are politically biased because their arguments mirror those of
Nicaragua's tiny minority political opposition, currently with under 10%
support nationally.
That political bias is
clear too in the rest of the Association's document. Despite knowing the route
of the Canal, the resolution dispays a graphic with a false route that would
indeed result in very serious environmental damage and social disruption of
indigenous communities.
But that is not the
route that has been chosen as was made clear in July 2014. This is:
The language the
Association chooses is deliberately jaundiced and hostile. The map of the fake
route the Association publishes is entitled “Nicaragua Carve-Up”, remarkably
unscientific language, clearly implying, on the basis of no evidence
whatsoever, that the Canal project is corrupt.
Rachel Nuwer reproduces
the numerous inaccuracies and hyperbole in the Association's report. Like Shaer
and other critics of the Canal, for example, the authors of the article in Nature magazine, Nuwer too seems to start from the false premise that Nicaragua's
natural environment is currently pristine and is under threat from the Canal
and its auxiliary projects. Nuwer apparently accepts as gospel truth the
Association's assertion that:
“The canal development
is estimated to impact some 4,000 km2 of forest, coastline and
wetlands that include the San Miguelito Wetland (a site protected by the Ramsar
Convention, of which Nicaragua is a signatory), the Cerro Silva Natural
Reserve, the Rio San Juan Biosphere Reserve, which comprises 7 protected areas,
including the Guatuzos Wildlife Refuge, Indio Maiz Biological Reserve, and the
Solentiname Archipelago.”·This assertion is grossly false.
In fact ,the final route
of the Canal has been deliberately sited so as to avoid precisely the Rio San
Juan Biosphere Reserve, the Guatuzos Wildlife Refuge, the Indio Maiz Biological
Reserve and the Solentiname Archipelago. The Cerro Silva Natural Reserve is
already at grave risk as the Nicaraguan government's Natural
Resources Ministry management plan for that protected area indicates. The Cerro Silva reserve's main
problems are, encroachment by cattle farming, local population growth, erosion
and sedimentation affecting water resources, clandestine logging and hunting,
poor environmental awareness among the population, and inadequate resources to
implement conservation policies. The report states :
"The institutional
and civil capacity of the region to address these macro-problems is very
limited. The lack of national capital and external capital interest in
sustainable exploitation of the area's natural resources is self-evident. The
regional institutional framework lacks resources to do more than work on
planning and the major part of those resources are used in never-ending
reconstruction of institutional administrative infrastructure in a still very
weak legal framework that leads to lack of attention to specific cases of, for
example, logging, agricultural fires, and contamination from chemical
waste."
When complete, the Canal
project will in fact protect the Cerro Silva conservation area by improving
woodland and water resource management and reducing encroachment by rural
families engaged in subsistence farming and relentless piecemeal logging. It
may be true that the San Miguelito wetlands will be marginally affected by the
Canal but those effects are likely to be enormously outweighed by the protection
from the advance of the agricultural frontier driven by poverty the Canal will
finally afford to Cerro Silva, the Indio Maiz Biological Reserve and the Rio
San Juan area.
One looks in vain among
the environmentalist attacks on the Canal for an acknowledgment of the
substantial and important arguments in favour of the Canal. Likewise, the
Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation suggest in their resolution
that Nicaragua is water impoverished. It states “The Yale Centre for
Environmental Law and Policy Environmental Performance Index (EPI) has
identified Nicaragua as a country with “water stress”, meaning that the volume
of water available to the population is inadequate and ranks Nicaragua 136 out
of 163 countries surveyed for water scarcity.”
This information is
insanely counterfactual. Nicaragua's water resources are among the most
abundant between the Great Lakes of North America and the Guarani Aquifer in
South America. It may indeed be true, for reasons relating to historically
inadequate, underfunded water resource management, that Nicaragua makes poor
use of its water resources. But that is very different to saying that Nicaragua
suffers from a lack of water.
For example, the
Wikipedia entry on Nicaragua's water resources states, “Nicaragua has ample
water supplies in rivers, groundwater, lagoons, and significant rainfall.
Distribution of rainfall is uneven though with more rain falling on an annual
basis in the Caribbean lowlands and much lower amounts falling in the inland
areas. Significant water resources management challenges include contaminated
surface water from untreated domestic and industrial wastewater, and poor
overall management of the available water resources.”
What that view of
Nicaragua's water resources clearly implies is that the Association for
Tropical Biology and Conservation's phony science deliberately cherry picked
available information to favour its biased point of view. The Nicaraguan
government and the proponents of the Canal argue that the Canal will fundamentally
improve Nicaragua's water resource management. That fact and the fact of water
abundance in Nicaragua are ruthlessly omitted from both the Association for
Tropical Biology and Conservation's resolution and from Rachel Nuwer's article.
Nuwer repeats the falsehood
that Lake Nicaragua is where “most of the country’s drinking water comes from”.
She repeats the spurious accusation by Jorge A.
Huete-Perez, and Axel Meyer, in their Nature magazine article that the Canal will affect the Bosawas biosphere reserve, even
though the Canal will pass hundreds of kilometres to the south of that reserve.
Nuwer reports as fact the outrageous lie in relation to indigenous communities
that “No proof has emerged that their rights have been taken into consideration
or allocations have been made to make up for disruptions to their lives,”
In fact, the Canal's 2013 legislation explicitly guarantees in its Article 12 the indemnity process for
any communities displaced by the Canal. The Canal project has been coordinated
with both the relevant indigenous governing institutions and local communities.
Hundreds of government and HKND personnel have spent months conducting a
population census, measuring properties, gathering concerns and criticisms
along the likely final route of the Canal. The government and HKND presentation
of November 20th 2014 explicitly stated this, confirming the final route of the
Canal has been altered as a result of the census and associated consultations.
While Nuwer's poor
reporting is clear, that does not mean opposition to the Canal does not exist.
It would be surprising if it did not. But it remains to be seen whether the
minority grass roots opposition to the Canal survives the process associated
with indemnification negotiations. Both the Nicaraguan government and HKND have
explicitly stated that their commitment is to ensure that no community affected
will be worse off economically as a result of the Canal. That information is
glaringly absent from Rachel Nuwer's report. Nuwer does raise legitimate
concerns about the potential for creeping salination of the lake and the
possible appearance of invasive foreign species. Another concern relates to the
migration of wildlife across the Canal. Those concerns may well be addressed in
the final environmental impact studies the conclusions of which her article
pre-empts in a most prejudicial way.
Shifting from the
environmental angle, Nuwer repeats the view by critics of the Canal that the
HKND company and its owner Wang Jing are unproven. She cites extremely hostile
articles from pro-US Asian media outlets like the the South
China Morning Post and the Bangkok
Post questioning Wang Jing's track
record and the success of his Xinwei multinational telecommunications company.
But the conclusion of any critically minded interpretation of those articles is
that Xinwei operates with mixed success in a number of countries, has an
extensive, solid domestic base in China and has good relations with the Chinese
government. This is a typical profile of many multinational businesses around
the world.
If the Canal's opponents
have set out to dig up dirt and scandal in relation to HKND and its boss Wang
Jing, they have signally failed. Similarly to James Griffith's Global Post report slighting Wang Jing's business record, all Rachel Nuwer and her
pro-US sources have discovered is that Xinwei is a domestically strong company
struggling to do well in cut-throat foreign communications markets. Similarly,
Nuwer quotes the hostile opinion against the Canal by one shipping analyst but
omits the positive opinion of one of the
biggest shipping companies in the world, Maersk. It may indeed be true that Wang Jing's Xinwei company has hit a brick
wall in terms of its business model overseas.
But Xinwei is not HKND.
Nuwer seems oblivious to the self-evident fact that the Nicaraguan Canal marks
a diversification of Wang Jing's businesses away from telecommunications. She
ignores that the HKND team of contractors includes some of the biggest, most
successful engineering construction companies in the world. On commercial and
economic grounds, her arguments against the Canal are either trivial
speculation, or tautological non sequiturs. On environmental grounds, her
sources are inaccurate or prejudiced and she evades opposing environmental
arguments in favour of the Canal by omitting them.
Nuwer writes, “at worst,
Nicaragua will get a massive canal that might bring environmental devastation
to the country and could perhaps even 'reignite the civil violence that has
long blighted the region,' theNature authors write. At best, on the
other hand, plans will simply fall through, like many of Wang’s other
ventures.” Apart from yet another gratuitous slight against Wang Jing,
belittling his proven successes, that summary ignores the integral economic
nature of the Canal and its auxiliary projects, two deep water ports, an
international airport, a major tourism complex and an industrial and commercial
zone.
The articles published
recently by the Smithsonian magazine attacking Nicaragua's Canal have been
overtaken by events. While critics of the Canal will may well continue their
negative sniping campaign, HKND and it sub-contractors have already
incorporated legitimate criticisms into their planning, for example in relation
to protecting vulnerable mangrove areas and re-siting port infrastructure. In
coordination with the Nicaraguan government's National Canal Commission which
is overseeing the whole project, work will start on a couple of the Canal's
auxiliary projects in December.
Almost all critics of
Nicaragua's Canal have overlooked the Canal's urgent strategic importance for
global trading interests. For the Chinese government and its allies - Russia,
India, Brazil and South Africa – the Nicaraguan Canal dramatically increases options
for their international commerce. Likewise, for the Atlantic elites of North
America and Europe, the Canal will facilitate their vision of the Trans Pacific
Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership should those
far-reaching corporate welfare schemes every come to fruition.
On a regional level, the
Canal enhances Nicaragua's strategic location and role as part of the
Venezuelan and Cuban led Bolivarian Alliance cooperation and development bloc's
planning for Central America and the Caribbean. The Nicaraguan Canal will
transform not just Nicaragua's economy but that of the whole Central American
and Caribbean region. The Canal itself is just one part of a complex set of
global infrastructure initiatives by various countries
Elsewhere, plans are
advanced for another Suez Canal running parallel to the existing one. In South
America, China is planning a transcontinental rail link with Peru and Brazil and, possibly, Bolivia. China plans similar
far-reaching infrastructure projects across Africa and Central Asia and is also
undertaking major projects with Russia and some of the ASEAN countries. All
this is relevant to discussion around Nicaragua's Canal, contradicting Rachel
Nuwer's uncritical recycling of criticism by Canal opponents that it will be an
economic white elephant.
However, the truly
damning argument against the intellectual integrity of opponents of the Canal
is that they deliberately omit discussion of the urgent current threats to
Nicaragua's natural environment and refuse to engage the environmental
arguments of the Canal's proponents. Matthew Shaer, Rachel Nuwer and the
opponents of the Nicaraguan Canal whose arguments they repeat propose next to
nothing worth serious consideration in defence of Nicaragua's chronically
deteriorating natural environment. Still less have they any viable proposal to
reduce the country's persistent intractable poverty.
By contrast, the track
record of Nicaragua's Sandinista government is one of outstanding economic
success, demonstrated concern for the country's natural environment and
indigenous peoples and overwhelming international recognition for its
redistributive poverty reduction programs. President Daniel Ortega and his
colleagues have kept every important promise they have made to the people of
Nicaragua. Defending Nicaragua's natural environment and reducing poverty in
the country are ultimately the same thing. If Nicaragua's Canal can be built it
will do both.
