Why Water Infrastructure is Social Infrastructure: The Case of the Hidrovia Amazonica

If we want sustainable development, we need to build strong social infrastructure. Especially when we’re talking about straightening the Amazon into a superhighway for oil transport.

Iquitos is a jungle city of a half million people — mostly native and Mestizo — located on the Amazon River deep in the Peruvian Amazon. There are no roads that go there, so the only way in is by boat from the Andes or a flight from Lima. I have journeyed there both ways — many times by plane, and once from Coca, Ecuador by small boat, following the path of the Spanish explorer and conquistador Francisco de Orellana, from the cloud forest of Rio Napo to the start of the Peruvian Amazon at the confluence of Rios Marañón and Ucayali in the largest and resource rich province of Loreto.

This area of the world has riches in at least five categories:

1. Carbon management — the forest here is literally the lungs of the planet;
2. Biodiversity on an astronomical scale — the Amazon River hosts more freshwater fish species than any other river in the world;
3. People, cultural diversity and human capital — the rainforest hosts more than 300 endemic native languages and one-half of the planet’s uncontacted peoples;
4. Contraband — Iquitos hosts a lucrative illegal trade of drugs, gold, sex and timber; and
5. OIL — massive quantities of it, lying just underneath the lungs of the planet, and in need of a highway to transport it out to cities in far off lands. The Peruvian government has slated the Amazon River to be that highway, which makes the stakes for further development obviously high.

The problem: These riches — generated by the Amazon’s meandering path — are not matched by the region’s lack of even basic infrastructure.

This contrast between natural and cultural riches and infrastructure poverty is especially apparent in Iquitos — the jungle’s capital — where key bridge construction projects languish and water services are scant. Nearly 3 million people lack access to safe drinking water in Peru, and 8 million lack access to improved sanitation. I would hazard that the denizens of Iquitos and other jungle communities make up the majority of these statistics.

More importantly, expertise in drinking water treatment and sanitation is non-existent in smaller communities in Loreto and likely just as hard to come by in Iquitos. I will return to this idea of human capital and social infrastructure later, as well as in a post here next month.

Why Building an Amazon Superhighway is a Public Health Problem as Well as an Engineering Challenge

Here’s the coming bombshell for Iquitos: In Lima, on the other side of the Andes, the Peruvian government is thinking about straightening the Amazon River, so shipments can go all the way from the Atlantic to Lima instead of having to go around Tierra Del Fuego or go through the Panama Canal and then come down. This project, the massive hidrovia amazonica, would also provide a straight shot for oil transports out of the jungle.

As if out of a textbook from a siloed single discipline, the hidrovia project appears to be envisioned as an upgrade to physical infrastructure — but with scant investment in the social infrastructure that would be required to support it locally and to build it in a way that lifts local communities out of poverty.

The consequences of failing to consider social infrastructure here are local and global:

• Locally, construction jobs do not build long lasting economic vitality and sustainability. Construction is transient and therefore fuels the flow of transient economies including contraband. This transience would have devastating impacts on cultural heritage, language and the potential for local communities to later sustain the new physical infrastructure and its benefits.
• Globally, the forest that exchanges CO2 for O2 would be cut off from the meandering of the Amazon’s mainstem — a connection that creates the riches of the region.

Building the Amazon superhighway is not just an engineering challenge. It’s a public health problem for places like Iquitos. Iquitos is a treasure trove of culture and people, all at high risk from novel and often waterborne or water-related vector borne diseases.

Without building critical social infrastructure, hidrovias will provide a short term boom to these jungle outposts at the cost of carbon balance and human and cultural diversity.

— John Sabo

Much of this public health risk emerges from poor water treatment and sanitation infrastructure as well as from inadequate waste management. As if to put the proverbial cart before the llama, we will see the water highway go in without clean water provided to those who use and maintain it. If we’re going to modernize shipping in the Amazon — a move of which I’m not a proponent — shouldn’t we connect that with improving Iquitos’ water treatment and sanitation infrastructure and outcomes?

To make this connection, we need also to grow the technical capacity and business of clean water delivery. The social infrastructure in water treatment needs as much investment as the technology itself. Expertise is too expensive and impractical to fly in from Lima. It needs to be grown locally.

Because of the importance of the Amazon rainforest in regulating the global carbon balance, I would argue that safe drinking water and sanitation facilities are an important building block of sustainable development — not just for the the jungle capital of Iquitos and its surrounding communities, but for the world. Without building this critical social infrastructure, hidrovias will provide a short term boom to these jungle outposts at the cost of carbon balance and human and cultural diversity.

Next month: What kinds of social infrastructure are necessary to close the US water access gap?

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