Diario las Américas Newspaper, January 29, 1956, Page 26

nes Aan * Look to the Rivers (Continued from Page 11) of rivers, lakes, and harbors began 131 years ago, when Congress voted } the first funds fo the purpose. Be- tween 1824 and 1952, the fabulous sum of four billion dollars was in- vested in this work. The program was carried out gradually, in line w:th the development of maritime and river trade and the size and drought of the vessels. Few places in the coastal bays and rivers of- ed natural depths of twenty to “ty feet. The Great Lakes, which form a ‘e part of the border between ‘ United States and Canada, con- ute the biggest system of lake avigation in the world. However, heir full use was only made pos- rle by the construction of expen- e canals to join them and the spening of the approach chan- ls. The St. Mary’s River, for ex- le, which provides access to the er lakes from Lake Superior, is t by severe rapids with a fall of snty-one feet. To provide a way yund this barrier, four dokes ve built. Today nearly 80 per at of U. S, iron ore reaches the cuntry’s steel mills through the s sall “Soo” (officially Sault Ste. Murie) bypass-canal there, which e--ries more cargo than the Pana- ma and. Suez canals combined. More than four billion tons of freight have been transported > ough this waterway in its hun- od years of existence one fourth it in the last ten years. Where uld the United States be today that providential engineering .rk had never been constructed? ‘iat would have happend to Me- xi iron and Michigan copper? r the U. S. steel industry to »sper, it was essential that iron m Minnesota and coal from tern mines hundreds of miles ay be brought together without ohibitive transportation costs. e “Soo” canal accomplished this racle, providing the cheapest transportation in the world. How high would the price of steel have soared if the nearly three billion tons of ore shipped from Min- nesota since 1885 had to go to the plants in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania by rail, instead of on Great Lakes ships that carry it for less than one and a half miles per tonmile? The whole structure of U. S. in- dustry might have collapsed out of inability to compete in price with O'1 World producers. Navigable rivers ana canals in th» United States measure close to 2° 500 miles. This mileage is the revult of the building of many ca- n s, with 312 locks and 219 na- vization dams, and of constant m intenance work such as removal o: obstacles, dredging, and mark- i) ~ of channels with flashing sig- n 3 and buoys. The country has 4 I a eS ere aactrrnorvs oa Pwemenadte SS & Sad we ports, 131 of them on the Great ve very low cost of water trans- ition and the fact that it is lable to everyone are the rea- s why industries prefer water- sites and why most of the ‘d’s big cities are situated on igable bodies of water, The ‘y of Houston, Texas, some fifty *s from the Gulf of Mexico, es an impressive example: In i 9 that city had only seventy- e ht. thousand inhabitants. With t construction of the canal that g es it an outlet to the sea, its p°pulation has soared to six hun- deed thousand and it’is now the n_‘on’s second port in shipping to nage. “hanks to the channelizing of t) upper Mississippi, which re q red twenty-six locks and a 322 m ‘e canal to tie it to the Great L*kes, merchandise can be shipped e ther way between the Lakes and the Gulf. Work recently begun to deepen the channel of the St. Law- rence Seaway, at a cost of about a hundred million dollars, will give ocean steamers direct access to the Great Lakes from the East. The channel will have a minimum depth of twenty-seven feet and is to be inaugurated in 1958. Then bulk merchandise now transported by rail from the lake region to the coast at a cost of some thirteen dollars a ton should make the trip for around $1.70. The capacity of the U. 8. lake and river transportation system is $83,800,000 tons. In 1950 the figure reached 820,600,000 tons, ten times more than the Suez Canal handled Sa in the same year and twenty-seven times the total for the Panama Ca- nal, Though the increase in ton- nage in that period was only 40 per cent, in ton-miles it totaled 800 per cent. When then, can we do to take advantage of South America’s ri- vers? First, we must be practical and avoid extravagant projeets. Robert M. Warren, adviser’ on ri- ver and port development to the United States Economic Develop- ment Commission, has declared: With the most extensive river sistem of any comparable area in the world, and the urgent need for more and cheaper transportation, it is astonishing that internal wa- terways have not been developed in Brazil, Apparently the underly- ing cause... is a lack of understand- ing and appreciation of the basie role that inland waterway trans- portation can and should play in the development of Brazil. For ex- ample, the opinion is widely held here that river transportation is outmoded, and this erroneous idea is industriously kept alive by pro- paganda issued by advocates of other forms of transportation. costly railroads and _ highways where navigable rivers and lakes are available. We must not repeat the tragic mistake of the Madeira- mamoré railway. Tthat route was built at the beginning of this centu- ry to skirt the nineteen cataracts in the Madeira River and provide an outlet for the produce of the upper Madeira and more especially of the Beni basin in Bolivia, as called for in the Petropolis Treaty between Brazil and Bolivia, Everything in- dicated that a series of small later- al canals parallel to the rapids would solve the problem perfectly. The building material, stone, was plentiful around the rapids, The necessary locks could be run with a small staff, each requiring one operator. (Today, with electrical controls, all the locks could be managed from a single cabin, and the electricity could be generated by the rapids themselves), Not on- ly is water transportation cheaper than rail, but this system would have permitted river craft coming from the Para and Manaus to pe- netrate the upper Madeira and the Beni and load and unload their ear- go directly, without — the present costly transfers from ship to train and train to ship. Against the advice of experienc- ed technicians, .including the Bo- livian General Quintin Quevedo, one of the strongest champions of the idea of tryin the eastern part of his country to the Atlantic, it was decided to build this ill-fated railroad in Amazonian jungle in- fested with malaria and considered at that time one of the most un- healthful areas in the world. Its cost in money — more than fifty million dollars — and in lives was so hight that it came to be known as the line of golden tracks, in which each tie represents a body. Ties were imported from Formosa, although there was plenty of suit- able lumber along the route; in fact the Madeira (“Wood”) Ri- ver is named for its forest riches. Canned food was brought in from the United States and from south- ern Brazil. Since canning techni- que had not been perfected to the same degree .as now, thou- sands of workers who had escap- ed malaria fell victims of food poisoning. The toll exacted by en- demic diseases climbed even high- er, because many of the workers had been recruted in Central Am- erioa, the United States, and Ger- many and were unused to the cli- mate. The U.S. firm in charge of the project was obviously more concerned with the fabulous pro- fits earned by rubber than with a desire to solve the region’s tran- sportation problem. So when the rubber trade collapsed, the com- pany had to withdraw, leaving the responsibility for the work on the shoulders of the Brazilian Gov- ernment. All this to handle a vo- lume of freight that could be ca- rried by two or three river boats a month at far lower freight rates To derive full benefit from their inland waterways, it seems to me the South American countries should aim at these goals: 1) dred- ging, removal of obstacles, and channel marking along the navig- able rivers; 2) construction of channels around rapids that im- pede navigation in the Casiquiare Canal and Orinoco River when wa- ter is low; 3) construction of by- Pass-canals around the cataracts of. the Tapajés and similar rivers such as the Xingu, the Tocantins, the Araguaia, and the Parana; and finally 4) construction of canals linking the tributaries that form ~the Tapajés with those that make up the Paraguay (the Novo Ari- nos with the Cuiaba, for example) to make it possible for boats to pass between the Amazon basin and the Panamé-Paraguay: system. Brasil’s river netwerk now to- tals 22.900 miles. Improvements in line with points 1 and 3 might double the navigable mileage. Pen- etration roads between the rivers also require study. It should be possible at least to establish the routes and distances now. Such projects could be partly financed by the Plan for Economic Deve- lopment of the Amazon, to which, under a Constitutional provision, 3 per cent of national taxes must be devoted. Down to the last century. the Cuiaba-Tapajos route was the most accessible natural way for the mer- chants of Cuiaba, the capital of Mato Grosso State, to enter the Amazon basin, where they conduc- ted a profitable exchange of goods for local products, especially gua- rana, from which a medicinal tea and soft drinks are prepared. Cui- aba shippers outfitted canoes load- ed with dried meat, cheese, and nets and set off down the Tapa- jos. These voyages were dangerous because of both the long rapids and the risk of sudden attacks by Indians along the way. Generally the traders landed at Vila Braga and continued overland to Manués, famous for its guarana, and hawk- ed their wares there. Sometimes they went as far as Aveiro and Santarém. The return trip to Cuia- ba took months of constant strug- gle against the waters and savages. All or part of many an expedi- tion was sacrificed. The white-wa- ter sections of the Tapajés, es- pecially Augusto Falls, were by- passed by land. So the course of the Tapajés seems to be a natu- wal route for joining the Amazon and the Parana-Paraguay basins, although engineering studies have . not been made that would en us to judge the practicability and cost of a canal or whether the wa- ter in it could be maintained at a useful level. A concession exists for building a railroad between Santarém and Cuiab4, which might repeat the experience of the Ma- deira-Mamoré line, this time on a route of 1.240 miles. PAGE 14 Laying concrete mattress along graded bank of Mississippi River to help stabilize channel and make the most of navigation potential. Of course, those rivers running through already highly productive areas offer the greatest economic incentive for development of na- vigation. Where new channels are contemplated through comparativ- ely uninhabited regions, the pro- gram should be coordinated with population growth so that the num- ber of users will justify the cost of improvements. There can be no progress without population, and the latifundium, or huge estate, continues to be the worst econo- mic cancer in Latin America. Ex- propriation of the lands along the shores of these rivers and their sale on long terms to selected Bra- zilian and foreign colonists could, in my opinion, fully cover the cost of the work. Obviously, such co- lonization would have to be carri- ed out in accordance with mo- dern, rational methods, under which the colonists would receive s comoleted house, part of the land already cleared and free of wild animals, sufficient food for six months, and technical and me- dical assistance. ‘We should not overlook the to- urist possibilities connected with development of links between the Orinoco and Amazon basins and between the latter and the Para- na-Paraguay. U.S. tnavelers are generally fascinated by adventu- rous voyages. Lectures by “explo- rers” returning from Africa and South America ( who in many cases never left the luxurious ho- tels of Cape Town or Rio) always find a large and attentive audi- ence. It’s not hard to imagine of trafic a yearn Looking upstream as barge is locked through Fort Loudon Dam on Tennessee River, which carries six huidred thousand ton-miles appropriate river boats or laun- ches, airconditioned and _ fitted with screening and glassed-in decks, carrying tourists from Be- lem, at the mouth of the Amazon, to Buenos Aires, on a voyage of 3.600 miles through regions of un- paralleled exotic beauty. Mr. Warren’s report cited above comes out strongly for linking Sao Paulo with Buenos Aires by im: provements of the Tiete and Pa- rand rivers. The timeliness and urgency of these works seems ap- parent, for the whole region is suf- ficinetly developed, populated, and productive to guarantee pro- fitable cargoes for the. transpor- tation companies. Warren believ- es that navigation on the Parana “should continue as it is, divided into two sections, upper and low- er, separated by the huge Sete Quedas Falls at Guaira. He advoca- tes careful study of the cost of a good channel between Sao Paulo and Porto Guaira before a costly railroad building program in the area is embarked on, But he makes no mention, perhaps because of the high cost, of connecting the upper and lower Parana sections for navigation. As this tie is, in my opinion, essential, it would have to be made, if not by water, then by a railroad or highway parallel to the river, as has been suggested by some Brazilian en- gineers, who are perhaps influenc- ed more by the technical aspects of the job than by its economie significance and practicability, Instead of a railroad, a lateral canal seems advisable for a num- SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 1066 peer pes Bay) Eee wae