Rio abandons cleanup effort
Rio de Janeiro is abandoning its promise to treat the raw sewage polluting Guanabara Bay, as workers building a pipeline network and treatment plant are being fired and the state sinks into fiscal crisis.
A US$450 million loan agreement with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to build the infrastructure needed to collect and treat sewage will expire in March, and the Brazilian Treasury won’t allow its extension, according to Rio’s environment secretariat.
Of all the pledges to win Olympic Games hosting rights, stopping the torrents of raw sewage pouring into its postcard bay became one of Rio’s most high-profile legacy projects, and its most glaring failure.
Authorities said two years ahead of the games that the IDB-financed programme wouldn’t be completed in time for the sailing competition, but maintained hope for its completion afterwards.
Rio’s government has since declared a state of fiscal emergency and is struggling to pay civil servants while it pushes for austerity measures and lobbies Brazil’s Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles for federal aid.
The so-called PSAM programme to clean up the bay, which features the famed Sugarloaf Mountain at its mouth, involved hiring a consortium of companies for a massive expansion of the existing sewerage network and construction of a new treatment plant.
The state’s environment secretariat said dozens of workers had already been served with dismissal notices.
‘‘I hope good sense and sensibility prevail and President Michel Temer saves this programme,’’ said Andrea Correa, Rio’s environment secretary.
Doing so would require extending the IDB loan agreement for two years. Five years after the loan was approved, however, the IDB has disbursed less than onefifth of the funds, according to its website.
Jockeying for control of the programme and attempts to divert IDB funds hampered its progress, according to a Bloomberg investigation published in July.
As part of the loan’s terms, Rio agreed to provide an additional US$188 million – no small sum for a state whose finances are among the most precarious in Brazil, partly due to a drop in oil revenues but also as a result of billions of reais in tax breaks it granted to companies.
Governor Luiz Fernando Pezao played a key role in striking a grand bargain that renegotiated the state’s debts, but relief measures achieved so far haven’t prevented salary delays for teachers, policemen and judges.
Rio’s water and sewage utility estimates that only about half the waste produced by the millions of residents living around Guanabara Bay is treated. Critics say that figure is overestimated. Some treatment plants are inactive or operating at reduced capacity after the 1990s programme that produced them, also partly funded by the IDB, failed to complete associated sewerage networks.
The IDB declined to comment on the firings or whether they effectively meant the end of the PSAM project, saying this was an issue for Rio de Janeiro.