IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/lauspo/v90y2020ics0264837719308841.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The construction of the Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon and its consequences on regional rural labor

Author

Listed:
  • Calvi, Miquéias Freitas
  • Moran, Emilio F.
  • Silva, Ramon Felipe Bicudo da
  • Batistella, Mateus

Abstract

The article analyzes the impacts of the Belo Monte dam construction on the rural labor mobility dynamics and the effects on the agropastoral activities, in the rural areas of the Altamira region, Pará state, in the Brazilian Amazon. The study is based on longitudinal data organized as a panel survey applied to fixed sample of 402 rural properties for each survey in the years of 1997/98, 2005 and 2015. The construction of Belo Monte dam produced a demographic boom in Altamira, with the urban population almost doubled during the construction period between 2011 and 2014. The increased demand for food in Altamira’s markets was expected to boost production in the local agropastoral economy. However, the supply of jobs during the dam construction to work in the dam or in the new jobs in the urban area led to an exodus of rural workers, causing a shortage of labor in rural areas and an increase in labor costs of the agricultural activities. This scenario has accelerated the trend of productive specialization of agricultural commodities (i.e., beef and cocoa) instead of strengthening the local agricultural production to supply the local markets with vegetables and staple crops. Labor shortage in rural areas was the main driver of changes in the local agricultural activities and the impacts were more evident among the households with lower purchasing power and less market integration. The study shows that the impacts of large dams on the agricultural sector tend to vary according to the degree of consolidation of the productive activities and the market conditions of the products associated to these activities at the time the changes occur (i.e., the period of the dam construction). The study shows that the promises made that the dam would lead to regional economic development were not delivered, and that the agricultural sector if anything declined in its food production capacity. Governments and dam builders should either not promise, or make better plans and policy making to ensure that these goals are achieved.

Suggested Citation

  • Calvi, Miquéias Freitas & Moran, Emilio F. & Silva, Ramon Felipe Bicudo da & Batistella, Mateus, 2020. "The construction of the Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon and its consequences on regional rural labor," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:90:y:2020:i:c:s0264837719308841
    DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104327
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837719308841
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104327?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Legese, Getachew & Van Assche, Kristof & Stellmacher, Till & Tekleworld, Hailemariam & Kelboro, Girma, 2018. "Land for food or power? Risk governance of dams and family farms in Southwest Ethiopia," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 50-59.
    2. Aniseh S. Bro & Emilio Moran & Miquéias Freitas Calvi, 2018. "Market Participation in the Age of Big Dams: The Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam and Its Impact on Rural Agrarian Households," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(5), pages 1-15, May.
    3. Chen, Ji & Shi, Haiyun & Sivakumar, Bellie & Peart, Mervyn R., 2016. "Population, water, food, energy and dams," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 18-28.
    4. Sgarbi, Felipe de Albuquerque & Uhlig, Alexandre & Simões, André Felipe & Goldemberg, José, 2019. "An assessment of the socioeconomic externalities of hydropower plants in Brazil," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 129(C), pages 868-879.
    5. Ansar, Atif & Flyvbjerg, Bent & Budzier, Alexander & Lunn, Daniel, 2014. "Should we build more large dams? The actual costs of hydropower megaproject development," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 43-56.
    6. Fearnside, Philip M., 2016. "Environmental and Social Impacts of Hydroelectric Dams in Brazilian Amazonia: Implications for the Aluminum Industry," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 48-65.
    7. Gustavo Gonzaga, 1998. "Rotatividade e qualidade do emprego no Brasil," Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, Center of Political Economy, vol. 18(1), pages 120-140.
    8. Wood Junior, Thomaz & Tonelli, Maria José & Cooke, Bill, 2011. "Colonização e Neocolonização da Gestão de Recursos Humanos no Brasil (1950-2010)," RAE - Revista de Administração de Empresas, FGV-EAESP Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo (Brazil), vol. 51(3), May.
    9. Gustavo Gonzaga, 1998. "Rotatividade e qualidade do emprego no Brasil," Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, Center of Political Economy, vol. 18(1).
    10. Philip M. Fearnside & Salvador Pueyo, 2012. "Greenhouse-gas emissions from tropical dams," Nature Climate Change, Nature, vol. 2(6), pages 382-384, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mayer, Adam & Lopez, Maria Claudia & Moran, Emilio F., 2022. "Uncompensated losses and damaged livelihoods: Restorative and distributional injustices in Brazilian hydropower," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 167(C).
    2. Conceição, Katyanne V. & Chaves, Michel E.D. & Picoli, Michelle C.A. & Sánchez, Alber H. & Soares, Anderson R. & Mataveli, Guilherme A.V. & Silva, Daniel E. & Costa, Joelma S. & Camara, Gilberto, 2021. "Government policies endanger the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Amazon," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 108(C).
    3. Alynne Almeida Affonso & Silvia Sayuri Mandai & Tatiana Pineda Portella & José Alberto Quintanilha & Luis Américo Conti & Carlos Henrique Grohmann, 2023. "A Comparison between Supervised Classification Methods: Study Case on Land Cover Change Detection Caused by a Hydroelectric Complex Installation in the Brazilian Amazon," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(2), pages 1-28, January.
    4. Rana, Aditya & Singh, Siddharth & Bhagat, N.K. & Singh, M.M. & Jadaun, G.P. & Singh, P.K., 2021. "Evaluating the sustainability of a hydropower project in the Himalayas: A case study for resolving legal disputes in tribunals," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 174(C), pages 894-908.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Costa, Francisco J M & Szerman, Dimitri & Assunção, Juliano, 2018. "Local Economic Impacts of Hydroelectric Power Plants: Evidence from Brazil," SocArXiv kzhs6, Center for Open Science.
    2. Jelena Cvijović & Vladimir Obradović & Marija Todorović, 2021. "Stakeholder Management and Project Sustainability—A Throw of the Dice," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(17), pages 1-22, August.
    3. Isabel L. Jones & Joseph W. Bull, 2020. "Major dams and the challenge of achieving “No Net Loss” of biodiversity in the tropics," Sustainable Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(2), pages 435-443, March.
    4. Aniseh S. Bro & Emilio Moran & Miquéias Freitas Calvi, 2018. "Market Participation in the Age of Big Dams: The Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam and Its Impact on Rural Agrarian Households," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(5), pages 1-15, May.
    5. Mayer, Adam & Lopez, Maria Claudia & Moran, Emilio F., 2022. "Uncompensated losses and damaged livelihoods: Restorative and distributional injustices in Brazilian hydropower," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 167(C).
    6. Fearnside, Philip M., 2016. "Environmental and Social Impacts of Hydroelectric Dams in Brazilian Amazonia: Implications for the Aluminum Industry," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 48-65.
    7. Shobeir Karami & Ezatollah Karami, 2020. "Sustainability assessment of dams," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 22(4), pages 2919-2940, April.
    8. Callegari, C. & Szklo, A. & Schaeffer, R., 2018. "Cost overruns and delays in energy megaprojects: How big is big enough?," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 211-220.
    9. Vicente Fruet & Daniel Campos & Lorena Caridad, 2023. "Itaipu Binational Dam: A Quantitative Analysis of the Economic and Social Impacts in Paraguay. Successful or not?," SAGE Open, , vol. 13(4), pages 21582440231, December.
    10. Rhodante Ahlers, 2020. "Where walls of power meet the wall of money: Hydropower in the age of financialization," Sustainable Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(2), pages 405-412, March.
    11. Gumber, Anurag & Zana, Riccardo & Steffen, Bjarne, 2024. "A global analysis of renewable energy project commissioning timelines," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 358(C).
    12. Love, Peter E.D. & Ika, Lavagnon A. & Ahiaga-Dagbui, Dominic D., 2019. "On de-bunking ‘fake news’ in a post truth era: Why does the Planning Fallacy explanation for cost overruns fall short?," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 397-408.
    13. Shirley, Rebekah G. & Word, Jettie, 2018. "Rights, rivers and renewables: Lessons from hydropower conflict in Borneo on the role of cultural politics in energy planning for Small Island Developing States," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 189-199.
    14. Alexander D. Chapman & Stephen E. Darby & Hoàng M. Hồng & Emma L. Tompkins & Tri P. D. Van, 2016. "Adaptation and development trade-offs: fluvial sediment deposition and the sustainability of rice-cropping in An Giang Province, Mekong Delta," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 137(3), pages 593-608, August.
    15. Sheila M. Olmstead & Hilary Sigman, 2015. "Damming the Commons: An Empirical Analysis of International Cooperation and Conflict in Dam Location," Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, University of Chicago Press, vol. 2(4), pages 497-526.
    16. Milan Daus & Katharina Koberger & Kaan Koca & Felix Beckers & Jorge Encinas Fernández & Barbara Weisbrod & Daniel Dietrich & Sabine Ulrike Gerbersdorf & Rüdiger Glaser & Stefan Haun & Hilmar Hofmann &, 2021. "Interdisciplinary Reservoir Management—A Tool for Sustainable Water Resources Management," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(8), pages 1-21, April.
    17. He, Xi, 2023. "Dams, cropland productivity, and economic development in China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    18. Ole Jonny Klakegg, 2016. "Project Risk Management: Challenge Established Practice," Administrative Sciences, MDPI, vol. 6(4), pages 1-3, December.
    19. Sovacool, Benjamin K. & Walter, Götz, 2018. "Major hydropower states, sustainable development, and energy security: Insights from a preliminary cross-comparative assessment," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 1074-1082.
    20. Hilario J. Torres-Herrera & Alexis Lozano-Medina, 2021. "Methodological Proposal for the Assessment Potential of Pumped Hydropower Energy Storage: Case of Gran Canaria Island," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(12), pages 1-27, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:90:y:2020:i:c:s0264837719308841. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joice Jiang (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/land-use-policy .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.