area of good land within the Area of Expansion,137 agricultural use is limited in the rest of the territory with high environmental vulnerability.” The resulting Bank Loan Proposal confirms that the SEA portrayed “a fragile environmental and social situation in the area of influence of the Santa Cruz-Puerto Suárez Corridor,” observing further that, in environmental terms, “global experience in the past decades with the building or improvement of highways in isolated regions and with natural vegetation has had grave consequences: greater accessibility throughout the year and the reduction of transport costs causes a rapid expansion of the economic frontier (agriculture, extensive cattle-ranching and logging), which in turn results in massive deforestation, degradation of ecosystems and a loss of biodiversity.” In social terms, moreover, the SEA described “the region’s poverty and ethnic and social diversity: the majority of the population living in urbanized areas are poor, the indigenous peoples, small farmers and landholders that have come from other regions, the Mennonites, small landholders, day laborers, as well as large farms and cattle ranches.” The lack of land tenure security and rural poverty, in turn, were seen as “the central factors contributing to vulnerability.” In addition, the development that the highway will bring is going to cause conflict between modern production systems linked to global markets and traditional systems of subsistence agriculture. The rise in land value and the “permeability” of the…communities and small farmers who (sic) will join the population attracted by the project, will exacerbate existing social differentiation and private appropriation of communal lands. Up until now, the relative isolation of the region has somewhat ameliorated these factors, but this will change when the highway is improved. The difficult access helped to keep down pressure on the land and minimized the impact on ecosystems and the most vulnerable population. The new greater accessibility will increase land value and will extend the economic frontier, as well as exacerbate conflicts and the impact on society and the environment.138 Based on the SEA, the LP also described the direct impact of road construction and obtaining the corresponding rights of way, which would be 100 meters wide along the entire
137
Although the Loan Proposal does not define what it means by “the Area of Expansion,” it does provide a footnote right after mentioning it that states “the rapid conversion of forests into agricultural areas was caused by a zone approximately 100 km to the east of the Grande River where the Lowlands Project was financed by the World Bank,” referring to an earlier agricultural development project in the region. 138 IDB, Bolivia: Environmental and Social Protection in the Santa Cruz-Puerto Suárez Corridor, op. cit., pp. 7-8. My emphasis.
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