Latin America; in English (pdf) - Transboundary Freshwater Dispute ...

Ecuador ’s small farmers harvest broccoli to survive the country’s agricultural trade problems. Photo: USAID.
and downstream nations along the shared rivers.
If one nation is polluting upstream and that
damages the waters used by a country farther
down the river, there is a potential for conflict.
With such large numbers of people without
basic sanitation services and with only a small
percentage of collected sewage actually treated,
industrial and domestic waste is the primary
cause of pollution of South America’s international
freshwater resources (UNEP 2000). Poignant
examples of this can be seen in Lake Titicaca
where, although the entire lake is not polluted,
there are specific areas near the urban centers
of Puno, Peru, and Copacabana, Bolivia, where
the levels of contamination are very high
(Revollo 2001).
Second to urban waste as a source of
contamination is that of agriculture. With many of
the upstream areas of international river basins
such as the La Plata, Amazon, Orinoco,
Essequibo being in large agricultural regions, this
introduces the possibility of upstream agricultural
runoff polluting the rivers as they flow towards
other countries. With the increased use of
chemical fertilizers in rural areas of the continent,
rivers like the Orinoco and the Amazon have
been found to have higher rates of nitrates
(UNEP 2002). Eutrophication is becoming a
problem for reservoirs in the La Plata and
Amazon River basins because of the nutrient
loading from soils being washed down the rivers
(Tundisi et al. 1998).
3.2.1.5 Hydropower
Of all the non-consumptive uses for water within
the international river basins of South America,
hydropower is, by far, the most important. As
the countries in South America become more
developed, they will increasingly look towards
how to provide their economies with enough
energy to promote the development they require
to sustain growth and meet the demand from the
increasing population.
The South American continent has the
second largest potential in the world for hydroelectricity
behind Asia and 20% of the world’s
hydropower potential (Mendiondo 1999), but only
about 20% of that is used (San Martin 2002). The
La Plata River basin is the most widely used for
hydropower of the international basins in South
America. It is thought to have reached more than
half its potential production, mostly for Brazil,
which meets 93% of its energy needs from
hydroelectricity (Tucci and Clarke 1998).
Somewhat surprisingly, there are only 55
dams in international river basins (TFDD 2004,
54 — Hydropolitical Vulnerability and Resilience along International Waters: Latin America and the Caribbean