The Belo Monte and São Luiz do Tapajós hydroelectric dams and the concessions for the BR-163 highway, the Santarém-Cuiabá highway, are the three projects located (the first two entirely and the last one partially) in Pará that are among the 15 most important infrastructure projects for Brazil. This is what the report Futuro do Estado 2030 (Future of the State 2030), drawn up by consultants KPMG and Exame magazine, published by Abril, says.
The study points out “the nine megatrends that will impact government programs”. Of the 15 projects in which they materialize, five are located in São Paulo: the Viracopos international airport, the São Lourenço water treatment and supply, line 6 of the São Paulo metro, social housing and the Ferroanel.
The other most important projects are sanitation in the Recife metropolitan region, the Salvador subway, Smart Grid Light, the Libra oil field (Pre-Salt), 29 deep-water drilling rigs and the National Quality Improvement Plan/Investment Plan for personal mobile service operators 2012-2014 (Tim, Vivo, Claro and Oi).
The North-South railroad is the 15th project, which should also benefit Pará, but for the time being is expanding only to the south, from Maranhão. As a campaign issue, President Dilma Rousseff pledged to extend a line towards the port of Vila do Conde, in Barcarena.
The KPMG report says that 1,566 projects completed or underway in the country were analyzed, divided into segments: energy, oil and gas, transport, sanitation, telecommunications, social infrastructure and urban mobility.
From there, the projects were classified “according to the pillars of the megatrends pointed out in the Future of the State 2030, which are: demographic changes; the rise of social classes; technological inclusion; interconnected economies; public debt; changes in the economic power of nations; climate change; scarcity of resources; and urbanization.
According to a competitiveness survey by the World Economic Forum (WEF), Brazil ranks 114th out of 148 countries in terms of infrastructure quality, despite being classified as the world’s seventh largest GDP. The selection of the 15 projects, according to KPMG/Exame, can help Brazil improve in the WEF ranking, “as well as serving as a model to help meet the challenges of the nine megatrends”.
Based on universal criteria, 85 projects were selected from more than 1,500 initial projects. The authors then defined seven arbiters, one for each priority area, who chose four projects each, reducing the number to 28 initiatives. The final stage was to choose the last 15 projects, which was done through a detailed scoring of each of them in relation to their ability to deal with the global megatrends of the Future State.
From the selection of projects, it appears that in the coming years the colonial function of the Amazon, of exporting raw materials, will be consolidated. This is why the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, the most expensive public project underway in Brazil (around 30 billion reais), is complemented by the Xingu River transmission line to the industrial processing markets in the far south of Brazil.
