When you tell a good story, complicated issues can become easier to understand, and that understanding can lead to change. Our Brazilian partners Ibase showed this last year when their web video about a Rio steel mill helped slow the mill’s expansion and bring new government attention to the effects of the steel industry on the local community.
The Companhia Siderúrgica do Atlantico (CSA) facility, owned by Vale do Rio Doce and the German group ThyssenKrupp, is located in the industrial district of Santa Cruz in Rio de Janeiro. Built over an area of over 10 square kilometers, the plant can process 42 million tons of steel per year. Even before it began operations in 2010, the project had sparked conflict with local citizens over questions of environmental impact, on both public health and nearby fishing activities.
RWI’s partner Ibase (Instituto Brasileiro de Análises Sociais e Econômicas) monitors the effects large scale oil and mining projects, especially those owned by Brazil’s national oil company Petrobras and the private company Vale. With support from RWI, Ibase produced a video to illustrate the changes the project has imposed on local fisherman, the neighboring environment and the wider community, using in-person interviews and educational information.
The video “Desenvolvimento a Ferro e Fogo” (or “Development by Steel and Fire” - the video is in Portuguese) also describes Ibase’s monitoring work and the mobilization by local activists who demanded a better plan to mitigate environment impacts and a review of the project license. Within days of the video’s release in May, 2011, the Ministry of the Environment halted the company's plans to expand the steel complex and issued statements acknowledging the impacts of the CSA mill on public health.
Our RWI Latin America team saw the video and heard this story during a Rio workshop that brought together members of Ibase and RWI with colleagues from groups around the region, including Grupo Faro in Ecuador, Fundar in Mexico, CEDLA in Bolivia and Peru’s Grupo Propuesta Ciudadana, among others.
Participants discussed efforts to monitor the mining and oil sectors and to advocate awareness and response to questions of environmental impact. The Ibase video provided a vivid example of how good communications tools and approaches can turn the facts about the impact of mining into a story that has impact itself.
Please note that some of the links above are to English translations by Google of Portuguese web pages.
