Venezuela is mired in one of the worst crises in its history, and one of the most affected areas is the environment. This has dire consequences on natural resources and the quality of life of the population.
Walter Obregón / Correspondent lapatilla.1eye.us
The existing environmental problems are varied and very broad, according to the forestry engineer and former professor at the University of Los Andes (ULA) in Mérida, José Rafael Lozada Dávila. Efficient environmental action has priorities, and in that sense the most serious problems that the specialist points out are deforestation, solid waste disposal, water pollution by domestic effluents and agrochemicals, oil spills and mining in the Venezuelan Guayana.
In this order, these are the priorities that the expert consulted by lapatilla.1eye.us recommends addressing in the Venezuela of the future.
Deforestation: the most serious
For engineer Lozada Dávila, deforestation is the most serious environmental problem in Venezuela, because it means the destruction of forest ecosystems, mainly in order to make way for livestock and agriculture.
Reality indicates that new farmers who want to develop agriculture or livestock do not find available land “on low land” or in flat areas, and are forced to resort to mountains or areas with high slopes, or the Venezuelan Guayana.
“The problem is that the areas with high slopes are protected areas, because they belong to national parks, hydraulic zones (watersheds), and are areas where deforestation should not be taking place, but this is happening,” he said.
In 2023, a work called MapBiomas Venezuela was published, which is available on the Internet, where you can see vegetation maps of Venezuela from 1985 to 2022, and which is under constant review and update.
It is important to note that for the year 2020, the FAO indicated that in Venezuela there was an area of 46.2 million hectares of forests, and in that same year MapBiomas is determining that there are 53.7 million hectares of forests, the difference being given by the methodologies used in the measurement study.
An important fact from engineer Lozada Dávila from reading the maps is that the forests of the Lake Maracaibo basin can be said to have almost completely disappeared. The forests of the western plains, the central plains and the eastern plains, and protected areas such as forest reserves, are currently converted into pastures.
There are images that show that deforestation in Venezuela is moving to the mountain areas, in the Andean foothills, in the cloud forests in Mérida and in the Southern Villages.
The solution to the problem of deforestation has to start with a great national agreement, where a good part of the operational ministries, institutions that depend on the Government and civil society organizations, such as farmers, ranchers and unions, among others, participate.
Lozada Dávila proposes as an idea to set a “zero deforestation goal by 2030”, and then Venezuela will be on par with international agreements that are aiming that goal.
Solid waste, a setback
“For me this is very serious because of what I am seeing in the country,” says Lozada Dávila, because in many places the garbage is being dumped in the streets, avenues, and in many cities throughout Venezuela could be happening what has been his personal experience, in his house in Mérida, where the urban trash collection only comes once a week.
“This leads to the proliferation of vermin, rodents, ‘cucarachas’ (cockroaches, palmetto bugs), ‘chiripas’ (german roaches), and this is a serious health problem,” he explains.
In the opinion of the forestry engineer José Rafael Lozada, in Venezuela there is no worksing sanitary landfill that is up to the established technical standards. What we have are “garbage dumps” and these “cannot be called a sanitary landfill.”
The garbage is dumped on a piece of land where they then pass a machine to compact it, and sometimes they put a layer of earth on top, therefore, that is a simple “garbage dump.”
“Technically, a landfill must have a leach collection system (liquid substances that circulate among the waste found mainly in landfills, with an unpleasant appearance and bad smell), which must go to an oxidation lagoon so that they do not contaminate the surrounding rivers or groundwater,” he explained.
It must also have a chimney system to evacuate the gases produced by the decomposition of organic matter.
“There are cities in Venezuela where garbage is collected in dump trucks, as was done 30 or 40 years ago,” which indicates that there has been a setback in this area of solid waste management.
Water pollution
“All urban wastewater in Venezuela is being carried to rivers, lakes, lagoons and the seas, without treatment,” and this has given rise to extensive pollution according to engineer Lozada Dávila .
He said he does not know of a town or city in this country where urban wastewater is properly treated, despite the fact that many years ago, for example, a sanitation system was offered for the Guaire River in Caracas, when it was assured that anyone would be able to bathe in it. This did not happen.
It is unknown if there was any budget for this project for the Guaire river cleanup, but the most important thing in the case is that this river in Caracas continues to be contaminated.
“The last wastewater treatment plant that I saw in operation was the one in Puerto Ordaz (Bolívar State), which was located next to the Macagua dam,” Lozada recalled, recalling that this was about 10 years ago, but people who live in that region confirmed to him that it is no longer working.
There is another very serious problem with Lake Valencia, because water from the Pao and Cachinche basins is being used to supply drinking water to Tinaquillo, Valencia, Maracay and all the other towns in the area surrounding the lake.
“So, the wastewater from Valencia and Maracay flows to Lake Valencia,” which is an endorheic basin, meaning that it has no outlet, and that urbanizations that were built in Carabobo and Aragua are flooding, the waters do not flow, the toilets do not flush, turning these areas into contaminated areas.
This is complicated because the waste water from the Cabriales River, which runs through Valencia, is being pumped into the Pao-Cachinche system to be treated in the aqueduct and supplied to the population, which means that they have to add excess chlorine to the water and the coliform bacteria break down their cell walls and the cytoplasmic content goes into the water, resulting in toxic levels of organic compounds.
“A solution has been considered (in Lake Valencia), to build a tunnel and dump the water into the sea, or a drain into a nearby stream that flows to the Orinoco River.” Lozada Dávila does not agree with this solution unless this water is treated.
In 2013, through an investigation carried out in the state of Mérida, it was found that the water that arrives by aqueduct to the areas of Bailadores, Las Tapias, Las Playitas, had noticeable levels of a pesticide called Dimethoate, up to an amount of 4.18 micrograms per liter, and that exceeds the concentrations permitted by national and international legislation.
All this is a consequence of contamination by agrochemicals in waters that are intended for human consumption, mainly in some high areas, in mountainous areas, where aqueduct systems were built 40 or 50 years ago, where the water intake used to be above the levels of livestock and agriculture fields and are now below.
Oil spills
This fourth environmental problem that adds to the crisis that Venezuela is suffering is related to Pdvsa (Government run oil conglomerate), which is the company in charge of the exploitation, storage, commercialization and everything related to oil, and since 2017 it has not published quantitative information on oil spills.
At the time of the preparation of this journalistic work, an oil spill from the El Palito refinery was affecting some beaches in Carabobo and Falcón, close to the Morrocoy National Park, because in Venezuela the prevailing sea currents go from east to west.
According to a study that is available on the Internet, between 2009 and 2016, the accumulated oil spills exceeded one million barrels of oil. The data reported has been taken from the information published by Pdvsa, said engineer Lozada.
In 2022, the NGO ‘Clima 21’ and the Venezuelan Observatory of Human and Environmental Rights published a report showing statistics on oil spills in quantity, but not in volume, “of course, that is very difficult to calculate.”
According to Lozada Dávila, in 2016, 12 spills were reported, in 2019 there were 30 spills, in 2020 there were 58 spills and in 2021 there have been 68 oil spills.
This situation has affected very important ecosystems, such as the mangroves at the mouth of the San Juan River in Guarapiche, Monagas State. This even disrupted the supply of drinking water to surrounding communities.
Where people fish, bathe, The people have suffered from oil spills where they fish, bathe, where they live. In a recent study published by the expert in aquatic ecosystems, Antonio Machado Allison, he points out all the consequences of oil spills.
Mining in Guayana
The last problem cited among the most serious by engineer José Rafael Lozada Dávila is related to mining in Venezuelan Guayana, which according to the evaluation made with MapBiomas, in 2022 a total of 71,300 hectares had been affected by mining in this region of the country.
“It is a high, important figure, but it is not like some people are saying that there are half a million hectares, or a million hectares, or that all the forests in Venezuelan Guayana are finished,” he clarified.
In the Venezuelan Guayana there are more than 40,000,000 hectares of forests, so the 71,300 hectares is a fairly large area that is concentrated in some places: the Paragua River, in an area of the Supamo River, in the surroundings of El Callao, in Las Claritas mine, and south of the Canaima National Park in the area of the Kukenán River and the Caroní River.
Regarding mining in Guayana, there are those who claim that the most affected part of the Canaima National Park is in the northern area, but for engineer Lozada it is in the southern areas of the park.
In the places affected by mining, the impact is extremely intense, because the forest and soil are destroyed, the water is contaminated with sediment and mercury, the fauna and habitats are not only destroyed but fragmented, which is harmful.
The use of mercury, apart from impacting people’s health, has pervasive and enduring consequences on the environment and there are at least 53 rivers affected in Venezuelan Guayana as a consequence of mining.