MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

BRICS financing, a life-changer for Amazonia residents

Brasil Novo is one of the nine municipalities in the state of Pará, which have benefited from infrastructure works generated by financing from the New Development Bank (NDB)

Financing from the BRICS bank has been pivotal in boosting pavement, drainage, basic sanitation and sidewalk construction works in Brazil's Amazonia, it was reported.

These initiatives seek to leave behind the existence of dirt roads, floods, and dust storms typical of strong agribusiness towns in the area.

Residents of Brasil Novo, one of the nine municipalities in the state of Pará, see these changes day by day, which are transforming the rustic physiognomy of the reddish earthen streets. “Having asphalt on the streets and sidewalks can help students go to class,” Marliette Rodrigues, director and teacher at the Leo Schineider municipal school, told Xinhua.

“There are students from adjacent neighborhoods who cannot come when there is mud or hills to climb,” she added. ”In the winter season (rainy period) they arrive with a lot of mud on their feet and all the classrooms get dirty,” she also explained.

Slightly over 1,900 kilometers from Brasilia, Brasil Novo is one of the nine municipalities in the Xingu and Tapajós river basin, in the state of Pará, which have benefited from infrastructure works generated by financing from the New Development Bank (NDB), the financial development entity of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).

“It is very important that other countries cooperate by investing in our place”, Rodrigues said as road machines were beginning to prepare the ground to apply asphalt.

Aline Maria Guedes Feitosa, a 30-year-old mother of four, said the arrival of paved streets brought hope for the future of her business, the only bar in the upper city of Brasil Novo. “There are people who don't come to the bar because of the mud in the rainy season or the dust in the dry season. With the asphalt, it will be good for my children to walk to school and it will improve the movement of my bar, because now there is no street. We suffer from the lack of asphalt and sanitation to go to the market and to the city center to go shopping,” she went on.

In other parts of the city where asphalt has already been finished, the storm drains have been installed and the sidewalks are ready for people to walk on them, 86-year-old pensioner Jovita Rodrigues explained that “before the asphalt everything was bad.”

“When my husband died, the funeral procession could not enter the street because it was the rainy season and everything was flooded; Now it has improved a lot, dust no longer enters the house,” she said

Brasil Novo legally became a municipality in 1992. It previously belonged to Altamira, the largest city in the area located about 40 kilometers away, the municipality's mayor, Weder Makes Carneiro, known as Pirica, 42, told Xinhua. “This is the most important project of the municipality of Brasil Novo, it is improving 100% the quality of life of the municipalities with the asphalt works being executed with the government of Para with the bank. It is very important to see other countries investing in our municipality,” he added.

According to Carneiro, the BRICS bank is “very important for the state of Pará. Asphalt of this quality is like a gift to us. We ask that they continue to invest in this region, which is very productive in cocoa and livestock”, he said and added that the financing between NDB and the state of Pará was a “wise move to improve the lives of residents.”

(Source: Xinhua)