SUNS  4359  Monday  25 January 1999

Colombia: Bringing an outdated road network into shape (IPS, Bogota)



Bogota, Jan (IPS/Maria Isabel Garcia ) - Colombia's government is moving to transform the worst road network in the Andean sub-region into a modern system capable of boosting its foreign trade, and sub-  regional integration.

Two contracts with a combined value of 4.4 billion dollars, awarded recently to Spanish and Colombian-Argentine consortia, are among the major steps in a plan to bring the country's sorely outmoded road system into shape.

A highway to be built by the Spanish firm will connect the cities of Tobia Grande and Puerto Salgar in the rich valley of the middle Magdalena River, the country's main waterway. The Magdalena played a key role in trade and transport until it was replaced in the mid-20th century by a railroad - which is no longer in use - and then by roads.

Civil engineering companies from Colombia and Argentina are building roads in the Cauca Valley in the west, the country's breadbasket, located close to Buenaventura, Colombia's main Pacific Ocean port.

In the first half of this year, tenders will be invited for the construction of the Buenaventura-Bogota corridor, which will connect Colombia's busiest port to its capital and main industrial centre, Juan
de Dios Cisneros, chief of planning of the state National Highways Institute, said recently.

Another project, valued at about 650 million dollars is to be adjudicated in 1999. It will connect Briceno - in the Bogota savanna - with towns in the department of Boyaca, including Sogamosa, the gateway to Colombia eastern plains.

By the year 2015, if everything goes according to plan, the road network will link key production and export centres and improve connections with Venezuela, Colombia's main partner in the Andes Pact, a sub-regional integration movement that also includes Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

The road projects should also help resolve the serious problem of finding markets for agricultural and mining products in areas with intense social conflicts, and boost tourism development.

Specialists say Colombia's highway infrastructure has remained fairly backward because of the mountainous nature of its Andean highlands, where half of its 36 million people live, and of the way road transport has been approached in the country. "In Colombia, the roads were planned so as to link one town to another, not as a network with a beginning and an end," said Cisneros.

Another reason why Colombia has lagged behind its neighbours, added Cisneros, is that it "invests 0.97 percent of its gross national product in the sector, while Venezuela, for example, invests 1.5
percent".

From the days of Spanish colonization, what is now Colombia emerged as an atypical development model. Although it has coasts on the Caribbean and the Pacific, its main population and industrial centres have always been located in the Andean area.

The administrative weight of the Andean zone, centred on Bogota, became evident in the 19th century, with the construction of the railroad.
The imported rails arrived in Barranquilla on the Caribbean. From there they were shipped to the port of Girardot, on the Magdalena, loaded onto mules and taken to the capital, from where they were laid all the way back to the Caribbean.

Today Colombia has trains only in a few areas and none of them are mass-transport passenger trains.

The demise of the railroad was due to the roads, on which goods can be transported at 60 to 70 km an hour, whereas the trains' top speed was 40 km/hr. Before that, the railroad, built parallel to the Magdalena, dealt a severe blow to river transport.

Air transport is also not in very good shape.

Colombia was the first country in the world to have commercial air transport - used by its postal services. It has 76 airports, but there are deficiencies in the sector, so much so that the U.S.
keeps some of the international airports under observation.

Cisneros said it was only in 1992, when the country became part of the international trend for trade liberalisation, the legislative framework for designing and building roads according to international standards was modified.

In 1994, when the National Institute for Roads began to function, a survey of the state of Colombia's main roads showed that only 36 percent were in good state.

An initial project to resurface 85 percent of Colombia's 15,300 kms of roads between 1994 and 1998 was only partially completed: 76 percent were done. The current road development plan envisages an aggressive policy of concessions that will allow Colombia to be on par with its
neighbours.

The concessions idea entails additional tolls to allow the construction companies to recoup their costs. However, the use of tolls to finance a so-called Coffee Road, which connects the towns of Manizales, Pereira and Armenia, sparked heavy protests in December in Chinchina, an area
near Manizales.

The Chinchina case, which caused the construction of one section of the road and, as a result, the toll, to be suspended, gave an indication of what could occur with other projects in which modernization comes up against social crises.