The Rubber Time

Manaus, Brazil is the gateway to the Amazon, the earth's rich biosphere and carbon sink. Today Manaus counts around 2,2m inhabitants with a primary language of Portuguese, is a major port, and has 20 storey blocks along bumpy roads similar to other parts of Brazil, a busy airport shuffling TAM Airbuses dropping businesspeople and tourists. It has facilities by global majors like Samsung and Sony, and is an important industrial centre for the manufacture of electrical and electronic goods for all of Brazil. Headlights may be optional however, although the 60km/h sections to the airport do instill sufficient fear in taxi-drivers who, as in elsewhere in Brazil, seem to been training to fill Filipe Massa's shoes at Ferrari...

Manaus, whose name originated from the Manaos Indians that inhabited the region, is situated on the left bank of Rio Negro (Black River), close to the "meeting of the waters" with Rio Solimões, the Amazon’s actual name. The grand old opera house is a famous excess of the boom times, a European vestige worthy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in equatorial America from the Rubber Time circa 1910-1950, when the indigenous Amazonian rubber tree and demand from industrializing world made rubber the commodity that oil and coal are today for Chindia [China and India]. Wikipaedia offers the “rubber boom occurred largely between 1879 to 1912, and afterwards experienced a revival from 1942 to 1945 during the Second World War.” Legend and intrigue connect it to my visit a week ago in SE Asia. Apparently two Englishmen – the local Amazonian guide looked at me with steely eyes when explaining this part for some reason – smuggled samples of the tree and started rival plantations in Malaysia, with easier land and labour…moving manufacturing to Asia, sound familiar? Today the major rubber markets include Kuala Lumpur, London, New York, Tokyo, Bangkok, Shanghai and Singapore, not Manuas nor Sao Paolo, as well as dubious looking electronic Inter-Continental Rubber Exchange (IRE). Futures contracts with different quality specifications are also offered on the Kuala Lumpur Commodity Exchange (KLCE), the Shangai Futures Exchange (SHFE) and the National Multi-Commodity Exchange of India (NMCEI).

Downstairs in this elegant old hotel, Hotel Tropical Manaus, is a regional pensions conference, the ABIPEM 2^o Seminario Norte, 13-15 De Agosto, produced by the state and municipal authorities in Manaus and Amazonia and their respective pension funds, ManuasPREV and AmazonPREV. Delgates were identified by suits and nifty eco-friendly hessian notebags, not the de rigeur bikini or Speedos around the pool. After a meeting last week in Rio with PREVI, the largest national fund and PRI in EM stakeholder, I was curious to see how sustainability+investment plays out on the cusp of the jungle. Citizens seem aware of environmental responsibility, and positive about the environmental record of the current governor [uncorroborated this, but the public impression tells its own story]. So where or how is the so-called "universal owner" theory being discussed, or promoted? Universal owner speaks to the role of public pension plans as having combined investment and public objectives, holding the whole market as is typical of large funds with passive strategies at low cost, and having the longer time horizons of long-term investors [greater than 10 years. The conference sponsors include multinationals like Schroders and UBS with regional players like Banca Cruzeiro do Sul, Bradesco, Banco de Brasil, CAIXA, PanAmericano and BANIF Investment Bank. UBS has a fairly forward approach to sustainability, although adoption and implementation in-country is mixed, so I look forward to learning more about their approach in Brazil with in-country branded firm, UBS Pactual, how it relates to sustainability+investment and initiatives at head office in Zurich. Experience of similar firms as ESG architect suggests the Brazilian tail may wag the Swiss dog.

The hotel venue offers more food for thought on making sustainability practical in 2008 and beyond. Hotel Tropical sits on the posh side of town in Ponta Negra suburb close to the confluence of the rivers, laid out in a friendly compound fashion with a sprawling estate, and the website references social responsability [sic] and environment on its homepage [strangely, English translations seem to be a little off in Brazil]. How quickly environment slips away in the stakeholder hierachy is evident in the text. The text covers guests and other humans, the environmental footprint disappears after the cursory “nowadays, it is not possible anymore to think of the future of mankind and not to consider environmental and human rights responsibility”. Time to re-think. Perhaps tellingly, the investor webpage is “under construction”.

The hotel was clearly designed by an architect without energy efficiency front of mind. Tropical Hotel Manaus is a self-described ‘eco-resort” despite its massive eco-footprint courtesy of 24 hour air-conditioners to handle the humidity, luxurious proportions [the hallways are marble-lined, long like something out of The Shining, and red carpeted, measuring about the width of the average Holiday Inn Express room]. No wind nor solar power, no recycling bins obvious. Windows seem thick though, CFLs are evident outdoors, and being riverside, the water treatment plant may be decent – no info, so anyone’s guess.

A major positive contribution is the zoo. After a sub-optimal experience at another so-called “eco-lodge” upriver [my experience in Brazil is that “eco” has fluid meanings], we toured the hotel zoo with the friendly and enthusiastic biologist who showed us a selection of local animals, and there was no doubting the passion she has for the creatures. A significant realization for me was that most were posted with signs saying “endangered species”. The zoo doubles as city amenity [a busload of kiddies in blue uniforms were noisily trooping through their live lessons!], a classic private-public partnership type typical in emerging markets where profit and social motives blend easily. The zoo holds about 10 cages with rescued animals from homes and traders, including a sad jaguar [Portugese "onca pintada", Panthera onca] and a depressed woolly monkey with an impressive prehensile tail. a cage is tough living for the animals to be sure, especially down the river from where they should roam were it not for deforestation, encroachment and human hunters, but I support such a zoo for educational value hosting only rescued animals.

It seems human rights are well covered compared to biodiversity rights. On the back of the biologist’s hotel -issue polo shirt was a SA8000 logo proclaiming the hotel rated to this global standard developed by Social Accountability International (SAI) for “ensur[ing] that workers of the world are treated according to basic human rights principles”. I understand the role of social responsibility ratings, but the juxtaposition of a 5 star non-enviro-friendly hotel and the CSR claim was jarring. The gap between some international ratings and the reality of the due diligence on the ground has caught my attention before, and here was an example of a such gap - like the absence of "fair trade" or "shade grown" food products in stores and even at the airport. A rough space comparison suggests that two hotel standard double-occupancy rooms on the second floor were the size of the jaguar cage where the impressive feline paced the wire mesh fence footprinting the fine sand with it's hand-sized paws. More puzzling was the walkway between cages was LARGER than the actual cage size itself. Who else would be up for hatching a plan to highlight and find funding to upgrade the cages using tourist taxes, and to reduce the ratios? Maybe "human monkey eat one gaioba, buy one for the monkey outside" or "big cage for human, bigger cage for endangered species outside"?

That sums up the Manaus experience, a city on the edge of the great jungle with its natural wonders, defined by the dark waters of the mile-wide river. Poor houses jostle next to each other by the river, then some grander colonial type buildings, then the newer gated communities for the industrial workforce. A potholed road features in photos in this morning's paper with Olympic coverage, stories of achievement, and claims by political rivals of nepotism. But Manaus being built in the European style with its emerging market resources, will have no bike lanes for the hard-riding Thursday night 8-man peleton on the three-lane roadway, no comfortable shady parks with fountains. It is more a city built bit-by-bit as its former glory suggests, with a progressive public leadership that diversified the industrial base away from rubber into the industries today, including Honda’s second largest motorbike factory, Harley-Davidson's only ex-US manufacturing [see SRI-Extra earlier today Harley-Davidson in Amazonia] and electronics. This frames the question architects of built environment now struggle with in for a like the US Green Building Council: building new kinds of cities with a smaller sustainability footprint, but building them while they’re still being lived in, with limited resources in any given budget period, by a heterogeneous voting population all trying to get ahead. And the Tucuxi and the Boto Dolphin (the River Dolphin) never can make it up to the voting booth...