{"id":50038363,"date":"2020-11-19T10:01:08","date_gmt":"2020-11-19T10:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stage.dialogochino.net\/?p=38363"},"modified":"2024-04-15T09:37:39","modified_gmt":"2024-04-15T09:37:39","slug":"38363-amazon-river-ports-brazil-to-china-commodities-routes","status":"publish","type":"opinion","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/business\/38363-amazon-river-ports-brazil-to-china-commodities-routes\/","title":{"rendered":"Multiplying Amazon river ports open new Brazil-to-China commodities routes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alessandra Korap wanted to be heard. But she\u2019d been invited to the August 2020 court hearing only as an observer, sitting for hours in forced silence, even though she was serving as the sole representative of the Indigenous people whose lands, lives and future would be impacted by a proposed Amazon Basin river port.<\/p>\n

Only lawyers and government officials were invited to speak at the online hearing conducted in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, as Judge Sandra Maria Correia da Silva weighed whether to lift a suspension on a permit for the port, put in place because the project still lacked a prior consultation with the Munduruku, Korap\u2019s people.<\/p>\n

For almost a decade, the Munduruku had been unsuccessfully fighting the rapid transformation of the city of Itaituba in Brazil\u2019s Par\u00e1 state into a key global commodities supply chain hub, and the conversion of their beloved Tapaj\u00f3s River into an industrial waterway \u2014 a nexus for the transport of soy and corn out of the heart of the Brazilian Amazon and on to China, the EU and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

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\"Alessandra
Alessandra Korap, a Munduruku leader (image: Sarita Reed)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

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Since 2013, the community had seen multiple industrial river ports constructed by transnational agribusiness commodity-trading giants, arising on a river that for centuries had been plied only by small boats and Munduruku canoes.<\/p>\n

However, never during the building boom had the Indigenous group been formally consulted about commodity industry plans, which prosecutors saw as a clear violation of the International Labour Organization\u2019s Convention 169<\/a>, an agreement to which Brazil is a signatory.<\/p>\n

The new ports had rapidly turned the city, already plagued by major illegal gold mining and logging operations, into a congested destination for commodity-loaded trucks that often clogged the BR-163 highway in kilometers-long traffic jams. Arriving in Itaituba, that cargo was transferred to enormous barges for the downriver journey to ships bound mostly for China. The incoming throng of truckers attracted prostitution and the illegal drug trade, while the barges impacted the river fishery, impoverishing traditional fishers.<\/p>\n

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\"An
An aerial view of soy trucks at a petrol station on the BR-163 highway (image: Alamy)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

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After lawyers friendly to the Munduruku\u2019s cause intervened, Korap was finally allowed to speak. She told the court how the proposed Rio Tapaj\u00f3s Log\u00edstica port had been preceded by others, how it would likely prompt the construction of a major Amazon railway, and maybe even new dams to make a larger stretch of the Tapaj\u00f3s navigable. The current decision, she emphasised, didn\u2019t just concern one project, but rather a multipronged development plan to change the river and region beyond recognition.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know these projects are connected to each other,\u201d she told the judge. \u201cThese companies that are arriving are killing us, suffocating our culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

From afar, Fl\u00e1vio Acatauass\u00fa, who heads Amport, the association representing most companies operating Amazon river ports, was also watching the case unfold. Like Korap, he felt the case had larger implications than just the approval of one port. He contended that a port-friendly outcome in the case was vital not only to all companies with plans to operate along the Tapaj\u00f3s River, but as a precedent assuring the viability of future commodities transport logistics investments across the Amazon Basin.<\/p>\n

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95<\/p>\n

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\nports have been built or are under construction on the rivers of the Amazon basin
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Today, the Amazon\u2019s roughly 100 private industrial river ports are an essential and integral part of the fastest-growing infrastructure corridors in Brazil \u2014 moving commodities cheaply and quickly from the nation\u2019s interior to the Atlantic coast for export, Acatauass\u00fa explained. Northern river ports, moving cargo via the Amazon River and its tributaries, have more than doubled their market share in the last decade. In the first half of 2020 alone, almost 20%<\/a> of the country\u2019s soy and corn flowed along the Amazon Basin\u2019s major rivers.<\/p>\n

Some 40 planned private projects, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, are now at stake, with many slated for construction in sensitive environments \u2014 places like Maraj\u00f3 Island, a delta locale near the mouths of the Amazon and Tocantins rivers, and the biodiversity-rich Maic\u00e1 Lake.<\/p>\n

If the consent of traditional peoples was required for all these projects, then \u201call the investments in the Amazon Basin would die,\u201d Acatauass\u00fa asserted. Still, he was confident that stakeholders would find a way forward. In terms of logistics, he said, Brazilian agribusiness \u201chad nowhere else to run to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turning rivers into industrial waterways<\/h2>\n

The transformation of the Brazilian Amazon\u2019s many wild rivers into industrial waterways got underway in the early 1990s, mainly as the vision of Amaggi, Brazil\u2019s biggest soy producer and a leading commodities transport company.<\/p>\n

The firm\u2019s goal: to increase the value of its quickly expanding soy crop in the southern Amazon, particularly in Mato Grosso state, by finding an efficient means of crossing the rainforest via a cheaper northern river route, more easily reaching buyers abroad. Opening that corridor to the Amazon River and the Atlantic would bypass a long, rugged road journey, and the queues of trucks then clogging Brazil\u2019s southern commercial ports at Paranagu\u00e1 and Santos.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will save \u2026 on the freight for each tonne of soy we export,\u201d pledged<\/a> Blairo Maggi, then the company\u2019s vice president; in 2016, he became agriculture minister during the administration of Michel Temer.<\/p>\n

Amaggi\u2019s was a simple plan to build a great barge terminal at the public port of Porto Velho on the Madeira River, a major Amazon tributary that swells with Andes meltwater and becomes navigable between January and August, just in time to transport the soy harvest produced by the rainy season. Trucks would move the crop from the soy fields on the first leg of the journey. Then barges would take over, moving soybeans downstream to an Amaggi-owned private port in the city of Itacoatiara in the eastern part of Amazonas state, where the Madeira meets the Amazon River. There, the commodities would be shifted yet again, this time onto immense oceangoing ships able to export the soy to China and other destinations.<\/p>\n

This particular river transportation corridor was inaugurated in 1997. But Brazil\u2019s booming agribusiness producers and transnational commodities companies \u2014 eyeing the largest drainage basin in the world \u2014 asked themselves: Why stop there?<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we can do it in the Madeira, we can do it in the Tapaj\u00f3s River; we can do it in the Tocantins River too,\u201d said Amport\u2019s Acatauass\u00fa. \u201cThat\u2019s when the new [infrastructure] boom started.\u201d<\/p>\n

So it was that these first lucrative ports, built with a flood of international capital, and operated by the world\u2019s major grain dealers, proliferated across the Amazon with little government oversight. At least 41 new ports are currently planned or under construction for major rivers in the region.<\/p>\n

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