- New roads and riverways integrating the Brazilian Amazon and ports on the Pacific coast of South America are expected to be announced in 2025, reducing shipment costs to supply China.
- Brazil’s plans to build ports and roads to help move grains, beef and iron ore from the rainforest echo a development vision that dates back to the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s.
- Environmentalists warn the new routes boost deforestation and encourage land-grabbers and ranchers to keep exploring the Amazon as a commodity hub.
Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Peru last November and inaugurated the Chancay Port, a megaproject rising from the Pacific coast. This wasn’t just a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Jinping’s presence in the town, 75 kilometers (46.6 miles) from Peru’s capital, Lima, celebrated a bold move in China’s strategic game of global trade. The $3.4 billion project, spearheaded by the Chinese state-owned COSCO, will reduce distance and costs and is a key part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, also known as the New Silk Road, a strategy to expand its trade capabilities and global influence.
Experts say the port, poised to be the largest in South America, is more than just concrete and steel; it’s a powerful statement about China’s ambition to dominate trade routes and a concrete step toward a future where Latin American goods flow through the Pacific, not the Atlantic.
This new infrastructure is a critical hub for the growing trade between China and South America, especially Brazil, a major supplier of grains and other commodities — Brazilian exports to Asia rose from $8.8 billion in 2002 to $152.4 billion in 2023.
In 2012, soybean exports to China were valued at around $12 billion, accounting for 69% of Brazil’s total soybean exports, according to a study. By 2021, Brazil’s soybean exports to China had tripled to $38.6 billion.
China’s investments in the region are refreshing old plans in Brazil. Since the late 1960s, during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-85), the federal government has pushed for infrastructure in the Amazon Rainforest. Now, with the prospect of delivering commodities through the Pacific, Brazil is planning new routes cutting through the Amazon and reaching the other side of the Andes.
Known as the “Amazon Route” or “Route 2,” these paths seek to connect Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, to four Pacific port cities in South America: the newly inaugurated Chancay, Paita (also in Peru), Manta (Ecuador) and Tumaco (Colombia). The new route will speed up trade with Asia, particularly with China, by facilitating the export of grains, animal protein and iron ore.
Cutting corners for international trade, however, poses serious risks for the Amazon, critics say. To build the new highways, contractors must cut down large swaths of the rainforest in regions with no or little urbanization. As happened in the past, building infrastructure accelerates deforestation and intensifies pressure on Indigenous territories. Some routes are “multimodal,” meaning they will integrate riverways with paved roads to reach the Pacific.
According to CNN Brazil, that’s the plan for connecting Manaus and Ecuador. If done by paved roads, it would require deforestation of pristine areas of the Brazilian Amazon, but the federal government says it plans to prepare the Solimões River to move goods by boat up to rivers in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. From there, cargo would reach Pacific ports on trucks.
The Brazilian government unveiled plans for the new Amazon routes throughout 2024. It’s part of a much larger project, including five different routes connecting different parts of the continent with the Pacific Ocean, named the South American Integration and Development Routes Project. In late November, the Brazilian government published a detailed report on the status of the 190 constructions that are part of the project, which crosses 11 of the 27 Brazilian states.
The route connecting Manaus to different Pacific ports is expected to be the first to conclude in 2025 or 2026, according to CNN’s report. The Solimões River will get new signage for vessels and will go through dredging in some sections.
The initiative was inspired by the decisions made during what is being called the Brasília Consensus, a meeting of South American leaders on May 30, 2023, in Brazil’s capital, where they committed to revitalizing regional integration.
The works inside Brazilian territory could count on an additional $3 billion from the Brazilian Development Bank and $7 billion from regional development banks, including the Inter-American Development Bank, Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean) and FONPLATA development bank.
Besides easing commodity exports, the new Amazon-Pacific routes could benefit the bioeconomy of one of the most well-preserved regions of the rainforest, particularly by exporting products like coffee and cacao.
“Other sectors such as Amazonian biofoods, forestry and fisheries can benefit from the access to Asian markets the Chancay port will bring,” Omar Narrea, a researcher on China and Asia at the University of the Pacific in Peru, wrote in Dialogue Earth. “However, they face greater challenges as they have fewer companies with the capacity to integrate internationally.”
Despite these eventual benefits for local communities, environmental activists fear the impact of this new infrastructure network will affect several South American biomes, including the Amazon, the Cerrado savanna and the Pantanal wetlands. “How can all this infrastructure be built while conserving the forest? It will lead to the implosion of Amazon,” Telma Monteiro, an environmental activist, told Mongabay. Monteiro is a researcher with GTInfra, a Brazilian network promoting socio-environmental justice in Amazon-focused infrastructure projects and a consultant with the Germany-based Society for Threatened Peoples.
Arco Norte project
China’s investments in South America offer Brazil the chance to move forward with infrastructure plans decades in the making. The new routes will also be connected to the expanding infrastructure in northern and northeastern Brazil — roads, railroads, ports and highways, which enabled Brazil’s increasing agricultural production in recent decades and also aided land-grabbing, deforestation and illegal logging.
Today, eight river ports are under expansion in Brazil’s northern half, with five railways planned for the Amazon and northeast Brazil, three waterways and dozens of highway pavements, with multiple connections to the Pacific via four of the five routes.
Since the early 2000s, investments have been directed toward the so-called Arco Norte project, an informal term used to describe a set of infrastructure projects aimed at improving logistical efficiency in northern Brazil. While not an official government plan, it’s known among experts and researchers for encompassing several federal and private-sector initiatives to reduce transport costs and expand export corridors. Some see it as a continuation of infrastructure strategies initiated by the military government in the late 1960s, which laid the groundwork for integrating the Amazon into national development plans.
One of these projects that equally thrills agribusinessmen and worries environmentalists is the Ferrogrão railway, planned to link Mato Grosso state to the Tapajós River. The railroad is in its planning stages and faces opposition from Indigenous peoples who live nearby. The Tapajós River, a major Amazon tributary, is already a major deforestation, land-grabbing and illegal mining hotspot and is plagued by mercury contamination. Lawsuits have also been delaying its construction.
According to a study by the Federal University of Minas Gerais, if Ferrogrão is built, it would reduce grain transportation costs by 30%. The railway will be connected with the new Rondon Quadrant, providing access to the Pacific through Bolivia. “Once completed, the two projects together will create a connection from the Arco Norte to the south, driving the expansion of agribusiness, particularly soy production, across this entire stretch and the Arco Norte region,” Monteiro said.
Arco Norte’s roots stem from the National Integration Plan, created by the Brazilian dictatorship, which reflected the ideology of Brazil’s military. Since the 1950s, the military has pushed its doctrine for the Amazon as an open space for Western-style agribusiness and mining with the excuse to occupy the rainforest to “protect” the nation from foreign invaders.
“The Arco Norte project is actually an update of what the military dictatorship had planned for the Amazon,” Tarcísio Feitosa, environmentalist and Brazil coordinator of the conservation coalition Forests & Finance, told Mongabay.
In its first phase, in the 1970s, the military opened highways such as the Trans-Amazonian and the BR-163. In the 2010s, a second phase provided the construction of the Belo Monte hydropower plant and the Madeira River Basin dams. “And now a third phase is being announced, which begins with the Ferrogrão railroad,” Feitosa said.
These efforts created conditions for land-grabbers and illegal miners, ranchers and loggers to move goods through the rainforest, encouraging newcomers to engage in deforestation and other crimes. According to MapBiomas, a research collective that tracks land use changes through satellite imagery, the forest lost more native vegetation (9.6%) between 1985 and 2020 than in the 500 years since European colonization (8%).
Nevertheless, despite the cost to the environment and Indigenous communities that are often victims of violence from criminals, the Brazilian government justifies the investments (and human costs) on logistical grounds. “The same logic we saw in the past prevails: taking down the forest, opening roads for cattle, grains and mining activities,” Feitosa told Mongabay.
The construction or expansion of ports, railways and roads would reduce the distance between the ports responsible for exporting grains and the areas where they are primarily produced, thereby lowering logistics costs and enhancing global competitiveness.
A study, published in 2023 by IPEA, one of Brazil’s main federal economic research bodies, identified the lack of infrastructure as the main logistical bottleneck to expanding Brazil’s agricultural frontier. IPEA’s study, based on official data, outlines five main hubs of the Arco Norte project: the Madeira River, the Tapajós River, the Tocantins River, the São Luís and the Salvador hub. These axes involve various infrastructure efforts, including paving highways, dredging rivers and building new railroads to improve the capacity to export grains.
The report shows, for example, that the Madeira hub aims to increase the export capacity of producers in western Mato Grosso and Rondônia by paving highway MT-170 and dredging the Madeira River to make it navigable during dry months. The Tapajós hub, formed by the BR-163 highway and the Tapajós and Amazonas waterways, plans to enhance export capacity by dredging the Tapajós River and its tributaries and constructing the Ferrogrão railroad. The region is one of the Amazon’s main deforestation and environmental crime hotspots.
The Tocantins hub involves building at least two major railways, paving roads and creating a waterway connecting the Araguaia and Tocantins rivers.
Some of these works are already underway, such as the FICO and FIOL railways. Waterways such as the Hidrovia Tocantins-Araguaia, which demand river dredging, have been subject to lawsuits as public prosecutors have raised concerns regarding the environmental impact studies presented.
“The cost [of grain transportation] in the United States corresponds to 55% of the cost of [grain] transportation in Brazil because there they are using the Mississippi [River], predominantly,” said Elisangela Pereira Lopes, an economist at the powerful Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil (CNA), the most influent agribusiness institution in Brazil.
In 2009, Brazil’s northern half produced 52% of total Brazilian soybeans. In 2023, it reached 69%.
Data from 2023 analyzed by CNA show that 23% of all soy and corn produced in Brazil and exported to China used the Arco Norte ports. When the destination is the EU, Arco Norte projects carry 93.6% of Brazilian soy and corn. According to Brazil’s waterway transportation agency, the Arco Norte ports move more soy and corn than the rest of Brazil. In 2023, they handled 100.8 million tons, surpassing the 100.2 million tons managed by the southern ports.
The Arco Norte expansion is expected to cost at least $5.5 billion. According to the Brazilian government, $4.2 billion are allocated for Ferrogrão; $455 million for Fico; $400 million for the Tocantins-Araguaia waterway; and $334 million were already invested in the Itaqui port, as reported by its administration, with $183 million still expected to be invested, according to CNN.
An incentive to deforestation
Historically, these infrastructural projects have caused significant environmental impacts that extend far beyond their construction. Roads, for example, often pave the way for third parties to create unplanned paths branching from the official road, accelerating deforestation and enabling illegal activities, a phenomenon known as the “fishbone pattern.” From satellite imagery, this pattern resembles a fishbone, with the main road serving as the spine. Similar dynamics are now being observed with the Arco Norte projects.
As Mongabay reported, researchers have found 3.5 million km (2.2 million mi) of roads in the nine Brazilian states encompassing the Legal Amazon. They estimated that at least 86% of these roads are used by loggers, gold miners and unauthorized settlers — branching off from official roads. Studies have also found that 95% of deforestation happens within 5.5 km (3.4 mi) of a road and 85% of fires each year occur within 5 km (3.1 mi).
“Infrastructures are very important drivers of advancement, both deforestation and [nature] degradation and human rights violations, such as the displacement of people, land seizure, land disputes, conflicts and violence,” Marcela Vecchione, a researcher at the Federal University of Pará’s Institute of Advanced Amazonian Studies, told Mongabay.
Ferrogrão exemplifies Vecchione’s concerns. The plans for the 933-kilometer (580-mile) railroad connecting northern Mato Grosso to the Miritituba port in Itaituba, Pará, includes cutting through forest reserves and Indigenous territories, drawing strong opposition from the Kayapó and Munduruku Indigenous groups. Despite these challenges, the project, initiated in 2014 under then-President Dilma Rousseff, has maintained steady support from successive administrations from far-right former presidents Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro and now leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
“There is already real estate speculation [along Ferrogrão’s route], there is already an increase in land-grabbing, this is clear in the increase in environmental fines, an increase in deforestation, as we see the construction of silos of gas stations, etc.,” Vecchione said.
According to MapBiomas, deforestation and the expansion of agribusiness have already been booming in these regions. Brazil’s west-central region, which connects the Amazon, Cerrado and Pantanal biomes, has lost roughly one-third of its forests between 1985 and 2022. During the same period, the area covered by soybeans increased nearly thirteenfold.
Since the start of preliminary socioenvironmental studies of the Ferrogrão railroad in 2014, environmental fines related to illegal logging and deforestation have increased by 190% in the region, according to Tatiana Oliveira, a political scientist and policy adviser with a long trajectory with Brazilian NGOs such as the Institute of Socioeconomic Studies.
Banner image: China’s megaproject Chancay Port on Peru’s Pacific coast, inaugurated by President Xi Jinping, is a key hub for the Belt and Road Initiative and future trade with South America, including Brazil’s Amazon exports. Image courtesy of Peru’s Presidential Office (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Brazil plans new reserves to curb deforestation near contested Amazon roads
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