August 6, 2007

 

Brazil government in final review stages of Amazon "Soy Highway"

 

Brazil's environmental protection agency, Ibama, said it intends to complete its environmental impact study on a controversial Amazon highway by Aug. 21.

 

BR-163 - a mostly decrepit two-lane highway that connects north Mato Grosso state to the massive Amazon state of Para - is seen as a cheap transport route for soys out of the Amazon River port of Santarem. The road, nicknamed the "Soy Highway", is over 800-kilometers long and is awaiting Ibama's green light before it gets paved.

 

"We have all the information we need on this right now and hope to have an opinion by Aug. 21," Ibama environmental permit director for the transportation industry, Jorge Reis, told Dow Jones Newswires Friday.

 

"I don't know which way this is going to go. There are no guarantees it will be approved," he said.

 

Last week, Jorge Baldo, president of the BR-163 Committee, a private-public partnership to promote so-called sustainable development along the road, said the highway would be approved in August.

 

"We've talked about this to death with everyone, even the local indigenous population. This is going to happen next month," Baldo said about Ibama's possible greenlighting of the project in the next three weeks.

 

The road would cut transport costs by roughly US$2 per 60-kilogramme bag of soys for soy farmers in northern Mato Grosso, Brazil's largest soy producer, making it easier for them to invest in soy field expansion.

 

Farmers and some industry leaders have been begging the government to improve road conditions for the past ten years in that part of the country, but environmental permits have stalled the BR-163 project in particular due to its location in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.

 

"We can only do this if it is sustainable and there is government oversight of the highway after it is built," Reis said.

 

"And who is going to be responsible to make certain no one is illegally cutting down trees, trafficking exotic animals or drugs on that road in the middle of the jungle? It's Ibama, and right now we don't have the manpower to do it," Reis said.

Ibama has roughly 100 employees in Para state, a state larger than Texas in the US and not all of those employees are agents.

 

Ibama's transportation department, the group that decides which roads, rail, and port projects can be built, has over 700 projects on the table. Reis did not know what percentage of the projects Ibama receives actually gets an environmental permit to build. But so far this year, Ibama has granted roughly 200 permits, including some tracks on the Transnordestino railroad in the Cerrado region in Brazil's centre-west, seen connecting the centre of the nation with small northeastern ports.

 

Brazil is the world's No. 2 soy producer and exporter behind the US.