Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
time it reaches the Tapajós River, BR-163 is sprouting cleared land in dense, perpendicular
gashes, each a dozen miles long, like the teeth of a giant rake.
The road terminates, finally, in Santarém, at the western end of the waterfront. And it is
here, not a hundred yards from where BR-163 runs out of places to go, that Cargill Incor-
porated of Minnetonka, Minnesota, built its soy terminal.
The terminal is Santarém's most conspicuous structure, a metal barn that stretches sev-
eral hundred feet, with a huge Cargill logo on one side. A grain conveyor more than a thou-
sand feet long extends from the northern end of the building to a tanker dock in the river.
On the day we cruised past it, on a riverboat rented from a friend of Gil's, we saw a bulk
carrier receiving its cargo, beans pouring out of massive downspouts, and plumes of soy
dust floating out of the ship's compartments. Docked at the next moorage upriver was a
Holland America cruise ship, a little smaller than the soy ship, and blinding with its bright
wall of cabins. Next in line, smaller still, was a timber transport waiting for the cruise ship
to vacate the dock so it could resume loading containers of wood. At a single glance, we
could see the comings and goings of three major Amazonian industries: soy, tourists, and
timber.
Construction of the Santarém terminal began in 1999 and was finished in 2003, even
though Cargill had failed to do the necessary environmental impact study—a fact that res-
ulted in the terminal being declared illegal by the Brazilian courts multiple times. Never-
theless, it opened.
For Cargill—the largest privately held corporation in the United States—building the
terminal was a strategic move that allowed soybeans to get to market faster and more
cheaply than before. Soy from Mato Grosso could be shipped north by river or trucked
along BR-163. At the Santarém terminal, the soy could then be offloaded and stored before
being shipped directly to Europe via the Amazon River. The fact of the terminal would
therefore be a further incentive for the Brazilian government to pave the rest of BR-163.
And that would mean yet another launching pad for assaults on the rainforest. (Paving a
thousand-mile-long highway through the jungle, though, is easier said than done. As of
2012, it is still unfinished.)
There was incentive, too, for any farmer in Mato Grosso who cared to do the math. Why
bother sending only your crop to the Cargill terminal when you could send the entire farm?
Land was cheap around Santarém, and a soy farm built close to the Cargill terminal would
save on both land and transportation costs.
Farmers flooded north. By 2004, a year after the terminal opened, cultivation of soy in
the area had jumped to 35,000 hectares (about 85,000 acres, and a five-year increase of
more than 2,000 percent) and land prices had shot up by a factor of thirty. Local farmers
were under ever-increasing pressure to sell their land to the soy farmers. Soon, soy was be-
