A nearly 600-mile railway that would cut through the heart of the Amazon rainforest got one step closer to reality Thursday when the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled that a national park could be resized to accommodate its passage.
If approved, the Ferrogrão, or “grain train,” would run alongside a notoriously clogged and troubled road known as the “soy highway” that carries soybeans and corn from massive plantations to riverways in the Amazon basin—and from there to livestock feedlots across the world.
The project is supported in large part by major soy traders, including the American grain giant Cargill. Cargill and the Brazilian developers argue the railway is essential for economic growth in the region and is part of a broader effort in the northern Amazon to improve infrastructure and facilitate grain exports.
But Brazilian researchers have estimated the railway will directly lead to more than 1,500 square miles of deforestation, releasing 75 million tons of carbon, and that broader environmental impacts will affect an area of roughly 19,000 square miles, bigger than the state of Connecticut.
The Amazon rainforest is the world’s single largest reservoir of terrestrial carbon and essential to maintaining a stable atmosphere. The largest drivers of its loss are soy plantations and cattle ranching.
Indigenous and environmental activists have dubbed the proposed train route the “Railway of Death.”
Thursday’s ruling by the court rolls back a previous ruling that had prevented the alteration of the boundaries of the Jamanxim National Park, which sits adjacent to the existing “Soy Highway.” Earlier in the week, the lower house of the Brazilian Congress approved a plan to reduce the size of the nearby Jamanxim National Forest by 40 percent. Both the park and the forest were created to protect the area from the incursion of agribusiness and prevent deforestation adjacent to the soy route.
“The injunction had basically kept the project at bay for quite a number of years, in that it essentially blocked the ability of the project planners to ram forward this project,” said Christian Poirier, a program director with Amazon Watch, a rainforest watchdog group. “It’s a ticking time bomb of deforestation, rights abuses and climate impacts.”
In its ruling, the court clarified that altering the park’s boundaries doesn’t constitute an approval. The project still has to clear a number of hurdles, including with environmental regulators and the country’s Federal Court of Accounts.
Indigenous and environmental groups have pushed against the railway since it was first proposed by a consortium of agribusiness interests, including Cargill and two other American grain giants, Bunge and Archer Daniels Midland, along with Brazilian companies.
Cargill, in particular, has been a vocal proponent. The Brazilian CEO of the Minnesota-based corporation —the largest private American company—has said the “Ferrogrão makes sense and will happen” and that opposition to it is irresponsible.
Cargill did not respond to questions from Inside Climate News on Friday.
A group of 42 Brazilian and international social and environmental advocacy groups have banded together as the “Enough Soy Campaign” to oppose the project and the broader development of the “Northern Arc Logistics Corridor,” a plan to link up roads, railways and riverways across the Amazon region.
Earlier this year, Indigenous and environmental groups protested against a decree that would privatize river traffic along several Amazon tributaries, including the Tapajós, a major river artery leading to a huge Cargill-owned soybean terminal. The government revoked the decree in February.
But the broader push to expand infrastructure, largely for agribusiness, remains a priority for the Brazilian government, especially regional governments in soy- and corn-producing states in the Amazon basin.
“Brazil’s agribusiness sector within Congress basically runs the show. They do so with other interests, of course, but they’re the single most powerful block,” Poirier said. “We’ve seen how they wield their influence, and they want this project to move forward.”
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Georgina Gustin covers agriculture for Inside Climate News, and has reported on the intersections of farming, food systems and the environment for much of her journalism career. Her work has won numerous awards, including the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, and she was twice named the Glenn Cunningham Agricultural Journalist of the Year, once with ICN colleagues. She has worked as a reporter for The Day in New London, Conn., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and CQ Roll Call, and her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and National Geographic’s The Plate, among others. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Colorado at Boulder.