A Waterway Project in Brazil Imperils a Vast Tropical Wetland

The Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, has been battered in recent years by agricultural development, drought, and fire. It takes 14 hours for Lourenço Pereira Leite to reach his fishing spot. He and his brother-in-law chug along in a simple one-engine motorboat, towing their traditional fishing canoe behind them. After winding along 150 miles of the Paraguay River’s deep curves, Pereira Leite and his brother-in-law arrive at Pacu Gordo, a campsite in Brazil among the lush green trees along the river’s edge. A third-generation fisherman, Pereira Leite is part of a group known as ribeirinhos, traditional people who live on a river’s edge and support themselves with sustainable fishing and small-scale farming. Building these ports, experts say, would open the door for government approval of the construction along the rest of the waterway, all designed to accommodate barges that would transport millions of tons of soybeans out of the Pantanal’s many farms. Acting like a giant sponge, the upper part of the Pantanal basin, where Cáceres is located, retains floodwaters from October to March and then slowly drains between April and September. The Pantanal also is home to the Taiamã Ecological Reserve and the Pantanal Matogrossense National Park, both important refuges for biodiversity and both located in the Tramo Norte, where three ports are proposed. The Pantanal is a tremendous resource for the people who live there, including ribeirinho and Indigenous communities.

If the planned waterway were to be built, however, much of that would change. Early this year, a federal judge granted an injunction requesting that the licensing process of the Barranco Vermelho Port be stopped. The portion of the Paraguay River known as the Tramo Norte (North Section), running between the cities of Cáceres and Corumbá, was dredged in the 1990s to accommodate small barges, but a judicial order stopped the dredging in 2000 over environmental concerns. In 2021, under Bolsonaro, a much larger project was launched, with the National Department of Transportation Infrastructure — under pressure from soybean growers along the Paraguay River — approving a major increase in dredging. According to GPG Serviços Portuários, the company charged with Barranco Vermelho’s construction, the port project now under consideration will cost roughly $20 million and will affect only 86 acres. “It creates the pressure to have the rest of the enterprise approved,” says Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at Brazil’s National Institute for Research in Amazônia (INPA), of the potential approval of the construction of the initial port. Paula Isla Martins, an environmental analyst and researcher at the nonprofit Ecology and Action, agrees. “You can’t consider the impact of a port in isolation,” says Martins. The Pantanal has been under assault for decades, with drought and burgeoning agricultural activity leading to a 68 percent loss of water area since 1985.

Most of the Pantanal lies in Brazil, which is also one of the world’s leading producers of soybeans, growing roughly 120 million metric tons of the legume annually. What makes the Paraguay River — which is, on average, 2,000 feet wide — difficult for barges to navigate are its constant bends and curves and its many sandbanks. A jaguar ambushes a caiman on the Three Brothers River in the Pantanal. Deepening the river, says the non-profit SOS Pantanal, would make its water flow faster and change the natural flooding dynamics of the wetland. Eliminating its curves at strategic locations, so barges could travel in a straight line rather than following the natural winding path of the Paraguay River, is another part of the plan to get the ports and the rest of the waterway up and running. For Indigenous and ribeirinho peoples, like Pereira Leite, it would mean the disruption of their centuries-old way of life. “They want us to adapt to them,” he adds, “but we’re not the ones destroying the Pantanal.

Read full article at Yale Environment 360

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