A view of Explora's biodiesel plant on the outskirts of the city of Rosario, where most of the companies that process soybean oil in Argentina are concentrated. In recent years, biofuels have generated investments of more than three billion dollars in the country, in addition to more than one billion dollars a year in exports, before the collapse in demand caused by the COVID pandemic. CREDIT: Courtesy of Explora

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 30 2021 (IPS)

Argentina, historically an agricultural powerhouse, has become a major producer of biofuels in recent years. However, this South American country is now moving backwards in the use of this oil substitute in transportation, a decision in which economics weighed heavily and environmental concerns have been ignored.

On Jul. 15, with the support of the government of centre-left President Alberto Fernández, Congress passed a new Biofuels Regulatory Framework, which will be in force until 2030.

The new law published on Aug. 4 reduced from 10 to five percent the minimum mandatory blend of soybean oil biodiesel in diesel fuel, and gave the executive branch the option of lowering it to three percent if deemed necessary to cut fuel prices for consumers."To mitigate we need all the available tools. And in this case, perhaps the worst thing is the setback in an area in which the country has gained a great deal of know-how and capacity, making it one of the largest users of renewable energy in transportation worldwide." -- Luciano Caratori

With respect to gasoline, the law maintained the current 12 percent bioethanol – based on corn and sugar cane – blend, but gives the government the option of lowering it to nine percent.

“The mandatory blends of petroleum-derived fuels with biofuels came into effect in 2010 and since then have generated the largest reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Argentine history, at least until 2019,” energy consultant Luciano Caratori, a researcher at the Torcuato Di Tella Foundation, which focuses on environmental issues, and former undersecretary of energy planning, told IPS.

The expert mentioned 2019 because it was the first year that non-conventional renewable energies – basically wind and solar – represented a significant share of electricity generation in this Southern Cone country of 44.4 million people.

Today, according to official figures, they account for 9.7 percent of the electricity mix, in a country where 87 percent of the primary energy supply is based on fossil fuels: 54 percent natural gas, 31 percent oil, and the rest, coal.

Argentina, Latin America’s third largest economy, is a net exporter of oil, but due to its limited refining capacity it is also a net importer of gasoline and diesel.

Caratori said the reduction in biofuel use is inconsistent with the climate change mitigation commitments Argentina submitted in December 2020, in the update of its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement.

This country has committed to cutting GHG emissions by more than 20 percent by 2030 from the 2007 peak, and to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

One of the ways to reach these goals, according to the NDC, is to reduce emissions from transportation – a sector that accounted for 33 percent of total energy demand in 2019 – through the use of biofuels and hydrogen and electrification.

The Argentine Senate special public session in which the law reducing the mandatory percentage of biofuels in the blend with petroleum derivatives was approved. Most of the legislators voted remotely, due to COVID pandemic restrictions. CREDIT: Argentine Senate

“There don’t seem to be too many opportunities in Argentina to offset the emissions savings lost from reducing biofuel use, and 2030 is just around the corner,” said Caratori.

“To mitigate we need all the available tools,” he stressed. “And in this case, perhaps the worst thing is the setback in an area in which the country has gained a great deal of know-how and capacity, making it one of the largest users of renewable energy in transportation worldwide.”

In the Senate, the ruling party’s Rubén Uñac, chair of the energy commission, acknowledged that the biofuels industry made possible the creation of “new companies and thousands of jobs” over the last decade, through “more than three billion dollars in investments.” But he said the system was in need of “in-depth reform.”

In the opposition, the chair of the Senate commission on the environment and sustainable development, Senator Gladys González, denounced “fierce lobbying by the oil companies” and argued that the government “says one thing and does another,” because it expresses in public a deep commitment to the fight against climate change that does not translate into action.

A study published in July by Caratori and Jorge Hilbert, an expert with the government’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA), points out that the current installed biodiesel and bioethanol production capacity could cover between 4.5 and 8.0 percent of Argentina’s international commitment to GHG emissions reduction.

“The decarbonisation opportunity offered by biofuels is considered to be very significant with minimal investment,” the paper underscores.

Pros and cons, depending on who is looking at it

In any case, the real environmental impact of biofuels is disputed. María Marta Di Paola, director of research at the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN), raised several reservations.

View of a soybean field in the province of Santa Fe, in western Argentina. Biodiesel is made from soybean oil in more than 50 plants near the city of Rosario, located in the south of the province. CREDIT: Confederaciones Rurales de Argentina

“We are concerned that they fuel the expansion of the agricultural frontier, compete with the use of crops for food and rely on agricultural production that is highly dependent on fossil fuels,” she told IPS.

“Consequently, although biofuels are presented as an alternative for the energy transition, it is very difficult to quantify their real contribution to the fight against climate change,” said the expert from FARN, one of the country’s most respected environmental institutions.

“In any case, the decision made by the government and Congress had to do with other issues, which clearly demonstrates that the priority given in Argentina to environmental debates is very low,” Di Paola asserted.

At any rate, the industry dismisses the misgivings that are raised.

“Less than five percent of Argentina’s arable land is involved in biofuel production,” Claudio Molina, executive director of the Argentine Biofuels and Hydrogen Association, which has been promoting biofuel production for 15 years, told IPS. “Only three percent of the total corn harvest is used to make bioethanol.”

In Argentina, biodiesel, produced by national and international private capital, received its first big boost through exports, which between 2012 and 2019 generated more than one billion dollars a year, according to official data.

However, the drop in demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic led to a sharp decline in 2020, when exports dropped to 468 million dollars.

The main market is the European Union, since the United States slapped high tariffs on Argentina’s biodiesel in 2017 to protect its soybean producers.

The pandemic’s impact on demand and a rise in the price of biodiesel put pressure on the government and left it with two alternatives that it wants to avoid: authorise an increase in consumer fuel prices or reduce the profit margin of the oil companies, especially the state-owned YPF.

This is included in the text of the new law, which states that the government reserves the right to further reduce the percentage of biofuels in the fuel blends when an increase in the prices of biodiesel or bioethanol inputs “could distort the price of fossil fuels at the pump.”

Axel Boerr is vice-president of Explora, a company with the capacity to produce 120,000 tons of biodiesel per year at its plant on the outskirts of the city of Rosario, an area he describes as “Argentina’s Kuwait”, due to the number of factories that generate energy from oil from the soybean fields that abound in the area.

In an interview with IPS, Boerr said biofuels were a way to add value to agricultural production and help Latin American countries become more than just exporters of primary products.

“In addition, this will aggravate our external dependence, because Argentina is an importer of gasoline and diesel and will have to buy more and more, since it has no more oil refining capacity,” he predicted.

The political negotiations ensured that the current six percent blend would remain in place for sugarcane bioethanol. This secured votes in Congress from legislators from the northwest provinces, which are sugarcane producers.

A possible reduction from six to three percent was left open in the case of corn bioethanol.

“We don’t believe in the argument that we have to take care of consumer fuel prices, because what determines them is oil, not biofuels,” Patrick Adam, executive director of the Corn Bioethanol Chamber, told IPS.

“Today we are working at 70 percent of our capacity and with these changes, which represent a step backwards in terms of the climate, we would drop to 40 percent. We were ready to grow and this law caught us off guard,” he concluded.

In Anapolis, Brazil's North-South railway line, which took more than 30 years to complete, was unable to connect with the existing network due to the different width of its tracks and its southern section remained inactive for several years, until it was privatised in 2019. Precedents like this one create concern about the new planned railway lines, dedicated to the transportation of grains to the export ports. CREDIT: Mario Osava

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Aug 27 2021 (IPS)

The sea of soybeans that sprouts every November will spread even further in the state of Mato Grosso if three new railway lines that would boost soy production in central-western Brazil and growing parts of the Amazon rainforest are built.

The most controversial railway line, the EF-170, is better known by its nickname “Ferrogrão (grainrail)” because it is to be built for the export of grains from the mid-northern part of Mato Grosso, the area where most soybeans and corn are produced in Brazil, through Amazonian rivers and ports in the north of the country.

Mato Grosso already produces 70 million tons of grains per year, a total that will reach 120 million tons by 2030, said Minister of Infrastructure Tarcisio de Freitas, who described the Ferrogrão as “the most important logistics project in Brazil,” in a digital meeting with foreign correspondents in June.

It would lower freight rates in general, by creating competition in the transportation of the bulk of the national agricultural production, replacing thousands of trucks and expanding exports through the ports of northern Brazil, relieving pressure on ports in the south and southeast.

The government intended to auction the concession for the rail line this year, but is unlikely to do so in the face of environmental obstacles and economic uncertainties.

The railway would cause the deforestation of between 1,671 and 2,416 square kilometres by stimulating the expansion of the planted area in the state of Mato Grosso alone, according to a study by the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), an international non-profit organisation with which the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro is associated.

The study does not take into account damage in the state of Pará, where two thirds of the 933 kilometres of the line would be built and where the port of Miritituba on the Tapajós River, the railway’s destination, is located.

In Brazil’s Amazon region, the EF-170 railroad, known as Ferrogrão, is a project of agricultural transnationals supported by the Brazilian government. The aim of the railway, construction of which has not yet begun, is to bolster soybean and corn exports through the ports of northern Brazil. Map: National Land Transport Agency of Brazil

At the port, grains are transferred to barges that travel about 1,000 kilometres on the Tapajós and Amazon rivers to reach the export ports where the large transatlantic ships dock.

In addition to underestimating the extent of the deforestation, the project would violate indigenous rights, threaten conservation areas and stimulate illegal land appropriation, says a group of 38 social organisations in an “extrajudicial notification” to banks that could finance the construction of the Ferrogrão.

“The most serious thing is that it does not evaluate alternative routes,” said Sergio Guimarães, coordinator of the Infrastructure and Social Justice Working Group, a coalition of 47 organisations that headed the notification pointing out nine flaws in the project. (The Working Group is one of the 38 social organisations that sent the notification.)

There are alternatives for transportation already in place or under way for soybeans in Mato Grosso, where 35.9 million tons were produced this year (26.5 percent of the country’s total), such as the BR-163 highway along the same route as the Ferrogrão, a railroad under construction and two others in the planning stage. They should all be assessed in order to find the best economic and environmental options, he told IPS by telephone from Brasilia.

“It is very difficult for the Ferrogrão to be competitive, considering that the BR-163 highway is already in place and there are other alternatives,” said economist Claudio Frischtak, president of the InterB International Business Consultancy.

“It’s a bad project,” he told IPS in a conversation in Rio de Janeiro. “It underestimates the investments and the time needed for implementation and runs the risk of having the same fate as two other railroads whose construction was interrupted in the last decade, leading to the loss of public resources.”

The state of Tocantins in central Brazil aims to repeat this century the soybean boom that transformed the neighbouring state of Mato Grosso, the country’s largest soy and corn producer, which has record exports. To do this, producers are demanding the extension of rail transport. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The economist compared the data from the government’s proposal with figures from the Midwest Integration Railway (Fico), a project under construction by the mining company Vale, which has years of experience in railways. Fico will link Agua Boa, a city in central-eastern Mato Grosso, and Mara Rosa, 383 kilometres to the east, in the state of Goiás.

Based on this comparison, Frischtak calculates that the actual cost of building the Ferrogrão would be 3.4 times the amount reported by the government: 5.45 billion dollars rather than 1.58 billion dollars.

The projected rate of return of 11.05 percent is also totally unrealistic, he said, as is the estimated construction time of nine years.

Frischtak projected that construction would actually take 21.9 years, or even longer given the complicated terrain where the Ferrogrão would be built.

The Fico does not reach the most productive soybean production area, which is around the city of Sinop, the planned starting point of the Ferrogrão. Instead, it connects with the North-South Railway that reaches the port of Itaqui, on the Atlantic coast of the northeastern state of Maranhão, which has the capacity to serve the largest ships.

The third new rail alternative for grains in Mato Grosso is the Ferronorte, a 730-kilometre stretch planned by Rumo, the largest national railroad transportation company, with access to the Port of Santos, the country’s biggest, after crossing the state of São Paulo, the most densely populated productive, agricultural and industrial state in Brazil.

The large warehouses next to the BR-163 highway, used by trucks to transport soybeans to the Amazon ports through which they are exported, have turned Lucas do Rio Verde into a hub of the agro-export economy of the state of Mato Grosso, in central-western Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Rumo’s rail network already reaches Rondonópolis, in the south of Mato Grosso. The idea would be to extend it to the mid-north of the state, where large quantities of soybeans are produced between October and February, and corn in the following months, on the same land. Agriculture in tropical climates has the competitive advantage of producing two harvests per year.

But the biggest competition for the Ferrogrão, according to Frischtak, would be the BR-163 highway, the paving of which was completed in 2019. Management of the highway was awarded to a private company this year. Overland trucking costs fell and continue to decline, which will hinder the financial viability of the new parallel rail line.

The economist argued that it would make more economic sense to upgrade existing infrastructure, such as widening the highway and improving the waterways that also serve agricultural exports through the north. “We must not continue to make the same mistakes,” he said.

But Tiago Stefanello Nogueira, coordinator of Agricultural Policy and Logistics of the Association of Soybean and Corn Producers of Mato Grosso (AprosojaMT), said there is no doubt about the viability and benefits of the Ferrogrão.

“There will be less pollution, because it will reduce the consumption of petroleum derivatives, greater transportation capacity, less carbon emissions and thousands of jobs created during construction, as well as demand for services; there are many benefits,” he asserted.

Railroads are mostly used for freight transport in Brazil, and passenger trains like this one on the Carajás line in Maranhão state often run at a loss, as compensation for the local populace from the companies that control the rail lines. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Only 11 percent of the land in Mato Grosso is dedicated to agriculture, according to Aprosoja, and this could expand to 40 percent, Nogueira estimates.

“To achieve this we need all modes of transportation, whether railways, highways and future waterways, and the paving and widening of roads,” he told IPS by telephone from Sorriso, a city located in a soybean-growing area in the north of the state.

But that’s the problem, according to Alexandre Sampaio, Policy and Programme coordinator of the International Accountability Project (IAP), an international organisation that works for human and environmental rights in development. He said Ferronorte would exacerbate the already unbalanced development model in its area of influence.

Of the 90.3 million hectares in Mato Grosso, 9.7 million are under agricultural production. That includes nine million hectares where soybeans are grown and then corn and cotton after the soybean harvest. The remaining 0.7 million hectares are dedicated to other agricultural activities, according to Aprosoja.

In other words, even though the state of Mato Grosso is known as a huge breadbasket, it produces abundant agricultural production for export but little food, which it has to buy from other regions. In fact, only 18 percent of the state´s population is rural.

Although it is intended to be used for export agriculture, “the railroad is a great investment that drives up the value of the land, boosts the economy and wealth, in addition to reducing traffic on the roads. In other words, it indirectly benefits family agriculture,” said Nilton Macedo, president of the Federation of Agricultural Workers of Mato Grosso.

“We have 148,000 members, 97,000 of whom were resettled as part of the agrarian reform programme,” he told IPS by telephone from Pontes e Lacerda, in the southeastern part of the state. The federation says it represents 500,000 workers, including wage-earning farmworkers and family farmers who work their own land.

In contrast, soybean and corn producers number only 7,300, according to Aprosoja, but they dominate the state’s economy.

Brazil's infrastructure minister, Tarcísio de Freitas, speaks during a videoconference with foreign correspondents, co-organised by IPS, during which he detailed plans to improve roads, ports and airports, build new railways and interconnect them, using private investors in the face of domestic fiscal constraints. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Jun 4 2021 (IPS)

Health, fiscal, environmental and political crises have not prevented Brazil from attracting private capital to expand infrastructure, according to the sector’s minister, Tarcísio de Freitas.

Concessions for airports, highways, railways and port terminals, auctioned in the last two years, total 14 billion dollars in investments, the infrastructure minister announced at a press conference with some twenty foreign correspondents, in which other leaders from the areas of trade and transport also took part.

Accelerating this process from July will allow the country to raise the total investment to 200 billion dollars over the next five years, if resources and services under the management of other ministries, such as power plants and sanitation, are included, he projected.

“It is the largest infrastructure concession programme in our history,” Freitas said in a Jun. 2 video conference with foreign correspondents.

The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to Brazil’s success in drawing international capital, contrary to what might have been expected.

“We forged ahead when many countries pulled back and stopped offering their assets due to the uncertainties of the economic situation,” said Freitas. “We decided to bet on investors’ long-term vision and seek out the excess capital available in the world, as unique sellers.”

The operation of 22 airports was privatised on Apr. 7 for a sum equivalent to 17 times the minimum price set, despite the air transport crisis caused by the pandemic. A French company acquired the 30-year concession for a block of seven airports in northern Brazil. The others are now in the hands of a Brazilian consortium.

The success was due to “Brazil’s tradition of respecting contracts,” the large portfolio of projects and their excellent profitability, said the minister at the virtual press conference, promoted by IPS in partnership with the Association of Foreign Media Correspondents, the National Confederation of Commerce and the Federation of Chambers of Foreign Trade.

Attracting national and international private capital is the way to cover the infrastructure deficit in Brazil, given the “delicate fiscal situation” that limits public investment, the infrastructure minister said.

A passenger train meets a freight train on the Carajás Railway, built for the export of iron ore in northern Brazil. Railways in Brazil are mainly used to transport grains and minerals, accentuating the weight of commodities in the economy. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

“The Ministry of Transport had 20 billion reais (about 7.5 billion dollars at the time) for investments in 2014 when it was only in charge of land transport; today the Ministry of Infrastructure has six billion reais (1.2 billion dollars) and oversees ports, airports, roads and railways,” he pointed out, to underscore the need for private capital.

Brazil invested 2.2 percent of its GDP in infrastructure from 2001 to 2014 and “should invest four to five percent to overcome its historical deficiencies,” said José Tadros, president of the National Confederation of Commerce.

That is much less than neighbouring countries such as Chile and Peru invest in infrastructure, and the consequence is high costs, “bad roads and ports, and lack of railways and intermodal connections,” he lamented.

But “it’s a virtuous moment” in the railway sector, with a strong rise in investments expected after the renewal of existing concessions and the future construction of two new major lines, said Fernando Paes, executive director of the National Railway Transport Agency.

The Ministry of Infrastructure’s National Logistics Plan sets a target for railways to carry 36 percent of national freight by 2035, an increase of 70 percent from the current share.

Ferrogrão (part of the plan) is the “most important project in Brazil,” according to Freitas. The 933-kilometre route will mainly serve the export of soy and maize from the mid-north of the state of Mato Grosso, the country’s largest producer of these exports, accounting for 27 percent of the total. The northern Amazonian route will be used instead of the more distant southern ports.

A view of the Brazilian BR-163 highway before its final northern section was paved in 2020. It is mainly used to export soy from the state of Mato Grosso. Now the plan is to build a railway next to it in order to make grain transport cheaper. CREDIT: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

Exports are currently transported via the BR-163 highway, the paving of which was only completed in February 2020, after decades of soybean-laden trucks getting stuck in the mud while crossing more than 900 kilometres of Amazon rainforest to reach the port of Miritituba on the Tapajós River, before the soy is carried over 1,100 kilometres down the river to the Atlantic ports.

The railway serves the interests of the multinational corporations that dominate these Brazilian exports and the global agricultural trade, such as the U.S. companies ADM, Bunge Limited and Cargill.

But Ferrogrão will make transporting these exports cheaper and will help reduce freight costs across the country, by expanding the scale of agricultural exports throughout northern Brazil and establishing a logistical hub between the heart of the Amazon and central Brazil, the infrastructure minister hopes.

Products from the Manaus Free Trade Zone, an industrial park in the capital of the state of Amazonas, will reach major national markets via waterways and the railway, he predicted.

He also said its construction will have beneficial environmental effects by cutting greenhouse gas emissions by trucks and curbing the more intense deforestation provoked by roads.

But environmentalists and indigenous rights advocates disagree.

“It will stimulate the expansion of the agricultural frontier in the Amazon rainforest, where there is a lack of governance, which results in deforestation,” said Sergio Guimarães, executive secretary of the Infrastructure Working Group, in an interview with IPS by telephone from Brasilia after the press conference.

The environmental assessment does not include the indirect impacts of the project over an area wider than the railway route and its margins, he said. Cheaper, largescale transport tends to expand the area of production in a region already affected by huge monocultures on the edges of the Amazon rainforest.

A road in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, with an endless line of trucks transporting soy beans and maize for export. The plan is that by 2035 at least 36 percent of freight transport in this continental-sized country will be by rail. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

In addition, more supply and demand studies and comparative analyses of alternatives are needed, the activist said.

Three railway projects have been presented to transport exports of soy and maize from the mid-north of Mato Grosso, which currently stand at 70 million tons per year and will increase to 120 million tons in the near future, according to Freitas.

In addition to Ferrogrão, an isolated line to the north, the Central-West Integration Railway (Fico) will run from the east, connecting to the North-South Railway which is already in operation and has access to ports in the Northeast and Southeast of Brazil.

The third alternative is a proposal by the Rumo company to extend its Northern Network, which now reaches the south of Mato Grosso, to the centre of the soy-producing region. This network has the advantage of connecting to railways with access to Santos, Brazil’s main export port, and crossing the state of São Paulo, the most economically productive and populous state.

But “there is not enough freight to make the three railways viable,” said Guimarães, who is calling for comparative studies on the Ministry of Infrastructure’s Logistics Plan’s other projects and concessions.

Other risks identified by Guimarães regarding the Ferrogrão are the possibility of overloading and accidents on the Tapajós-Amazonas waterway, if most of Mato Grosso’s production is exported via this route, and variations in river flows due to climate change.

Another railway, the West-East Integration line (Fiol), which crosses the northeastern state of Bahia and had a 537-kilometre stretch granted to a mining company controlled by Kazakhstan’s Eurasian Resources Group, also faces environmental opposition for threatening local biodiversity, especially in the area where a port is to be built.

Ports, which were a “bottleneck” for exports, are also undergoing improvements and extensive privatisation, the minister announced.

And waterways, an undervalued resource in Brazil, are also included in the transformations his ministry intends to make. But this is where the effects of climate change are being felt most even now with a severe drought in midwestern and southeastern Brazil. Navigation on the Tietê river, which crosses the state of São Paulo in southeastern Brazil, is expected to be suspended.

A view of Enresa, one of Argentina’s biodiesel plants. The country's biofuel production capacity is four million tons, but more than half is idle, due to a lack of external markets and limitations in domestic consumption. Credit: Courtesy of CEPREB

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 18 2017 (IPS)

The Argentine biodiesel industry, which in the last 10 years has become one of the most powerful in the world, has an uncertain future, faced with protectionist measures in the United States and Europe and doubts in the international scenario about the environmental impact of these fuels based on agricultural products.

In August, the U.S. government blocked in practice the import of Argentine biodiesel, which is made exclusively from soybeans, by imposing high import duties, arguing dumping, or unfair competition with local soybean producers.

One month later, Argentina recovered, at least partially, from the economic effect of this measure, when the European Union (EU) complied with a World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruling and lowered – although they did not eliminate – the anti-dumping tariffs they had imposed on the product in 2013.

"The emissions avoided by the substitution of oil could be less than those generated to transport soybeans, which in Argentina is done by truck. In addition, soy accounts for more than half of all deforestation in recent years." -- Hernán Giardini
“We are convinced that there is protectionism hidden behind false arguments. The decision by the Donald Trump administration not only affects consumers in the U.S., where fuel prices are already on the rise, but also delays the replacement of oil,” said Gustavo Idígoras, international relations consultant for the Argentine Chamber of Biofuels.

In his view, “the lowering of tariffs in the EU allows us to recover a commercial opportunity that had been closed arbitrarily, but it will not replace the U.S. market.”

The EU had heavily invested in biofuels until 2012, but began to reduce its use since 2015, when it considered that devoting agricultural raw materials to transport fueled deforestation and accelerated climate change.

This reasoning was disputed in his dialogue with IPS by Idígoras, who was a commercial attaché for Argentina before the EU in Brussels between 2004 and 2009.

“The use of biodiesel generates 70 percent savings in emissions of greenhouse gases, as international studies show, and is a fundamental tool in the fight against global warming,” he argued.

Argentina, a major soy producer since the commercialisation of the first transgenic seeds from biotech giant Monsanto was authorised in the 1990s, began to develop its biodiesel industry in 2007.

That year, a law to promote biofuels came into force, requiring a certain proportion to be included in petroleum-based fuels sold in the country.

“Today the country has an installed capacity to produce 4.4 million tons per year of biodiesel, 70 percent of which is produced by 10 transnational corporations.

“This country is the third largest producer of soybean oil biodiesel, after the United States and Brazil, but it is the leading exporter of biofuels, taking all raw materials into account,” explained Julio Calzada, director of Economic Studies at the Rosario Stock Exchange (BCR).

Most of the biodiesel-producing plants are near the central city of Rosario, where soy exports are shipped out from its river port to the Atlantic Ocean.

However, more than half of the national production capacity is currently idle.

The domestic market consumes 1.2 million tons, due to the obligation to incorporate 10 percent of biofuel into diesel.

Although the industry is pressing the government of Mauricio Macri to increase the proportion, automotive companies are lobbying in the opposite direction, arguing that it could affect the performance of the engines.

The country also produces ethanol, from maize and sugarcane, but in an amount that only covers domestic use. In 2016, according to official data, it produced 815 million litres, destined almost entirely to be mixed with fuel sold in the country, which according to the 2007 law should include 12 percent biofuel.

In 2016, Argentine exports of biodiesel amounted to 1.6 million tons which generated 1.175 billion dollars, according to data from the BCR.

However, more than 90 percent of that was exported to the United States, which in August brought purchases to a halt when it slapped an average tariff of 57 percent on Argentine biodiesel.

The reason given was that Argentina’s production of biodiesel is locally subsidised, since its exports are not taxed, unlike soybeans and soybean oil which do pay export taxes amounting to 30 and 27 percent of their value, respectively.

The decision left the Argentine government in a particularly uncomfortable position, because it was adopted only a few days after U.S. Vice President Mike Pence was given a friendly reception in Buenos Aires, where he praised the economic reforms carried out by President Mauricio Macri, in power since December 2015.

The Argentine Foreign Ministry rejected the U.S. decision in an Aug. 24 statement, saying that biodiesel “derives its success (in the U.S. market) from the recognised competitiveness of the soybean production chain in our country” and announced negotiations to try to reverse the Washington measure.

However, not only have they not been successful so far, but reportedly, in the near future the United States could raise import duties on Argentine biodiesel, due to the alleged unfair competition.

The EU also accused Argentina of dumping – selling at a lower price than normal – when it imposed a 24 percent tariff on Argentine biodiesel in 2013 – a rate that had been miscalculated, according to the WTO’s March 2016 ruling, which the EU complied with last month.

However, it is not only economic issues but also environmental ones that cast a shadow of uncertainty on the future of Argentine biodiesel.

“Beyond the fact that using crops for fuel goes against food uses, Argentine biodiesel is not green at all,” said Hernán Giardini, coordinator of the Greenpeace Argentina Forests campaign.

“The emissions avoided by the substitution of oil could be less than those generated to transport soybeans, which in Argentina is done by truck. In addition, soy accounts for more than half of all deforestation in recent years,” he told IPS.

On the other hand, Jorge Hilbert, an international consultant at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology, said that the environmental criticism against Argentine biodiesel actually arise from economic and political interests.

“Argentine biofuels are meeting the goals of emission reduction agreed at a global level, given the characteristics of our agricultural system,” he told IPS.

Hilbert claimed that “80 percent of the grains used are grown in the Rosario area, in soils with more than 100 years of agriculture, where there are no problems of deforestation or biodiversity.”

“The oil used for biodiesel is a byproduct of the soybean that Argentina produces in such quantity that there is no market for it. Its use in biofuel does not compete with food use,” he argued.

For Daniel Lema, an economist who specialises in agriculture, “U.S. and European producers are affected by Argentine biodiesel, and the problem is that our tax scheme gives them an argument for applying protectionist measures.

“Argentina should unify its taxes on all by-products of soy in order to not lose markets,” he told IPS.

Lema warned about another source of uncertainty with regard to biofuel. “Biodiesel faces another obstacle: it is more expensive than diesel derived from petroleum, and for the time being consumers have shown no signs of being willing to pay more in exchange for reducing emissions of polluting gases,” he said.

Brothers Daniel (left) and Armando Schlindewein stand in front of the small bridge over the Matrinxã river which will be submerged by the filling of the Sinop hydropower dam reservoir in western Brazil. Since the house they share is on the other side of the river, they will have to move, and their farms, which are connected by the bridge, will be separated. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
SINOP, Brazil, Oct 9 2017 (IPS)

“After being displaced for the third time,” Daniel Schlindewein became an activist struggling for the rights of people affected by dams in Brazil, and is so combative that the legal authorities banned him from going near the installations of the Sinop hydroelectric dam, which is in the final stages of construction.

He was a teenager in 1974 when the Iguaçu National Park was expanded in the southwest of the country, leading to the expulsion of his family and other local farmers. Seven years later, his family was once again evicted, due to the construction of the Binational Itaipu dam, shared with Paraguay, which flooded 1,350 sq km of land.

That was during Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship, when fighting for people’s rights could lead to prison and torture.

Today there are laws, recognition of rights and mechanisms to defend people which make conflicts more visible, such as the one triggered by the construction of four dams on the Teles Pires river in the western state of Mato Grosso, where Schlindewein now lives, 1,500 km north of where he was born.

The announcement, last decade, of the plans for the new dams “prompted previously fragmented social movements to organise in their resistance” in Mato Grosso, Maria Luiz Troian, an instructor at the Sinop state vocational-technical school, told IPS.

In 2010 the Teles Pires Forum was born, an umbrella group of trade unions, non-governmental organisations, religious groups, associations of indigenous people and fisherpersons, university professors and groups like the Movement of those Affected by Dams (MAB) and the Landless Movement (MST).

It is a “pluralistic forum without hierarchies,” for the defence of rights that are threatened or violated by hydropower dams, said Troian, one of the group’s most active participants.

Farmers whose land will be flooded by the construction of dams “are forced to accept unfair compensation, because the alternative is legal action, which takes a long time and has an uncertain outcome,” she said.

Aerial view of the hydropower dam being built by the Sinop Energy Company on the Teles Pires river which is changing the lives of the people in a large part of the western Brazilian state of Mato Grosso – both family farmers and monoculture producers of soy. Credit: Courtesy of CES

“In practice it is expropriation; they pay us four times less than the local market price,” complained Schlindewein, 56, one of the first people who settled in the village of Gleba Mercedes, in 1997, five years after emigrating from the southern state of Paraná, drawn by the prospect of cheap land in Mato Grosso.

“Many gave up because it rained too much and it took four hours to get to the city of Sinop, just 100 km away, in ‘girico’ (the name given to improvised motorised carts brought by peasant farmers from Paraná),” he said. Electric power did not arrive in the area until 10 years later.

Despite the difficulties, years later Schlindewein brought his divorced brother Armando, one year younger, who purchased land next to his, separated by the Matrinxã river that runs into the Teles Pires river.

The two brothers share a tractor and other machinery, and live together in the elder brother’s house, less than 100 metres from the small river.

But the dam will put an end to their brotherly cooperation, because the water will rise up to eight metres deep in that area, submerging the small wooden bridge that connects their farms and forcing them to move the house to higher ground.

The solution demanded by the Schlindewein brothers is to build up the riverbanks and make a longer, higher bridge. This modification depends on the Sinop Energy Company (CES), which owns the dam, and is important for local residents, because otherwise the distance to the city would be increased by 20 km since they would have to skirt around the flooded Matrinxã river.

The Teles Pires river, where it winds its way past the future Sinop and Colider hydropower plants, under a bridge on BR-163, the road used to transport most of the soy produced in the state of Mato Grosso northwards to Miritituba, the start of the Tapajós river waterway, which continues along the Amazon river until running into the Atlantic ocean, in Northeast Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Of the 560 families in the village – also known as the Wesley Manoel dos Santos settlement – 214 will see their land totally or partially flooded by the dam when the reservoir is filled in 2018.

Besides the low level of compensation, some complain that improvements made to their land and assets that they will lose have not been taken into account.

In the case of José da Silva Teodoro, his wife Jacinta de Souza and their four children, 79 of their 81 hectares of land will be flooded. With the indemnification, they were able to buy 70 hectares of land nearby, but “without the three sources of water” they have on their farm now – the Teles Pires river along the back and a stream running on either side.

“It wasn’t enough money for us to buy land within the settlement; we were expelled and we will lose our fruit trees, for which they hardly gave us a thing,” Teodoro told IPS. “We’ll plant new ones, but they won’t produce fruit for four or five years.”

The couple, who also come from southern Brazil, grow bananas, cassava, pineapples and mangos, raise chickens, and produce milk and cheese.

Their neighbour Ely Tarabossi, his wife and two children already had to give up half of their 100 cows, because the heavy traffic of trucks, tractors and buses caused by the construction of the dam cut off their access to water from the river. But Tarabossi plans to stay, even though the reservoir will flood 30 of his 76 hectares.

“I don’t have any other option,” he said. Although he was reluctant to do so, he plans to dedicate himself to monoculture production of soy, of which Mato Grosso is Brazil’s largest producer. “We tried everything here, from cassava to cucumbers…logistics is the hurdle. I’m 83 km from Sinop, and growing fresh produce is not feasible – everything perishes on the long journey there,” he said.

José da Silva Teodoro and his wife Jacinta de Souza stand next to their “girico” – the small, improvised vehicle that they use to transport people and products in the northern part of the western Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, which they brought with them when they moved here from the southern state of Paraná. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The logging industry was the first economic driver in the area, and helped clear the land for agriculture, according to the local residents.

Then came cattle-raising, which led to the deforestation of vast expanses of land, followed by soy, which rotates with corn or cotton every year. Livestock and then soy dominated the middle and northern part of the state of Mato Grosso and spread northwards, into the Amazon rainforest.

Then came the construction of hydropower dams.

The 408-MW Sinop dam, 70 km from the city of the same name, built at a cost of 950 million dollars, and its 342-sq-km reservoir will favour three hydroelectric plants downstream: Colider (300 MW), Teles Pires (1,820 MW) and São Manoel (700 MW).

With regard to compensation, CES stated that its calculations are based on the rules of the Brazilian Association for Technical Standards, subject to approval by the concerned parties. The negotiations, which have almost been completed, are carried out individually with each property owner, the company’s communication department told IPS.

“Everyone who is affected has constant meetings with our teams, who are always available for whatever is needed,” the statement said. Bridges and access roads will be built with the approval and “active participation” of the concerned parties, with the aim of minimising the impacts of the dam, it added.

To boost local development, CES has been implementing a Fruit and Vegetable Production Project over the last year in the settlements of Mercedes and 12 de Outubro, with the participation of 88 families.

Large agricultural producers in the area complain that the project ruled out sluices in the hydropower plants, and as a result, discarded the idea of a Teles Pires-Tapajós waterway for exporting soy produced in Mato Grosso, which currently depends on road transport.

“The hydroelectric dams respond to a national need; unfortunately their construction was agreed before the adoption of the new law that requires the creation of canals for future sluices,” Antonio Galvan, the president of the Sinop rural producers association, told IPS.

His hope now is that the waterway will be created on another nearby river, the Juruena, which along with the Teles Pires runs into the Tapajós river, and connect with the 1,142-km Ferrogrão railway running between Sinop and Miritituba, the export port on the Tapajós river in the northern Amazon state of Pará.

Chemical engineer Negumi Kosaka has been training for over a year, learning to manage each stage of the production of soybean oil and soymeal in the Angostura Agroindustrial Complex (CAIASA) in the industrial park in Villeta, Paraguay. Her parents, Japanese immigrants, grow soybeans in another region in this country, which is taking steps towards industrialisation with projects like this one. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
VILLETA, Paraguay , Mar 26 2016 (IPS)

“I worked in many companies, in construction, fertilisers, chemicals, but none of them were as good as this one,” said Dario Cardozo, who works in the Angostura Agroindustrial Complex (CAIASA) grain reception facility.

The way he is treated by the owners and managers – “very educated people” – the better wages and the good working environment are the advantages stressed by the 32-year-old father of two – a veteran among the young people who work with him receiving and monitoring the trucks that come from the Paraguayan countryside laden with soybeans to be turned into oil and soymeal.

“We’re the face of CAIASA,” he told IPS, describing his job at the entrance to the complex, the biggest soybean crushing plant in Paraguay. Keeping things moving quickly as 500 trucks – the average traffic during harvest season – a day come in to unload their cargo is an important task, he said, because “for truckers, time is gold.”

Hired by the company after the plant began to operate in 2013 in Angostura, he has been able to build a house in a new neighbourhood of Villeta, where the plant is located in the industrial park on the banks of the Paraguay river. The home is modest, and unfinished: it still needs plaster and paint.

“We used to live with my father-in-law, but he died,” said Cardozo’s wife Lourdes Ramírez, who is happy about the health insurance and other benefits offered by CAIASA. “The bus brings my husband to the two-lane avenue” a few hundreds of metres away, “but when it rains they drive him all the way home,” she said, standing in front of her house.

Local shopkeeper Marina Cáceres, the owner of the La Carapegueña 2 Supermarket, told IPS that “My sales have gone up, there’s more money in the city in the past couple of years; in this block alone there are three CAIASA employees.” The La Carapegueña 1 Supermarket, “which belongs to my father-in-law”, is at the entrance to the city, she said.

Villeta, 45 km from Asunción, is still mainly a rural municipality. Half of its estimated 40,000 inhabitants still live in the countryside, Mayor Teodosio Gómez told IPS.

But the arrival of dozens of industrial companies, which have invested a combined total of 800 million dollars here in the last five years, is changing the landscape and living standards in this municipality in Paraguay’s Central department.

Two truck drivers rest while waiting to unload their cargo in the Angostura Agroindustrial Complex (CAIASA) soy crushing plant in Paraguay. Some 2,000 trucks haul soybeans to the plant, which receives an average of 500 trucks a day during the peak harvest season, and where it takes less than a day to unload even during the busiest periods. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Besides CAIASA, which is a joint venture between two global agribusiness giants, the U.S. Bunge and France’s Louis Dreyfus, another U.S.-based food corporation, ADM, has also set up an agroindustrial plant in the municipality, which is attractive because of its location where the Paraguay river narrows and deepens enough to handle large barges with a cargo capacity of over 2,000 tons.

The result is “low unemployment and violent crime levels,” said the mayor. Besides creating direct jobs, the industries have generated a market for different services and locally produced foods.

The town, founded in 1714 around a river port, where mainly oranges were shipped out, is now at the centre of a diversified economy which includes stockbreeders and small farmers, and is becoming “the industrial capital of Paraguay,” said Gómez.

A skilled local workforce is taking shape through training, of workers, technicians and managers, to prepare them to work in the new industrial plants.

Megumi Kosaka, a 28-year-old chemical engineer, has been in training for the past 15 months, learning to manage any sector of CAIASA, from the reception of soybeans, quality control, the furnace and water treatment to the production of soymeal, oil, and soybean husk pellets.

She is learning all of this “in theory and in practice,” sometimes filling in for the manager of a section for several days or weeks. “For me it’s great – I see all of the operations, I learn everything, I have the chance to work with a wide range of professionals,” she told IPS.

Her favourite area, however, is production. “The machines are like living things, which with small differences in what we do produce something different, in terms of the quality of the sub-product,” Kosaka said.

“If we dry them too much, the soybeans crack, they don’t produce as much oil as possible; you have to know the exact level of moisture…it’s interesting to see the changes, what works best,” she said.

Villeta Mayor Teodosio Gómez, seen here in his office, says his municipality will be the industrial capital of Paraguay, thanks to its location on the Paraguay river and its flourishing industrial park, just 45 km from Asunción. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The daughter of Japanese immigrants, Kosaka already worked in a small soy crushing plant. “In a big one like CAIASA they pay me a better salary to learn more; later I’ll pay them back for what I learned, with my work.”

Her long-term dream is to open a factory in Colonia Iguazú, where her parents and 200 other Japanese families live, in southeast Paraguay, near the border with Brazil. Like 90 percent of the country’s soy producers, farmers there grow soy but do not process it.

A crushing plant would generate skilled jobs and would make it possible for young people who study to stay in the area. Today, with no chance of finding a decent job, “they leave,” Kosaka said.

“The question of human resources is extremely important in Paraguay, and CAIASA made an intelligent decision to train local people, which is a slow process,” said Julio Fleck, head of production in CAIASA, who was in charge of selecting workers and technicians for training, to form a payroll of 200 people.

Workers from other fields, people from the world of business and trade, and some local mechanics and electricians were selected. “We sent them to Argentina for training,” said Fleck, who was involved in the construction of the complex since 2012.

“I come from a different school,” he told IPS, referring to his previous job in the Colonias Unidas Cooperative in southern Paraguay, which is dedicated to diversified agriculture and has a small factory that produces cooking oil from different raw materials.

In CAIASA, he said, he found the “focus” he was seeking, “the big industry where I can learn more in-depth know-how,” to reach maximum productivity. “The good thing in CAIASA is that it offers an opportunity for improvement in a modern, new industry with a high level of mechanisation. But it requires the setting of priorities among the many fronts that must be attended.”

A barge makes its way down the Paraguay river, one of South America’s most important rivers, past the town of Villeta, which has several public and private ports and an industrial park that has become the hub of agroindustry in Paraguay, focused on processing soy, of which this small country is one of the world’s leading exporters. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

One priority was the fuel to fire the furnace. The fact that there is little demand in Paraguay for soybean husk pellets, a sub-product of soy, and that they are not export quality, helped lead to their choice as a fuel, since the idea was to avoid the use of fossil fuels.

But the excess ashes generated by the burning of the pellets hurt the productivity of the furnace, driving up maintenance costs. For this reason, wood chips continued to be used as well, a sustainable option, since the companies that provide them are certified as deforestation-free.

The challenge is how to boost the productivity of the furnace with these two raw materials, said Fleck, a 44-year-old chemical engineer who described himself as obsessed with competitiveness. Logistics, for example, affects Paraguayan soy and its by-products in terms of competition with neighbouring Argentina, which is closer to the markets abroad.

As Paraguay is surrounded by two giant soybean producers, Argentina and Brazil, the expansion of CAIASA depends on what those competitors do, he said.

The truckers, who make up the biggest group of workers among those linked to CAIASA, say the company brought them better pay in the past, but that this has changed since global soy prices plunged.

“I used to earn between eight and nine million guaranis (between 1,400 and 1600 dollars) a month; now I’m earning just 3,500 (615 dollars),” complained Mario Ortellano in the CAIASA parking lot, while waiting to unload the soybeans in his truck.

But the alternative for this 41-year-old who has driven a truck for 13 years is to return to his hometown of Villa Rica, 160 km from Asunción, and to a job as a machine and forklift operator, earning just the minimum wage, 315 dollars a month.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Excerpt:

A local small farmer, Rosineide Maciel, watches the road improvement works on highway BR-163, which runs past her house in Itaituba municipality in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
MIRITITUBA, Brazil , Jan 8 2016 (IPS)

The BR-163 highway, an old dream of the Brazilian military to colonise the Amazon jungle, was revived by agroexporters as part of a plan aimed at cutting costs by shipping soy out of river ports. But the improvement of the road has accentuated problems such as deforestation and land tenure, and is fuelling new social conflicts.

The 350-km stretch of road between the cities of Miritituba and Santarem in the northern Brazilian state of Pará look nothing like the popular image of a lush Amazon rainforest, home to some of the greatest biodiversity in the world.

Between the two port terminals – in Santarém, where the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers converge, and in Miritituba on the banks of the Tapajós River – are small scattered groves of trees surrounded by endless fields of soy and pasture.

Cattle grazing peacefully or resting under the few remaining trees, taking shelter from the high temperatures exacerbated by the deforestation, are the only species of mammal in sight.“A common phrase heard in the area along the BR-163 is ‘whoever deforests, owns the land’ – in other words, deforestation has become an illegal instrument for seizing public land.” – Mauricio Torres

“When we came here 30 years ago this was all jungle,” local small farmer Rosineide Maciel told IPS as she and her family stood watching a bulldozer flatten a stretch of the BR-163 highway in front of their modest dwelling.

Maciel doesn’t miss the days when, along with thousands of other Brazilian migrants, she was drawn here by the then-military government’s (1964-1985) offer of land, part of a strategy to colonise the Amazon rainforest.

Thanks to the paving of the highway that began in 2009, it takes less time to transport her cassava and rice to the town of Rurópolis, 200 km from her farm.

“It’s been easier since they improved the road,” she said. “In the past, there were so many potholes on the way to Rurópolis, and in the wet season it took us three days because of the mud.”

BR-163, built in the 1970s, had become practically impassable. The road links Cuiabá, the capital of the neighbouring state of Mato Grosso – the country’s main soy and corn producer and exporter – with the river port city of Santarém.

Of the highway’s 1,400 kilometres, where traffic of trucks carrying tons of soy and maize is intense, some 200 km have yet to be paved, and a similar number of kilometres of the road are full of potholes.

Accidents occur on a daily basis, caused in the dry season by the red dust thrown up on the stretches that are still dirt, and in the wet season by the mud.

But compared to how things were in the past, it is a paradise for the truckers who drive the route at least five times a month during harvest time.

Truck driver Pedro Gomes from the north of the state of Mato Grosso told IPS: “When soy began to come to Santarém, three years ago, sometimes the drive took me 10 to 15 days. Today we do it in three days, if there’s no rain.”

The BR-163 highway runs up to the entrance of the port terminal built in Santarém by U.S. commodities giant Cargill, where the company loads soy and other grains to ship down the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean, and from there to big markets like China and Europe.

This and other ports built or planned by different companies in Santarém, Miritituba and Barcarena – in Belem, the capital of Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon River – are part of a logistics infrastructure which, along with the paving of the highway, seeks to reduce the costs of land and maritime transport in northern Brazil.

The river ports and the road improvement have nearly cut in half the transport distance for truck traffic from Mato Grosso, which is around 2,000 km from the congested ports in the southeast, such as Santos in the state of São Paulo or Paranaguá in Paraná.

The Mato Grosso Soy Producers Association estimates the transport savings at 40 dollars a ton.

“Shipping out of ports in the north like Santarém has boosted competitiveness,” José de Lima, director of planning for the city of Santarém, told IPS. “BR-163 is a key export corridor that was very much needed by the country and the region.”

But the country’s agroexport model has many critics.

Road works on highway BR-163 in Itaituba municipality in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

With the soy production boom in Pará, illegal occupations of land have expanded and property prices have soared.

“The paving of BR-163 has heated up the land market,” Mauricio Torres, at the Federal University of Western Pará (UFOPA), told IPS. “As this is happening in a region where illegal possession of land is so widespread and where there is no land-use zoning, it generates a series of social and environmental conflicts.”

This, in turn, has driven deforestation.

“Forests are cut down not only for agriculture but to make fraudulent land claims. A common phrase heard in the area along the BR-163 is ‘whoever deforests, owns the land’ – in other words, deforestation has become an illegal instrument for seizing public land,” he said.

In 2006, the government launched a sustainable development plan for BR-163, aimed at reducing the socioenvironmental impacts caused by the paving of the road, by means of self-sustaining projects for local communities.

“But this pretty much just petered out,” UFOPA chancellor Raimunda Nogueira explained to IPS.

“If the communities along BR-163 are not strengthened, they will undergo a radical transformation,” she said. “For example, land prices are skyrocketing and small farmers are selling out, which accentuates the phenomenon of the latifundio (large landed estates).”

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon became more widespread in the 1960s, driven by the expansion of cattle ranching and the timber industry.

However, that did not leave the land completely free of vegetation, according to Nogueira, because subsistence farming “maintained different levels of regeneration of the forest.”

“When the big agricultural producers came in, they cleared all of those areas in the stage of regeneration that maintained a certain equilibrium,” said the chancellor, who estimates that around 120,000 hectares of land have been deforested to make way for soy.

Torres, meanwhile, referred to the emergence of other social problems like prostitution, involving minors as well as adults.

“There are towns in Pará that could turn into huge brothels for truck drivers,” he said.

The residents of Campo Verde, a town of around 6,000 people located 30 km from Miritituba, who depend on the production of palm hearts and on sawmills for a living, have started to feel the effects.

The town is located near the intersection of BR-163 and the 4,000-km Trans-Amazonian highway that cuts across northern Brazil.

“Only soy is going to come through here,” Celeste Ghizone, a community organiser in the town, told IPS. “An average of 1,500 trucks are expected to pass through every day. Just think of how many accidents we’re going to have with all of these truck drivers who drive through like mad men without even slowing down,” he said, adding that he is worried about rising crime and drug abuse rates.

When the improvement of BR-163 – including widening it to a four-lane highway along one major stretch – is completed, an estimated 20 million tons of grains (Mato Grosso currently produces 42 million tons) will be shipped northward to Amazon River ports rather than on the longer routes to ports in the southeast, by 2020.

The dream of agribusiness corporations is to continue expanding the soy corridor, by building a railway to Miritituba.

But Torres complained that “It’s important to stress that a paved BR-163 is not local infrastructure but is for the big soy producers of Mato Grosso. The state of Pará will become merely a transport corridor for soy exports.”

Edited by Verónica Firme/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The U.S. agribusiness giant Cargill’s port terminal on the banks of the Tapajós River in the northern Brazilian city of Santarém, where large cargo vessels dwarf the traditional small fishing boats of the Amazon basin. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
SANTARÉM, Brazil, Dec 11 2015 (IPS)

River port terminals in the northern Brazilian city of Santarém are considered strategic by the government. But what some see as an opportunity for development is for others an irreversible change in what was previously a well-preserved part of the Amazon rainforest.

In the evening light on the Tapajós River, whose green-blue waters mix with the darker muddy water of the Amazon River in Santarém, it’s not easy to ignore the silos that overshadow what used to be a public beach, where passenger boats and fishing vessels typical of this part of the Amazon jungle state of Pará tie up.

The port terminal of the U.S. commodities giant Cargill began to operate in 2003 as a centre for the storage, transshipment and loading of soy and corn, in this city of nearly 300,000 people.

The cargo ships and convoys of barges carrying grains are headed for the Amazon River and then the Atlantic Ocean on their way to Europe or China, the biggest markets for Brazil’s main agribusiness exports.

This country is the world’s second-largest producer of soy, after the United States, and the biggest exporter. In the 2014-2015 harvest it produced 95 million tons, 60.7 million of which were exported.

Municipal authorities argue that the river port terminals generate jobs and tax revenue, while they drive the construction and services industries, hotels and fuel supplies.

But Edilberto Sena, a Catholic priest who is the president of the Tapajós Movement Alive, holds a very different view.

“Cargill’s arrival has been a tragedy for Santarém,” he told IPS. “When they began to build the port they argued that it would bring jobs, and while they were building it did create 800 jobs. But as soon as it was completed, most of the workers were fired, and now it employs between 150 and 160 people.”

With a current capacity to export five million tons of grain, the port of Santarém was built to ease the congestion in ports in southern Brazil like Santos in the state of São Paulo, or Paranaguá in the state of Paraná.

This port and the transshipment terminal in Mirituba – 300 km to the south of Santarém – have also cut distances by land and sea for the shipment of soy from the neighbouring state of Mato Grosso, the country’s largest soy producer.

The installation was built by the U.S. agribusiness and food company Bunge, which was later joined by Cargill and other transnational corporations.

“These ports make Brazil more competitive,” the director of planning in the Santarém city government, José de Lima, told IPS.

As an example, he pointed out that with respect to the port in Santos, from Santarém to the port city of Shanghai, China, “the distance was cut from 24,000 km to 19,500 km, and going through the Panama Canal will reduce the cost from 159 to 147 dollars per transported ton.”

As of 2020, with an investment of around 800 million dollars, the transnational corporations project that they will export 20 million tons a year of grains through the Amazon basin.

A fisherman carries the day’s catch in the market in the city of Santarém, from the beach now overshadowed by the silos of the river port at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Credit: Gonzalo Gaudenzi/IPS

Nelio Aguiar, the Santarém secretary of planning, stressed the strategic importance of these ports for the agroexport sector. “Brazil’s GDP is growing, based on agribusiness, which is supporting our economy,” he told IPS.

Most of the cargo arrives by truck, over the BR-163 highway in the process of being repaved, which ends at Cargill’s port terminal.

Currently, during the soy and corn harvest some 350 trucks a day arrive. But Lima estimates that the number will rise to 2,000 a day when other port terminals set to be built in the city are in operation.

That is what worries social organisations and academics who have fought the construction of the port.

“Because the city was not adapted to receive so much cargo traffic, it has caused disruptions and we have seen an increase in the number of accidents due to the intensification of truck traffic,” Raimunda Monteiro, the rector of the Federal University of Western Pará, told IPS.

But despite a number of lawsuits challenging the legality of the Cargill port, construction went ahead with the support of local authorities.

“It destroyed a beach in Santarém and there were also a number of indirect impacts because it attracted more soy producers, who expanded across the Santarém plan. These impacts were not foreseen in the environmental impact study,” Ibis Tapajós, a lawyer who works with social movements, told IPS.

To decongest truck traffic, the city government projects the construction of new access roads and truck parking lots outside of the city.

But there is concern about environmental effects such as contamination of the river and pollution from motor vehicle emissions and from the chemical fertilisers carried by the ships.

“The Cargill port is a clear example of the violation of socioenvironmental rights by large corporations,” said Tapajós.

The construction of at least six new port terminals in Santarém is in the study phase. Two would be next to the Cargill terminal and four would be in the area around Maica Lake.

The most advanced project on the lake – now in the phase of obtaining environmental permits – is to be built by EMBRAPS, a private company.

“Maica Lake is an extremely fragile ecological area,” said Monteiro. “It is at one end of a 50-km series of lakes and canals at the mouth of the Tapajós river and its confluence with the Amazon River.”

The EMBRAPS port is to be built in the Green Area neigbhourhood on the lake, in an area that floods during the rainy season and is without water in the dry season.

There are already signs warning “no trespassers, private property,” and the 480 fisherpersons on the lake are worried about the impact on their activity due to the circulation of the cargo vessels and because a large area will be covered over with soil.

“They’re going to practically privatise the lake,” Ronaldo Souza Costa, the president of the Association of Local Residents of the Perola Neighourhood of Maicá, told IPS. Thirty percent of the fish eaten in Santarém comes from the lake.

“As far as we can tell, there will be a major impact on our fishing, mainly in this area, where we fish in the wintertime. They will mark off no-trespassing areas,” said Raimundo Nonato, the administrator of the Maicá market.
The Santarém city government says the installations will be on dry land and that the companies are not interested in the lake but in the Amazon River, which the waters flow into and which is deep enough for large vessels.

“The entire operation of the trucks will be on ramps. It will not affect the water in the lake at all,” said Aguiar.

But because the local communities have not yet been formally consulted about this and other port projects, fears are growing.

“From what we know, if the ships come near us, our boats will be in trouble because of the big waves, which will be dangerous for our small vessels,” local fisherwoman Telma Almeida told IPS.

After unloading her fish, Almeida casts off and sets out on the Amazon River once again in her small boat. Her silhouette becomes tiny and dim in the shadow of a large cargo vessel.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Members of the São Raimundo do Fe em Deus cooperative in the rural municipality of Belterra in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest peel manioc, to make flour. The associations of small farmers help them defend themselves from the negative effects of the expansion of soy in this region on the banks of the Tapajós River. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BELTERRA, Brazil, Dec 8 2015 (IPS)

In the northern Brazilian state of Pará, the construction of a port terminal for shipping soy out of the Amazon region has displaced thousands of small farmers from their land, which is now dedicated to monoculture.

The BR-163 highway, along the 100-km route from Santarém, the capital of the municipality of that name, to Belterra runs through an endless stretch of plowed fields, with only a few isolated pockets of the lush rainforest that used to cover this entire area.

State-of-the-art tractors and other farm machinery, a far cry from the rudimentary tools used by the local small farmers in the surrounding fields, are plowing the soil this month, ahead of the planting of soy in January.

José de Souza, a small farmer who owns nine hectares in the rural municipality of Belterra, sighs.

“Soy benefits the big producers, but it hurts small farmers because the deforestation has brought drought,” he tells IPS. “The temperatures here were pleasant before, but now it’s so hot, you can’t stand it.”

The effects are visible in his fields of banana plants, which have been burnt by the hot sun.

Resigned, De Souza waters a few sad rows of straggling cabbages and scallions.

Like other farmers, he has been hemmed in by the expansion of soy in the municipalities of Santarém and the nearby Belterra and Mojuí dos Campos.

According to the Santarém municipal government, of the 740,000 cultivable hectares in this region, soy now covers 60,000.

But Raimunda Nogueira, rector of the Federal University of Western Pará, offers a much higher figure. “Land-use change has involved 112,000 to 120,000 hectares, which have been turned into soy plantations,” she tells IPS.

And with the soy came the spraying.

“The soy fields bring a lot of pests because the poison they use to fight them drives them off their plantations onto our small fields,” laments De Souza.

The agrochemicals have polluted the soil and poisoned crops and animals, local farmers complain.

“The crops die, and as a result the property becomes completely unproductive – and the solution is to sell,” Jefferson Correa, a representative of the local non-governmental organisation Fase Amazonia, tells IPS.

There are no epidemiological data. But in these rural municipalities, the widespread perception is that health problems like respiratory and skin ailments have become more common.

According to Selma da Costa with the Rural Workers Union of Belterra, the threats to their health and the temptation to sell their land have led 65 percent of local small farmers to leave the municipality, which had a population of 16,500.

“They end up leaving, because who is going to put up with the stench of the pesticides? No one. People are getting sick. Pregnant women often feel ill and they don’t know why,” she tells IPS.

José de Souza waters the garden on his nine-hectare farm in the municipality of Belterra in the northern Brazilian Amazon rainforest state of Pará, where his vegetables grow sparsely due to the effects of the spread of soy monoculture, which has hurt family farmers in the area, who produce 70 percent of the food consumed by the local population. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

“They sold their land for a pittance. They practically gave away their land to the big producers, thinking their lives would get better, that they would build a nice house in Santarém But they can’t support themselves because they can’t grow anything,” she explains.

Correa points out that back in 2000, land here was cheap. There were people who sold 100 hectares for 1,000 to 2,000 dollars, and later regretted it.

“They went to the city, spent all the money, and without any formal education, the only solution was to go back to work in the countryside, as rural labourers for the people who had bought their land,” he says.

Others scrape by on the outskirts of Santarém as street vendors or in other informal sector activities.

“The farmers had their property, their own food, like beans, rice, flour and what they could fish and hunt; but in the city they no longer have that,” adds Claudionor Carvalho with the Federation of Agricultural Workers of the State of Pará.

The change, he explains to IPS, has fuelled prostitution in the slums surrounding the city, “because the families weren’t prepared for what they would face.”

The process was accentuated 15 years ago, with the construction of a port facility in Santarém by the US commodities giant Cargill.

Through the new port terminal in Santarém, on the banks of the Tapajós River where it runs into the Amazon River, soy and other grains can be exported to the Atlantic Ocean.

The aim was to reduce the distance and the costs of transporting soy from the neighbouring state of Mato Grosso, Brazil’s biggest producer.

Brazil is the world’s second-largest producer and leading exporter of soy, which it sells to China, Europe and other markets.

Ports like this one in the Amazon basin have nearly cut in half the transport distance from Mato Grosso, which is around 2,000 km from the congested ports in the southeast, such as Santos in the state of São Paulo.

The new Amazon port, with silos that now have a total capacity of 120,000 tons – double the initial capacity – has drawn hundreds of soy producers from the south of the country, leading to a land-buying stampede and driving up property prices.

One of those who came with his family was Luiz Machado, from Mato Grosso.

“We had 90 hectares that we sold to buy a bigger farm here because the land was cheap,” he tells IPS. “Besides, we would be closer to the port, so we could get a better price for our product.”

Machado says the purchase was legal, and that he has left untouched the rainforest surrounding his property, much of which had already been deforested.

But many others did not do this, and the expansion of soy has devastated large swathes of forest, Cándido Cunha with the National Institute of Colonisation and Agrarian Reform explains in a conversation with IPS.

In 2006, in a “soy moratorium,” associations of producers, many of whom had ties to Cargill, pledged not to sell any more soy from deforested areas.

There was a temporary drop in deforestation. But it once again increased because the farmers that sold their land cleared property in other areas.

“What happened was what we call ‘grillaje’ of land: forged documents or illegal appropriation of public land,” which further complicated the already highly irregular land tenure situation in the Amazon region, says Cunha.

Of the two million and a half tons of soy exported annually from Santarém, just six percent is locally grown; the rest comes from Mato Grosso.

But Nelio Aguiar, secretary of planning in Santarém, says it helped modernise the economy, fomenting a shift from family farming to mechanised agriculture.

“Today we have larger scale, dollarised agriculture, and every harvest produces great riches,” he tells IPS.

But while some celebrate the expansion of agribusiness here, others are worried about the future of local food security.

The greater metropolitan region, population 370,000, depends on family farming for 70 percent of the local food supply.

“Now you have to buy everything in the market, even rice and beans – things we didn’t have to buy before because we produced everything ourselves. And we also sold what we produced,” complains De Souza.

“Why are we buying? Because we don’t have land anymore. And what we plant is being poisoned,” says Da Costa.

For Correa, one solution is to expand government programmes that support family farming. De Souza is a beneficiary of one of them.

Another solution is to join together in farming associations or cooperatives.

De Souza proudly takes IPS to the São Raimundo do Fe em Deus cooperative, of which he is a member, where a festive group of men and women are sharing the tasks of peeling, grating and cooking manioc to make the flour that is a staple food in Brazil.

“We have to help each other, because small farmers face a difficult situation today,” he says.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Native varieties of maize, like these drying in San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the southern state of Chiapas, are key to preserving crop diversity. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 8 2013 (IPS)

In the 2011 action-thriller “Unknown”, scientists are persecuted by the biotech industry because they plan the open release of a drought- and pest-resistant strain of maize that could help eradicate world hunger.

There are certain parallels with the situation today in Mexico, the birthplace of maize, which is at the centre of the global fight to protect the crop’s diversity from the onslaught of genetically modified varieties.

“It’s the first time in history that one of the most important harvests in the world is threatened in its centre of diversity,” Pat Mooney, the head of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group), an international NGO, told IPS.

“If we let the companies win, there will be no chance to defend them in other parts. What is happening here is of key importance for the rest of the world.”

Civil society organisations are raising their guard against the possibility that the government of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) may approve commercial cultivation of transgenic maize, a move widely condemned by environmentalists and other activists, academics, and small and medium producers due to the risks it poses.

In September, the U.S. corporations Monsanto, Pioneer and Dow Agrosciences presented six applications for commercial plantations of transgenic maize on more than two million hectares in the northwestern state of Sinaloa and the northeastern state of Tamaulipas.

Moreover, in January these companies and Syngenta presented 11 applications for pilot and experimental plots to grow transgenic corn on 622 hectares in the northern states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Sinaloa and Baja California. And Monsanto has applied for an additional plantation in an unspecified area in the north of the country.

Since 2009, the Mexican government has issued 177 permits for experimental plots of transgenic maize covering an area of 2,664 hectares, according to the latest figures provided by the authorities.

But large-scale commercial release of GM maize has not yet been authorised.

“They are going to serve up transgenic maize on every table in spite of the fact that food sovereignty depends on growing native corn,” said Evangelina Robles, a member of Red en Defensa del Maíz (Maize Defence Network) which campaigns against GM corn. “As a result, we have to demand its prohibition by the state,” she told IPS.

Mexico produces 22 million tonnes of maize a year, and imports 10 million tonnes, according to the agriculture ministry. The country purchased about two million tonnes of GM maize from South Africa over the last two years, and is set to import another 150,000 tonnes.

Three million maize farmers cultivate about eight million hectares in Mexico, two million of which are devoted to family farming. White maize is the main crop for human consumption, while yellow maize, for animal feed, is largely imported.

The National Council for the Evaluation of Social Policy (CONEVAL) estimates the country’s annual consumption of maize at 123 kg per person, compared to a world average of 16.8 kg.

The historical link with pre-Columbian indigenous cultures gives maize a strong symbolic and cultural significance throughout Mesoamerica, the area comprising southern Mexico and Central America, where it was domesticated, producing 59 landraces or native strains and 209 varieties.

In the state of Mexico, adjacent to the capital city’s Federal District, small farmers have found their native maize to be contaminated with GM maize, according to tests carried out by students at the state Autonomous Metropolitan University.

“We swapped seeds and decided to do some tests. Now we are more careful when exchanging, and over who participates in the fair, although we still have to carry out confirmation tests,” activist Sara López, of the Red Origen Volcanes (Volcanoes Origins Network), an association of small farmers that has been organising producers’ fairs since 2010, told IPS.

Environmental, scientific and small farmers’ organisations have discovered GM contamination of native maize in Chihuahua, Hidalgo, Puebla and Oaxaca.

Contamination is “a carefully and perversely planned strategy,” according to Camila Montecinos, from the Chile office of GRAIN, an international NGO that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.

Transnational food companies “chose maize, soy and canola because of their enormous potential for contamination (by wind-pollination),” said Montecinos, one of the experts participating in the preliminary hearing on transgenic contamination of native maize at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, an international opinion tribunal which opened its Mexican chapter in 2012 and will conclude with a non-binding ruling in 2014.

“When contamination spreads, the companies claim that the presence of transgenic crops must be recognised and legalised,” in order to pave the way for marketing the GM seeds, to which they own the patents, she said.

Mexico’s environment minister, Juan Guerra, has said that all available scientific information will be examined before a decision is made.

But that will not be easy. The National Confederation of Campesinos (Small Farmers), one of the main internal movements in the ruling PRI, has had an agreement with Monsanto since 2007 under which the company is to “conserve” native varieties.

Meanwhile, the Peña Nieto government still has not approved regulations for the format and contents of reports on the results of releasing GM organisms, and the possible threats to the environment, biodiversity, and the health of animals, plants and fish.

“For 18 years, corporations have been unsuccessful in convincing the people that their products are good. Maize is being used as a means of political and economic control. People need maize to be alive,” the ETC Group’s Mooney said.

The transgenic seeds on the market are herbicide-resistant Roundup Ready and Bt (for the Bacillus thuringiensis gene they carry for pest resistance) versions of cotton, maize, soy and canola. While they are legally grown in Canada, the United States, Argentina, Brazil and Spain, they are banned for example in China, Russia and the majority of the EU countries.

Recent studies published in the United States show that transgenic crops do not significantly increase yield per hectare, do not reduce herbicide use, and do not increase resistance to pests, in contrast to biotech industry claims.

“We are analysing what legal action to take against the new applications (to plant GM maize),” said Robles, of the Maize Defence Network.