The BR-163 highway is in the state of Para, Brazil. The road cuts directly through the National Forest and is used for illegal logging operations and deforestation inside the protected area. The 1,100 mile road is the main north south artery. Built in the 1970's to open up the jungle to colonisation.
April 2007 President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has announced that 600 miles of this road is to paved. This will be called the Sustainable BR -163 Plan and is Brazils most ambitious attempt to reconcile growth and conservation.
YOU do not drive on the right of the BR-163, nor do you drive on the left. You drive on whichever bit of the road seems least likely to tear off the undercarriage of your vehicle. During the six-month rainy season, when the road becomes a river of mud, men with tractors wait for you to founder and haul you out for a fee. Under such conditions, the 1,765km (1,097 mile) journey from Santarém, a port on the Amazon River, to Cuiabá, capital of the state of Mato Grosso, can take a fortnight.
Yet the paving of the BR-163 is feared as much as it is yearned for.
The road joins what Brazilians call, without great exaggeration, the “world's breadbasket” to the “world's lungs”—the fields and pastures of Mato Grosso to the Amazonian rainforest. If the past is any guide, the lungs will suffer. Paving the BR-163 could lay waste to thousands of square kilometres of forest, carrying deep into the jungle the “arc of deforestation” through which it passes. It may visit similar destruction on the small farmers, gatherers and indigenous folk clustered along its axis. In Pará, the more northerly of the BR-163 states, older settlers are already battling loggers and land grabbers up and down the road. “On the one hand [it] will bring development,” says Cícero Pereira da Silva Oliveira, head of the union of rural workers in Trairão, a settlement 380km south-west of Santarém. “On the other it will bring ruin to the region—more land grabbing, more drug trafficking. Total violence will arrive.”
Road development could deforest 30-40% of the Amazon by 2020, according to one estimate. But the paving of the BR–163 is supposed to be a different sort of roadworks, bringing growth that is ordered rather than chaotic, reducing social inequities rather than exacerbating them, preserving the Amazon rather than despoiling it.
Getting it right has now become a global project, involving NGOs, multinationals and grass-roots groups, as well as all levels of Brazil's government. There are plenty of disagreements, but this throng is forming unlikely alliances, overturning assumptions about how to police the forest and proposing novel ideas for reconciling growth and conservation.
The road will transform as well as transport, but not necessarily for the better. The Amazon forest has already shrunk by 15% since the 1960s. In general, some 85% of deforestation takes place within 50km of a road, because a road makes it more profitable to fell trees, first for timber and then for pasture, the biggest contributor to the denuding of the forest. The paving of the BR-163, which passes through one of the Amazon's most varied bird habitats, will destroy 22,000-49,000 square kilometres of forest within 35 years, according to a report in 2002 by two research institutes, IPAM and the Instituto Socioambiental. Without law and order, the road could usher in the strong and flush out the weak.
