Road sparks alarm for Brazil rainforest

Gareth Chetwynd in Rio de Janeiro
Friday December 10, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/brazil/story/0,12462,1370605,00.html

Brazil and Peru have announced a £363m plan for a highway to link Brazil's Amazon basin to the Pacific, raising concerns about further devastation in the rainforest.

Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and Peru's president, Alejandro Toledo, outlined plans for the 711-mile road linking Amazon river port of Assis in Brazil with Peru's Pacific ports of Matarini, Ilo and San Juan.

Brazil also plans to upgrade an existing dirt track between Assis and its Atlantic coast with an all-weather surface.

Brazilian transport officials said the main objective of the road to Peru was to provide a more efficient export route to the markets of Asia for Brazil's agricultural products.

This is another nail in Amazonia's coffin. My enthusiasm for Lula is waning. Seems that he intends to improve the lot of Brasil's poor by cashing out his nations natural heritage. Just because that's what we did certainly does not make it right or wise. One would think(and hope) that a socalist would try to redress social inequities by at least some redistribution. Apparently Lula doesn't know how to spend the political capital that his mandate provided, unlike our fearless leader. (sarcasm)

I sense a certain snobbery and elitism in oppostion to roads like this.

It's easy for rich environmentalists to oppose a road somewhere thousands of miles away when they sit inside their big, heated house which sits on a road, and they can drive to work every day on a road, and drive to the supermarket on a road, and buy food that was transported on a raod, and they know that if they get sick they can get medical care by traveling on a road, etc.

The fact is that people in other parts of the world have just as much right to roads as we do. They have the right to have access to transportation, food, education, employment, medical care, sanitaion, etc.

Until you're prepared to live your life without using any roads, or using and goods or servies that are transported on roads, I don't think you have any right to judge others for trying to have a shot at a decent standard of living.

The very house that you are in right now is on land that used to be covered in forest. But somebody chopped the trees down so that you could have a place to live. So why would you try to deny anyone else the exact same thing?

Back in the days of FDR, roads were considered to be GOOD things. Remember those days?

Sorry, but I think providing people with homes, food, health care, eudcation, and employment, which are the orignial hallmarks of real liberals, is more important than protecting a jungle.

hard to know where to start. You assume that everybody should want the "american way", with all of our empty excess. You forget that much of what we have today is the booty of 1/2 a century of economic imperialism.

Who will this road benefit? Hardly the locals. A little labor for a year or so and they're left with a wasteland. After the trees are gone they might have the opportunity to absorb killer quantities of poison on a soy plantation. The road has little to do with the local folks, it's about extracting the resources as fast as possible for the maximum immediate profit. I've traveled to quite a few places in the Neotropics that have roads, the people's standard of living is little improved. Furthermore, the relatively sparse population of Amazonia makes much use of the rivers for transportation, but you can't float logs upstream.

There is a world of difference between living on a piece of land that has been used and abused for 200 years and raping the worlds disappearing virgin forest.

Finally, I'm not a liberal, I'm an ecosocialist. I say this because I understand that only cooperation will get us through the mess we have made of our world and that to live with nature is not only necessary for physical survival but a requisite for maintaining our humanity.

A road totally ruined the rainforest in the state of Rondonia and displaced many native peoples