To kill time, you can have a vitamin guarana glass to the lilting forró that echoes across the pier, or even a plate of moqueca, the aromatic Afro-Brazilian stew made with the giant Amazonian fish.
But the impatience is palpable in the port of Ceasa, in Manaus, during the long wait to catch the raft that crosses the Negro River. A long line of cars, trucks and coaches extends to the shore of the immense river, actually two, because the Negro and the Amazon converge here, in the famous bicolor Encontro das Aguas.
On the other side, the BR-319 highway begins, which, in theory, crosses the Amazon to Porto Velho, 900 kilometers further south, and the border of the soy belt in the increasingly prosperous state of Mato Grosso.
But the highway – inaugurated during the military dictatorship, in 1976 – was never paved. A section of about 500 kilometers is impassable in the rainy months.
“They don’t give a license for the work,” says Joao, in his 40s, trying to entertain his four-year-old son while they wait in front of an old Volkswagen Polo. “It doesn’t make sense. “
Actually, yes it has. But sometimes it seems more planetary than local logic. “Fixing BR-319 would mean an explosion of irreversible deforestation,” says Suely Araújo, former president of the Brazilian Institute of the Environment (Ibama).
Exactly one year ago, the government of Jair Bolsonaro granted the first of the three licenses needed to rebuild BR-319. Since the victory in October of the left-wing candidate, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the issue has divided a government whose Environment Minister, Marina da Silva, is at odds with the Ministry of Agriculture and agro-lobbies in Congress.
Lula has dropped that he would support the reconstruction of the highway, as long as there was “a commitment to the protection” of the regional administrations.
But that doesn’t exist, says Araújo. “No one controls deforestation.” The rate of forest destruction has fallen 33% since Lula took office. But the goal of zero deforestation is a long way off.
Protecting the jungle “will be much more difficult and expensive if BR-319 is rebuilt,” says Philip Fearnside of the National Research Institute in Manaus. Once open, the BR-319 will connect with other highways planned in the area of ??the Purús river. “Opening the trans Purús region would be catastrophic; it is crucial for recycling the water that supplies Sao Paulo”, says Fearnside.
But in Manaus, a poor city of nearly three million people, with no road access to the rest of Brazil, Sao Paulo’s climate, and even the planet’s, seems like less of a problem. “Everything here is expensive because everything goes down the river. In the pandemic we ran out of oxygen”, says Joao, during his long wait for the ferry.
The Brazilian Amazon has 15 to 20% of the planet’s living species and up to 22% of the drinking water. It stores trillions of tons of CO2. “No other country is home to a natural asset so necessary to sustain life,” sums up the writer Joao Moreira Salles in his new book, Arrabalde.
Despite this, the human development indicators in the Amazon are the worst in Brazil. The region has been heavily hit by the covid and its economic consequences. After brutal increases in fuel and food prices, more than half of the population deal daily with food insecurity
According to the Getulio Vargas Foundation, 67% of the inhabitants of the Manaus periphery earn less than five euros a day. In rural areas, poverty exceeds 70%. Only 48% of the inhabitants of the Amazon have access to the internet, compared to 77% in Sao Paulo. In the Largo de Sao Sebastián, in front of the Fitzcarraldian Teatro de Amazonas, not five minutes go by without someone asking for the remains of the tacacá soup.
Many people here attribute their hardship, rightly or wrongly, to isolation. The supply of the city is carried out mainly by boat. The only major highway is BR-74, which crosses the border with Venezuela, a 30-hour drive to the northeast, a route of little economic value.
Even the subsidized industrial hub, which creates tens of thousands of jobs and may have helped prevent the extractivist destruction that has occurred in other parts of the Amazon, transports its products by river or by air.
For all this, when there is passionate talk in Paris or Washington about the urgency of protecting the jungle, without addressing the urgent issue of poverty in the Amazon, the only ones who benefit are the local politicians of the Bolsonaro right. “I am concerned about environmental protection at any cost (…),” said Wilson Lima, the governor of Amazonas, in the newspaper O Globo.
Hence the problem for Lula. “In Manaus, if you speak ill of BR-319, you don’t win the elections,” says Suely Araújo. Much of the controversy is based on fallacies. “The politicians here say that BR-319 may be sustainable, but it’s a fiction,” says Fearnside. In any case, “it is cheaper to transport the products by river”, she adds. Despite this, “it cannot be taken for granted that Lula is going to stop the reconstruction of the highway.”
There is already a consensus, among experts, that the development model for the Amazon must be based on biodiversity. Even the World Bank, which in the past financed works such as the BR-364 from Mato Grosso to Porto Velho, already advises against the construction of highways.
“You no longer need access to more land for agriculture; the development model must be based on cities connected by the river”, summed up Marek Hanusch, World Bank economist.
But the change of consciousness is not so easy on the banks of the Río Negro. “The road isn’t built because the big shipping companies don’t want it!” laments a trader in a poor houseboat community. It’s false. The most powerful business lobbies want the highway. But the defense of the jungle, which will be raised this week at the Amazon summit in Belem, will depend on perceptions as much as realities.
