Brazil gov't to fund paved Amazon soy export road
Source: Reuters
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Nov 21 (Reuters) - The Brazilian government will provide some 1.5 billion reais ($695 million) to pave 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) of track linking soy farms in Mato Grosso to the Amazon river port of Santarem, a transport ministry official said on Tuesday. The decision will speed execution of the controversial BR-163 highway which was among 120 transport and energy projects reviewed on Friday by President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and ministers in a bid to speed economic growth and ensure energy supplies. "From 2007 we will have funds to make quicker progress," Jose Maria da Cunha, the Transport Ministry's BR-163 project adviser, told Reuters by phone from Brasilia. He said that the BR-163 will be included in the government's Pilot Public Investment Program (PPI) mechanism in 2007 rather than funded through the tortuous private-public-partnership (PPP). About 4.6 billion reais is earmarked for the PPI in 2007. Mato Grosso is the biggest soy producing state in Brazil, the world's No.2 soy exporter, but it is some 2,000 kilometers from the country's congested southern ports. The unpaved BR-163 is mostly impassable during the December to June rainy season. An all-weather road through the rainforest would open a shorter and cheaper export route. But environmentalists, fearing that paving the BR-163 will hasten the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by loggers, ranchers, soy farmers and squatters, have delayed paving the road built by Brazil's military in the early 1970s. The government already has a preliminary environmental license for the BR-163 project and now expects to get final clearance by the end of the rainy season in June 2007, Cunha said. Some of the work, which includes the replacement of 70 wooden bridges with concrete structures, should be tendered next year, he added. "The project will take three to four years but should be completed by 2010," Cunha said, adding that it was only possible to work during the dry season. "This year we finished paving the road up to the border with Para state, the army is asphalting the road from Santarem south to Ruropolis, and it also started to replace 14 out of 70 wooden bridges with concrete structures."
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