Destructive Progress: Brazil-Peru Transoceanic Highway

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http://wilderutopia.com/international-issues/destructive-progress-brazil-peru-transoceanic-highway-by-jack-eidt/

Destructive Progress: Brazil-Peru Transoceanic Highway – By Jack Eidt
By Jack Eidt– November 3, 2010
Posted in: International Issues
Destructive Progress: Brazil-Peru Transoceanic Highway

By Jack Eidt

The 2011 completion of the 3,400-mile Transoceanic Highway nears, connecting the Amazonian state of Acre in Brazil with the southern Pacific Coast of Peru. Supported by governmental and multi-national development interests, it promises to internationalize Brazilian agricultural products, mainly soybeans and cattle, while providing improved mobility to people across the region. Unfortunately, the record of highways in the Amazon is bumpy and washed-out filled with road-killed species, massive deforestation, rampant erosion and micro-climate modification, fragmented habitats, wildlife movement blocked, indigenous land stolen, subsistence-living destroyed, gold-mined hills stripped, rivers polluted with chemicals, oil spills, and human waste.


BR-163 in Mato Grosso is one ignominious example of the rainforest habitat biodiversity destruction enabled in road construction; the Trans-Amazonian Highway of the 1970s another. 95 percent of the deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is within 50 kilometers of a road. Timber and mineral extraction are of course enabled, as are hydroelectric dam construction. The main highway leads to expansion of unofficial road networks enabling mass deforestation and agricultural production, attracting colonists and speculators invading indigenous lands and societies.

With the Peruvian Carretera Transoceanica, largely financed by Brazil and China, oil, gas and mining companies are lining up, with Asian consumer markets getting hungrier. New highways are also extending into sensitive forest areas in Guyana, Venezuela, and Ecuador, further threatening the once-lost regions with new neighbors, new possibilities, water privatization, electrification, “industrial” ecotourists and the end of a way-of-life.

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1. map of highway