Behind a narrow border of trees, a crop duster sprays clouds of agrochemicals onto the vast soy fields stretching out on both sides of the BR-319 highway that cuts deep into Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.
As the road’s asphalt wears thin further north, timber trucks zig-zag to avoid the many potholes along the key transport artery, which spans 885 km (550 miles) and has come to symbolise the tension between infrastructure projects and environmental protection in the world’s largest rainforest.
Linking Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, and Porto Velho, Rondônia’s state capital, the road has lost most of its paving since it was built in the 1970s - meaning many sections are reduced to a muddy quagmire during the six-month wet season.
Now, as a series of droughts linked to climate change complicate river transport in the region, President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva’s government has vowed to repave the BR-319.
Amazon researchers fear repairing the road could trigger a surge in deforestation in Amazonas state, home to most of Brazil’s best-preserved rainforest, potentially threatening Lula’s progress on stemming forest loss to fight climate change.
But calls for rebuilding the road are growing louder.
During a record drought last year, farmers and residents had to rely on the BR-319 as the normally busy Amazon waterways sank to their lowest levels, making it almost impossible for shipping to navigate them.
Back in 2013, maintenance work resumed on the dirt portion of the road that runs through the district of Realidade, in Humaitá municipality, dramatically reducing the time it takes to reach the main city, and beyond. Paving work has not yet begun.
Humaitá mayor Dedei Lobo is happy - he expects an even harsher drought from May this year, so the road will be needed, especially as rivers are still below average levels.
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Paving the road … also has effects on deforestation, which may elevate the risk of droughts.
Carlos Souza Jr, associate researcher, Imazon environmental institute
Asked about environmental concerns over the road repairs, Lobo dismissed them as “a fad launched by NGOs financed by First World countries that have trains, subways, trams etc” while treating Amazon residents as “living in an altar”.
Environmental reserves already established around the BR-319 should halt deforestation, as long as the federal government reactivates abandoned enforcement checkpoints, he added.
But the Transdisciplinary Network of the Amazon (RETA), a collection of grassroots environmental groups from the area around the road, has said the work carried out on the BR-319 near Realidade is already driving up land prices.
This is fuelling land-grabbing and deforestation, said Dionéia Ferreira, a RETA coordinator.
Environmentalists also fear that highway development leads loggers, farmers and land-grabbers to extend unauthorised side roads deeper into the forest in a pattern known as “fish bones” because of how the side roads look from space.
According to a 2023 analysis from the BR-319 Observatory, 5,092 km (3,100 miles) of illegal side roads have been built along the highway.
Vicious circle?
When he returned to power in 2023, Lula vowed to protect the Amazon but he also accepted a key demand of Brazil’s powerful farming lobby and many locals by promising to pave the BR-319 - at an estimated cost of some 2 billion reais (US$385 million).
In December, the lower house of Congress approved a bill to relax environmental rules so that the BR-319 could be paved.
The draft law, which still needs Senate approval, authorises the use of conservation funds donated to Brazil to finance the project, such as the US$1.3 billion Amazon Fund backed by the US and European allies.
The government plans to pave the road’s 406-km (250-mile) middle section by 2027, and in late April it launched a bidding process to pave a 20-km (12-mile) northern segment of the road, which has already obtained environmental licences.
Some analysts fear expanding roads in the fragile Amazon region could exacerbate the very problems that created the need for more land-based transport connections in the first place.
“Paving the road … also has effects on deforestation, which may elevate the risk of droughts,” said Carlos Souza Jr. from the Imazon environmental institute.
Road density in the Amazon increased 51 per cent between 2012 and 2020, with roads now disturbing 55 per cent of the forest’s area, according to a study from the Amazon Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information Network (RAISG), a transnational consortium of Amazon environmental organisations.
