Transamazon Highway Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The Transamazon Highway was constructed as an east-west road corridor across the Brazilian Amazon during the 1970s. This was one of several interregional road projects promoted by Brazil’s then military government as a means of impelling frontier expansion. The military not only sought to relieve agrarian tensions in other parts of Brazil by opening land to landless populations, but also to secure remote portions of the national territory against perceived geopolitical threats by other countries.

Highway construction comprised one component of an integrated model of colonization, which the government implemented by selecting colonists, surveying and demarcating agricultural lots, and otherwise supporting frontier land settlement. The state land agency, INCRA, oversaw design and construction of the road network, which formed a “fishbone” pattern with feeder roads running perpendicular to the Transamazon itself. Colonist families settled along the highway corridor, first in the east, and increasingly toward the west, during the early 1970s. Integral to land settlement was the clearing of upland primary (old-growth) forest, which was not only necessary for colonists to establish land claims but also to plant food crops to feed their families.

In the early 1980s, the legitimacy of the military declined with Brazil’s worsening economic situation, forcing the withdrawal of state support for colonization along the Transamazon. This left colonists on their own in very precarious circumstances.

However, in the mid-1980s, prices rose for two key perennial crops, cocoa and black pepper, and colonists who were producing these commodities earned rising incomes. This stimulated a second wave of inmigration to the Transamazon corridor, expanding the population as well as forest clearing for agricultural land use.

In the late 1980s, as Brazil underwent democratization, municipal governments and social movement organizations emerged to support colonists along the Transamazon. Soon after, cocoa and pepper prices declined, as did crop production due to pests, leading again to difficulties. However, this circumstance did not halt deforestation, as colonists shifted their land use, this time to pasture for cattle, which requires much larger clearings than do crops. The availability of new credit lines for small-scale farms, including for colonists along the Transamazon, meant that many colonists had a new source of funds to expand pasture for cattle ranching, something that has continued into the new millennium.

Beginning in the late 1990s, fiscal decentralization in Brazil’s government system provided greater funds and responsibilities to municipalities. This intensified local politics over roads as a means of ensuring access by rural populations to urban services and markets. Road building by local groups along the Transamazon has encouraged continued deforestation and forest fragmentation, even in indigenous reserves. The paving of the Transamazon highway west to the town of Altamira, in anticipation of construction of the Belo Monte dam on the Xingu river there, is bringing new changes to the Transamazon corridor. Capitalized interests are increasingly arriving in the area, speculating in land and timber and seeking to expel colonists. The onset of land conflicts between speculators and colonists led to the murder of Sister Dorothy Stang in February 2005, which has again called attention to the link between environmental damage and human rights abuses previously seen elsewhere in the Brazilian Amazon.

Bibliography:

John O. Browder and Brian J. Godfrey, Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon (Columbia University Press, 1997);
Douglas Ian Stewart, After the Trees: Living on the Transamazon Highway (University of Texas Press, 1994).