By Fernanda Wenzel
“It would be like shooting oneself in the foot, followed by irreversible environmental impacts.”
This is what environmentalists and researchers have to say about the proposed construction of a waterway on the Paraguay River, the main water source for Brazil’s Pantanal. The project, which would include deepening the riverbed to accommodate the interests of agribusiness and mining, is being implemented gradually and has gained momentum under the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Shared by Brazil (91.6%), Bolivia (6.6%) and Paraguay (1.8%), the Pantanal is the planet’s largest freshwater wetland and is a Natural World Heritage Site. The Pantanal’s alternating rainy and dry seasons make this biome a natural cradle for biodiversity. It is home to thousands of bird, plant and fish species and is also home to traditional communities whose lives are adapted to the comings and goings of the floods.
The weight of the impacts implied by construction of the Paraguay-Parana Waterway led the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) to publish a resolution asking that the project not move forward. According to the ATBC, which declares itself the world’s largest scientific organization dedicated to tropical ecosystems, many studies have already described “in a clear and unequivocal manner the environmental and social damages that can be expected from this project.”
The works would take place along the North Fork of the Paraguay River, a stretch comprising some 700 kilometers (435 miles) of water flowing between the municipalities of Cáceres, Mato Grosso and Corumbá in Mato Grosso do Sul. Today, this part of the river is used by small boats that carry fishing tourists, but the windy and narrow riverbed makes it impossible for navigating larger, heavier boats.
The situation has been frustrating for business owners for decades, as they see the route as the perfect solution for cutting ore and grain export costs.
In their view, shipments should be carried downstream to the maritime ports in the La Plata River Basin in Argentina and Uruguay. These ports would also be entryways for pesticide, fertilizer and fuel imports.
The Paraguay-Parana Waterway would stretch more than 3,400 kilometers (2,113 miles) between Cáceres, Mato Grosso, and Nueva Palmira in Uruguay. It would be a transport route for grains and ores produced in Brazil’s Central-West and exported from ports in the La Plata River Basin on the Atlantic coast. The main works would be focused on the Paraguay River’s North Fork between Cáceres and Corumbá (in the north on the map), where the river is curvier and the Pantanal is better preserved. Image courtesy of UFPR/ITT.
The private sector is proposing a solution involving the removal of thousands of cubic meters of sediment from the bottom of the river to open space for large convoys of barges up to 120 meters (394 feet) long and 1.8 m (5.9 ft) deep. The river may need to be straightened on some stretches, meaning the curves would be removed, resulting in a straight — and shorter — route to the southern ports.
Some of the areas that would be affected by the project are the Taiamã Ecological Station, home to the most dense population of jaguars in the world, Guirá State Park, which is a refuge for wildlife during the flood season, Mato Grosso Pantanal National Park, a Ramsar site (a wetland classified to be of international importance) and Natural World Heritage Site, aside from many private reserves and the Guató Indigenous Territory.
“This stretch [of the river] needs to be well-protected,” says Débora Calheiros, an Embrapa researcher assigned to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (MPF) in Mato Grosso do Sul. Alcides Faria, biologist and director of ECOA, a Mato Grosso do Sul-based NGO, explains that the national park and the Taiamã Ecological Station are the most unpopulated parts of the Pantanal. “These two regions are unique to the planet. The amount of visible fauna is impressive. It is a living celebration of life itself.”
Environmentalists warn that the impacts will not be restricted to the North Fork because this region is crucial in controlling the volume of water throughout the entire biome. According to the ATBC, the dredging “would result in a smaller floodplain and a shorter flood season, compromising the integrity of the ecosystem, of its highly adapted fauna and flora and of the traditional strategies for utilization of the resources by local human populations.”
The explanation is simple: The water, which under normal conditions spreads out across hundreds of kilometers during the flood season, would be concentrated in the artificially sunken riverbed. There, it would flow out of the Pantanal more quickly rather than flooding over the plains.
“The Pantanal is like a sponge. It absorbs a lot of water and drains slowly because it is a floodplain. This is why the water remains in the system for a longer time,” explains Calheiros, who believes the project would be an ecological disaster. “In order for the Pantanal to work, for it to sustain its abundance of birds and fish, there must be water in the system.”
The waterway would impact the reproduction of fish that serve as food for many animals native to the Pantanal, including the jaguar. Image courtesy of Leandro Cagiano/Greenpeace.
Shooting oneself in the foot
Accelerating the water flow by dredging, together with severe droughts and climate changes, could become a problem for navigation itself. A MapBiomas study compared flood levels in the Pantanal, concluding that the flood areas inside the biome shrank by 29% between 1988 and 2018.
The fear is that a phenomenon seen in the 1960s could be repeating itself, when the Pantanal underwent a drought that dragged on for several years. “Then how will they navigate? Will they just dredge the river deeper?” asks Calheiros. She is one of 42 authors of an article published at the end of 2023 in Science of the Total Environment, warning that reduced flow rates could lead to “an interruption in navigability” and make dredging an “unending task” with hefty maintenance costs.
Low water levels made navigation impossible for long periods between 2019 and 2021, even on the stretches that had already been dredged on the Paraguay River between Corumbá and Paraguay’s capital city, Asunción. “This shows that, despite significant financial and technical investment, real success of a navigation project is dubious, while enormous environmental, cultural and social impacts are foreseeable,” the researchers affirm.
Deepening the bed of the Paraguay River by dredging would cause its water to flow out of the Pantanal more quickly, causing the flood plain to dry out and making navigation difficult. Image courtesy of Markus Mauthe/Greenpeace.
A smaller flood plain would also leave larger areas of the Pantanal vulnerable to the spread of monoculture farming (including soybean and sugar cane) and of wildfires, accelerating the destruction that is already underway. In 2020, extensive fires affected nearly a third of the biome, a land area the size of Switzerland, killing nearly 17 million animals. In 2023, new wildfires burned on 1 million hectares (nearly 2.5 million acres) during the month of November, a time of year when wildfires don’t normally break out.
“I had never seen a situation like this in the dozens of years I have been working and doing research in the Pantanal — deforestation is accelerating on the one side, and on the other, we have the visible impacts of climate changes,” says Faria. “The situation is so strange that we had wildfires in November, and now water levels are very low, even in the rainy season.”
According to the environmental journalism website ((o))eco, a land area equal to the size of Rio de Janeiro was deforested in the Pantanal between 2019 and 2022, mostly giving way to cattle raising and, more recently, soybean monoculture. Meanwhile, on the high plains of Mato Grosso, agribusiness is spreading across regions that hold the headwaters of the rivers that spill into the Pantanal.
“You’re already messing with the sources of the water, at the start of the whole system. Then you dredge the river so more water leaves the system. You are draining the system. With less water, you have less fish production, which is what sustains the local economy and the biodiversity,” warns Calheiros.
Aside from its importance to local populations, the Pantanal is also key in helping control global warming because wetlands are important for carbon storage. The scientists and environmentalists at ABTC are suggesting investment in other means of cargo transport such as improvements to already existing railways.
Project already underway
The first attempt at implementing the waterway was made in the 1990s when ships too large for the narrow river began scraping against its banks during the scramble to transport growing commodities production. A partnership between Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina, the initiative was abandoned due to the high environmental costs.
But in 2000, many ports began to attain licenses to operate along the Paraguay River as part of a strategy to make the waterway happen. “Projects were created along different stretches of the river without exposing the connection that existed between them to the public. The environmental licensing would be carried out locally, intervention by intervention, and requested from the State environmental agencies in Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, not at IBAMA,” wrote Faria in a report published by ECOA in 2014.
The Pantanal has been losing water in recent years, leaving the biome more vulnerable to wildfires and the spread of agribusiness. Image courtesy of Joédson Alves/Agência Brasil.
The strategy, blocked at the time by the Mato Grosso State Prosecutor’s Office, has come back into use in recent years. In Cáceres, Mato Grosso, the ports of Paratubal and Barranco Vermelho are now being licensed. And the Cáceres Fluvial Port, deactivated in 2012, came “back onstream” in 2020, thanks to a partnership between the Mato Grosso Mining Company and the Pro-Paraguay River Waterway Association, an organization formed by rural producers whose leaders include State Congressman Vanderlei Reck Junior of the Social Democratic Party.
“Who is most pushing this situation forward are the politicians in Mato Grosso — especially the ones from Cáceres — and the soybean producers,” explains Calheiros.
The State Prosecutor’s Office did manage to issue an injunction suspending the licensing and determining that the licenses must be issued by IBAMA, Brazil’s federal environmental regulating agency, rather than state environmental agencies. The MPF also argued that the ports’ impacts could not be analyzed individually without also analyzing construction of the waterway, because without it, there would be no reason to build the terminals in the first place.
“There isn’t the slightest judicial logic in SEMA-MT [the Mato Grosso State Secretariat of the Environment] licensing a port terminal or port that cannot legally make use of industrial-scale navigation on the waterway, for which there exists neither environmental licensing from IBAMA nor an integrated environmental evaluation by IBAMA. After all, anchored ships neither import nor export,” was the MPF’s declaration in court.
However, the injunction was overturned by a decision by TRF1 (the Regional Federal Court) in April, 2021, allowing the construction of ports to continue. According to ((o))eco, terminals in Mato Grosso do Sul are also receiving hefty private investment, including ports in Porto Murtinho, Ladário and Gregório Curvo.
In 2023, the Lula administration included dredging of the North Fork in its New Growth Acceleration Program, the Novo PAC. When questioned by Mongabay, the Ministry of Ports and Airports said the approvals are for dredging and maintenance, which are carried out every year, and not the more extensive dredging necessary for barges to pass. According to that office, the contract for these works began in 2023 and includes annual dredging until 2028.
In March, 2023 an audit carried out by the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU) of this same contract revealed that the document includes maintenance dredging, but that it also leaves an open door for more extensive dredging. According to the TCU’s audit, “as the term of the contract is for 5 years, shipping could begin within this period.”
Banner image: Aerial view of the northern Pantanal, where the Paraguay-Parana Waterway construction project is located. Image courtesy of Markus Mauthe/Greenpeace.
This story was reported by Mongabay’s Brazil team and first published here on our Brazil site on Mar. 15, 2024.
This article was originally published on Mongabay
