Dutch support soy transport mega-project, posing major risk to Amazon

Grain silos in Miritituba on the Tapajós River, where soy and other commodities from Mato Grosso state are transferred from trucks onto ships for the trip downriver to the Atlantic coast for export. The Dutch, with their history of infrastructure development, are big backers of the development of Brazil’s Northern Corridor. Image by Karlijn Kuijpers This story is the result of an investigation conducted by Platform Investico, a Dutch collective of investigative journalists. “Brazil and the Netherlands share a special history,” said Brigit Gijsbers, director of maritime affairs from the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment, at the start of a speech given in the city of Belém near the mouth of the Amazon River. “For centuries, it was shipping that connected us. Pernambuco, Bahia, Recife and Rio de Janeiro were popular ports of call on the way to the East Indies,” she added in a veiled reference to a time when the Dutch West India Company shipped slaves from Angola to Brazil to work on sugar plantations. It was September 2015, and Gijsbers was in Belém with reps from 13 Dutch companies who wanted to profit from the construction of the Northern Corridor, a mega-infrastructure transportation initiative intended to move soy and other commodities from landlocked Mato Grosso state down the Tapajós and Amazon rivers, to Atlantic ports for export. The Corridor project would require a vast, newly built network of paved roads, railroads, harbors and hydroelectric dams that would need to be hacked through the heart of the…

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