“A victory for life.” That was the triumphal message from Indigenous campaigners in the Brazilian Amazon this week after they staved off a threat to the Tapajós River by occupying a grain terminal operated by Cargill, the biggest privately owned company in the United States.
“The river won, the forest won, the memory of our ancestors won,” said the campaigners in Santarém when it was clear their actions had forced the Brazilian government into a U-turn on plans to privatise one of the world’s most beautiful waterways and expand its role as a soy canal.
What was arguably most impressive about this historic win was the apparently mismatched nature of the contest: on one side were about 1,000 local river defenders, mostly from the Munduruku, Arapiun and Apiaká peoples, and on the other were some of the most powerful forces of global capitalism and climate breakdown.
It has been barely a month since the US military launched an attack across the border in Venezuela, its first overt strike on an Amazon nation. That was carried out with the clear intention of securing resources – in that case, primarily oil – and to impose US business dominance in the region.
Undaunted, the activists in Santarém took on one of the US powerhouses of world trade. Cargill generates revenues of more than $160bn (£119bn) a year, employs 155,000 people and accounts for more than 70% of the soy and maize shipped through Santarém.
Last week the Indigenous campaigners intercepted and boarded a grain barge heading into the port. This week they launched a waterborne invasion of the Cargill terminal itself, which they occupied for several days, disrupting business at the US company.
This interrupted one of the focal points of the global food trade because the Cargill facility in Santarém is a primary hub between the nation with the biggest farms – Brazil – and the country with the most numerous dining tables – China, which is the destination for most of the soy.
The Brazilian national and local governments, supported by foreign finance and multinational traders, want to widen this route from pitchfork to mouth by building railways, roads and a “hydrovia” (river-turned-megacanal). The hydrovia, in particular, is seen as a linchpin of national development.
When I first wrote about this a decade ago, the Santarém mayor told me of plans to industrialise the Tapajós region and double the population of his city, while the former ambassador to China boasted of the economic gains that would flow to Brazil from opening up “the biggest food frontier in the world”. Cargill would be one of the beneficiaries.
The protesters fired an arrow in the spokes of that plan this week by forcing the government to revoke a decree to privatise federal projects on three rivers – the Tapajós, Madeira and Tocantins. That move, which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced last August, put dredging and other traffic management operations on those waterways up for auction. This heightened concerns about an acceleration of plans to turn the Tapajós, which already handles about 41m tons of cargo each year, into a bigger and more destructive hydrovia.
The government argued that river shipping was more efficient, less polluting and better for the climate than road traffic. But the Federation of Indigenous Peoples of Pará insisted risks for local life should come before profits for outsiders.
“The transformation of Amazonian rivers into routes for economic exploitation directly threatens Indigenous territories, traditional ways of life, food security, biodiversity and the environmental balance of the entire region,” the federation said.
Until 10 years ago, the Tapajós was famed for its crystalline waters. Now it is polluted with arsenic used by illegal miners and diesel spills from the growing number of soy barges. Communities are still recovering from the worst drought in memory during the last El Niño. Many crops died and river levels declined so severely that navigation became impossible and people could not use their boats to buy supplies or seek medical attention.
When I visited last December, Munduruku leaders at the Jamaraqu village told me the privatisation of the Tapajós would make matters worse because it was being done for agribusiness rather than for the forest and its people.
The Munduruku and their allies have been at the forefront of campaigns to protect the Tapajós from the encroaching threats of soy, cattle, illegal mining and huge hydroengineering projects. It was one of their most renowned campaigners, Alessandra Korap Munduruku, who led the blockade of the entrance of Cop30 in Belém for several hours last year, until she was given the chance to raise her concerns about the hydrovia and Tapajós privatisation with the president of the summit.
The global political, economic and environmental significance of these victories must not be overlooked. Weak environmental governance affects us all. Though still largely unmeasured, it is what scientists call a positive feedback of the climate system: the worse businesses treat forests, rivers and oceans, the more the basis for our economic and physical wellbeing is degraded. The more degraded they become, the greater the lengths companies have to go to influence politics to weaken regulations so they can continue to make money from ever greater destruction.
By protecting their own rivers, forests and land, Indigenous and other forest defenders are doing all of us a service. The Amazon regulates our planet’s climate by absorbing carbon dioxide, cooling the wider region and ensuring the regularity of monsoons. One new study has revealed that rainfall alone generated by rainforest is worth $20bn a year in terms of agricultural irrigation, urban drinking water and sanitation.
These vitally important global assets are being run down by extractive industries, but most of the damage that farming, mining and construction businesses do to nature, people and economies rarely appears on any national or corporate balance sheets. The only real accountability comes through the actions of local campaigners.
Amid scientific warnings that the loss of the Amazon is “perilously close to the point of no return”, we all owe a debt to Alessandra Korap Munduruku and others who stood up against Brazilian agribusiness, US corporate interests and Chinese and European buyers. With the war far from over, there will be many other opportunities to show support.
