Nearly 100 major industrial river ports have been built on the Brazilian Amazon’s major rivers over the past two decades. Many of the projects have been internationally financed and built by commodities companies with little government oversight.These ports have transformed the region, opening it to agribusiness and the export of commodities, especially soy, to China and the rest of the world. However, this boom in port infrastructure often came at the expense of the environment and traditional riverine communities.Today, more than 40 additional major river ports are planned in the Amazon biome on the Tapajós, Tocantins, Madeira and other rivers, projects again being pursued largely without taking cumulative socioenvironmental impacts into account.“What resources do these soy men bring to our city?” asked Manoel Munduruku, an Indigenous leader. “They only bring destruction.” Alessandra Korap, a leader of the Munduruku people. Image by Sarita Reed / Diálogo Chino. This story was co-produced and co-published by Mongabay and Diálogo Chino. Alessandra Korap wanted to be heard. But she’d been invited to the August 2020 court hearing only as an observer, sitting for hours in forced silence, even though she was serving as the sole representative of the Indigenous people whose lands, lives and future would be impacted by a proposed Amazon Basin river port. Only lawyers and government officials were invited to speak at the online hearing conducted in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, as Judge Sandra Maria Correia da Silva weighed whether to lift a suspension on a permit for the port, put in place because the project still lacked a prior consultation with the Munduruku, Korap’s people. For almost a decade, the Munduruku had been unsuccessfully fighting the rapid transformation of the city of Itaituba in Brazil’s Pará state into a key global commodities supply chain hub, and the conversion of their beloved Tapajós River into an industrial waterway — a nexus for the transport of soy and corn out of the heart of the Brazilian Amazon and on to China, the European Union and elsewhere. Since 2013, the community had seen multiple industrial river ports constructed by transnational agribusiness commodity-trading giants, arising on a river that for centuries had been plied only by small boats and Munduruku canoes. However, never during the building boom had the Indigenous group been formally consulted about commodity industry plans, which prosecutors saw as a clear violation of the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169, an agreement to which Brazil is a signatory. The new ports had rapidly turned the city, already plagued by major illegal gold mining and logging operations, into a congested destination for commodity-loaded trucks that often clogged the BR-163 highway in kilometers-long traffic jams. Arriving in Itaituba, that cargo was transferred to enormous barges for the downriver journey to ships bound mostly for China. The incoming throng of truckers attracted prostitution and the illegal drug trade, while the barges impacted the river fishery, impoverishing traditional fishers. After lawyers friendly to the Munduruku’s cause intervened, Korap was finally allowed to speak. She told the court how the proposed Rio Tapajós Logística port had been preceded by others, how it would likely prompt the construction of a major Amazon railway, and maybe even new dams to make a larger stretch of the Tapajós navigable. The current decision, she emphasized, didn’t just concern one project, but rather a multipronged development plan to change the river and region beyond recognition. “We know these projects are connected to each other,” she told the judge. “These companies that are arriving are killing us, suffocating our culture.” A fish market shares space on the riverfront with a Cargill soy terminal in Santarem, Brazil, where the Tapajós and Amazon rivers meet in the Brazilian Amazon. Image by Thais Borges/Mongabay From afar, Flávio Acatauassú, who heads Amport, the association representing most companies operating Amazon river ports, was also watching the case unfold. Like Korap, he felt the case had larger implications than just the approval of one port. He contended that a port-friendly outcome in the case was vital not only to all companies with plans to operate along the Tapajós River, but as a precedent assuring the viability of future commodities transport logistics investments across the Amazon Basin. Today, the Amazon’s roughly 100 private industrial river ports are an essential and integral part of the fastest-growing infrastructure corridors in Brazil — moving commodities cheaply and quickly from the nation’s interior to the Atlantic coast for export, Acatauassú explained. Northern river ports, moving cargo via the Amazon River and its tributaries, have more than doubled their market share in the last decade. In the first half of 2020 alone, almost 20% of the country’s soy and corn flowed along the Amazon Basin’s major rivers. Some 40 planned private projects, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, are now at stake, with many slated to be built in sensitive environments — places like Marajó Island, a delta locale near the mouths of the Amazon and Tocantins rivers, and the biodiversity-rich Maicá Lake. If the consent of traditional peoples was required for all these projects, then “all the investments in the Amazon Basin would die,” Acatauassú asserted. Still, he was confident that stakeholders would find a way forward. In terms of logistics, he said, Brazilian agribusiness “had nowhere else to run to.”