- Dredging and rock-blasting ever-drier rivers for new channels in Brazil might not achieve agribusiness’s goal of cheaper, year-round transport, experts warned, suggesting existing railways as price-comparable and more climate-resilient.
- Though waterway transport is promoted as lowering emissions, in fact proposed new shipping channels on the Tocantins and Madeira rivers increase carbon emissions and deforestation, experts told Mongabay.
- New shipping channel plans used old water data, stopping in 2017 for the Tocantins channel, and didn’t do climate risk projections or climate impact studies. Experts urge these studies must be done, or risk tens of billions of investments in rock-blasting and dredging river beds, leaving “ruins” and “abandoned projects.”
- An August lawsuit by federal prosecutors charges that licensing of rock-blasting and dredging in a 500-km stretch of the Tocantins River in Brazil is an illegal “trick” to circumvent legally required full environmental review of the whole Araguaia-Tocantins channel, for which an economic-technical feasibility study was never done. In March 2022, Ibama’s licensing director determined it was “unviable.”
Brazil is poised to invest tens of billions reais to build more than 2,000 km (1,240 miles) of new shipping channels in shrinking rivers – a dramatic, costly, damaging channelization of Amazon waterways, which experts say will result in conversion of traditional peoples’ lands to carbon-intensive agriculture.
In October 2022, the outgoing Bolsonaro presidency issued a preliminary license attesting to the supposed socio-environmental viability of a first 500-km piece of a long-dreamed-of Araguaia-Tocantins channel in the eastern Amazon, potentially 2,000-3,000 km (1,240-1,860 miles) long.
In August, federal prosecutors sued to declare void the flawed Bolsonaro-era license and stop Ibama, the licensing branch, from issuing the installation license. They charged multiple illegalities in the preliminary license, “The license never proved socio-environmental viability,” federal prosecutor Sadi Flores Machado told Mongabay.
Issued with 27 “pending” studies missing, without which it was impossible to evaluate viability, the Araguaia-Tocantins channel license should never have been awarded, constituting Ibama’s “abrogation of institutional mission,” prosecutors charge.
“The number [of missing studies] at that phase is high,” former Ibama director Suely Araújo told Mongabay. “You can have pending issues in the preliminary license, but not structural ones that are significant enough to alter the project’s environmental feasibility.”
Because of those long-missing studies, in March 2022 Ibama’s then-licensing director Jônatas Souza da Trindade (Araújo’s former student) signed a document declaring the channel “socio-environmentally unviable.”
Months later, after the Economy Ministry’s intervention, Trindade reversed himself, giving no technical justification, and issued a preliminary license while suppressing his earlier findings.
“That is irregular,” Araújo says. “You can change your mind, but you have to have the courage to give your reasons, and you can’t make your initial position in the official process disappear.”
The license illegally excludes thousands of traditional peoples who live and rely on that Tocantins River stretch for fishing and navigation, summarily labeling them, without evidence, as “not directly impacted” in order to cut costs, and it “gravely underestimates damages,” says prosecutor Machado. Trindade refused to require measurement of a year of fishers’ catch, a fundamental scientific “baseline,” according to Machado. Without it, the consequences are “serious,” as it’s impossible to measure future damages to fishers’ income and food security.
That’s necessary for compensation according to the polluter-payer principle of environmental law, which means the National Department of Transport Infrastructure (DNIT) has to pay for any damages it creates. DNIT claims they’re not responsible for channel operations’ damages.
Nilton Lopes de Melo of Tauiry Village told Mongabay that DNIT’s plan to “give a minimum salary [US$ 230] for 30 months” of the river detonations is utterly inadequate. “Poisoned drinking water, and fish poisoned by dynamite, which no-one will want to eat,” will last long after explosions end, leaving them without their primary income. They demand compensation per family and accuse DNIT of “violating their rights as traditional river peoples.”
The channel’s licensing “is the Brazilian state creating poverty and climate refugees,” the prosecutor Machado says. Those damages and costs will be borne not just by Brazilian taxpayers but, due to increased emissions from channel-incentivized deforestation, “will be borne by the global community.”
Yet, Ibama is close to allowing the installation license for 3 years of Tocantins River explosions to begin in 2025.
“According to the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, any license issued will be illegal,” the prosecutors messaged Mongabay. “The lawsuit was filed with the Federal Court on August 16, 2024, and has been awaiting a judicial decision since then.”
Transport Ministry is illegally trying to license only a piece of the Araguaia-Tocantins channel proposal in order to circumvent full review of its socio-environmental viability in all planned stretches, violating a 2009 ruling, prosecutors charge.
That 500-km stretch is a Trojan horse, opening the door to a potentially 2,000-3,000 km Araguaia–Tocantins channel, requiring construction of several megadams, and neither evaluating the “synergetic” impacts on communities and ecosystems in Maranhão, Tocantins, and Goiás states, nor consulting them, Machado says.
“When you intentionally cut a project in pieces to make licensing easier, that is fraud,” Araújo says. “That fragmentation is illegal.”
“It’s the old practice of completing a megaproject through the execution of parts of its works, so that the entire project becomes irreversible later,” wrote senator Jorge Kajuru.
In the 500-km stretch between Marabá and Barcarena, DNIT uses a “trick” to “artificially reduce costs. Their premise is that they’re not licensing the operation of the shipping channel, they are only licensing the dredging and rock-blasting work,” explains Machado. DNIT only considers “impacted” a 212-km stretch, for traditional riverfolk within 3 km, and for Indigenous and quilombolas within 10 km of “interventions.” These limits, “without technical or legal basis, violate ILO 169,” international and national law, as well as Ibama’s institutional mission to first analyze for impacts, not discard communities beforehand.
“The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office’s position is that all traditional river communities who use the Tocantins River for fishing and navigation are impacted, from Marabá to Barcarena,” says Machado.
Costly channel transport adds carbon emissions
Trying to forge new channels for the illusion of cheaper waterway transport of agricultural commodities for export, is a “poor cost-benefit proposition” for Brazilian society, as waterway transport costs rise due to dropping rivers, experts told Mongabay. “Unlike with hydroelectric energy, there is no provision to share benefits or profits with society,” says Machado.
MapBiomas’ Souza wrote to Mongabay: “The project reflects a vision of development that disregards environmental damage and privatizes scarce natural resources for the profit of a few, without proper consultation with affected communities. There is a lack of adequate monitoring of future impacts, raising the question of who will truly benefit from this undertaking: the Brazilian people or the interests of large agribusiness producers and mining companies, suggesting a development model that does not prioritize the common good.”
Transport Ministry claims channels are “the most sustainable transport,” “will reduce emissions, and take cars off the road.” Experts debunk those claims as greenwashing. Climate Observatory director Araújo cautions that in determining sustainability: “You can’t look just at emissions but all environmental impacts,” recalling that Belo Monte Dam promised massive sustainable energy production, but delivered much less, causing knock-on deforestation that made it a top carbon–emitting region.
Nearby roads and railroads won’t close, so a Tocantins channel will add emissions, not subtract them. “For DNIT’s argument to make any sense, it would assume that the shipping channel operation will render the highways no longer used for transporting grains,” says Machado.
“But the shipping channel will not replace the highways [and North-South Railway] for grain transportation,” says Machado. The agencies’ goal is to increase transportation capacity. So, existing emissions from the use of fuel on highways will be added to the emissions from the shipping channel operations.”
In fact, inland waterway transport causes more carbon emissions than railway transport, according to a 2018 European study. (Brazil’s transportation ministries frequently cite two tables, promoting waterways’ efficiency, from 2009 and 2015; Marengo says studies on the topic “have to be redone” with current water data.) Since then, higher waterway emissions have risen further along with fuel use and costs per ton/km on the Mississippi River, as the U.S. Soy Transportation Coalition’s Executive Director Mike Steenhoek told us. In 2024, the third year of severe Midwestern U.S. drought, despite dredging, waterway costs and carbon emissions per ton of grain shipped are higher, as barges must lighten loads and reduce the barges per convoy. October waterway transport costs were 55% higher than the 5-year average. Transported grain amounts fell.
“Every foot of reduced water depth or draft is the equivalent of loading 7,000 fewer bushels of soybeans per barge,” Steenhoek says. So they send more convoys to move the same amount, reducing efficiency, “leading to logjams and bottlenecks” with “boats idling for days” and longer journeys criss-crossing for a sufficiently-deep channel. Results: more fuel and emissions. “Farmers are forced to absorb higher waterway transport costs.” So producers get “lower soy prices and profits” while grain exporters Cargill, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus profit. (Farmers’ use and investment in more climate-reliable railways rose.)
That casts doubt on Brazilian agribusiness’ dream of cheaper transport by turning the Tocantins River into their own Mississippi River.
New channels’ carbon emissions also increase with Brazilian grains’ deforestation occurring due to land-use change, which will accelerate throughout the Araguaia-Tocantins basin, warns Carlos Souza. The director of MapBiomas Água told Mongabay a new channel, aimed at “expanding agribusiness production, increases deforestation. If there’s going to be significant agricultural expansion in this region, it could affect the communities already living there, who have different land-use practices [that keep most forest standing]. This could lead to replacing small-scale agriculture with industrial farming.”
Prosecutor Machado concurs: “The grains being transported, such as soybeans, have been scientifically proven to have climate-related effects due to their production. Therefore, what is happening here is the licensing of a project that will be a causal source of greenhouse gas emissions.”
Deforestation along the Tocantins corridor has expanded since 2021 in anticipation of the channel, converting forests into agribusiness, increasing carbon emissions.
“Communities are being expelled from their territories due to real estate speculation along the riverbanks as a direct consequence of this project [since] the action of the channel will tend to increase these areas’ value,” says Machado, creating “territorial pressures on these peoples, who are being forced to leave their lands.”
“This displacement is far from subtle,” says the prosecutor. “It involves threats, armed coercion and intimidation.” According to him, DNIT failed to protect them and “prevent deforestation with a mitigation plan per the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon,” charges Machado.
Asked by Mongabay about this issue, DNIT emailed: “DNIT doesn’t know anything about deforestation.”
“This is happening on the eve of COP 30, hosted in Pará state,” says the prosecutor. “It is deeply serious, contradictory, and profoundly sad, especially from the perspective of the human rights of the populations that will be impacted if this blasting and dredging proceed without proper assessment.”
Not yet constructed, the Araguaia-Tocantins channel is creating “climate environment damages (recognized by the Attorney General’s recent lawsuit),” the prosecutor says, “paid for by the Brazilian State and Brazilian taxpayers, borne by the whole global community.” DNIT failed to do “climate risk and climate impact studies,” including emissions increase calculations, disregarding Brazil’s National Climate Policy.
“So the Brazilian State, through its structurally deficient licensing processes, not addressing these predicted impacts, including climate impacts, fails to measure them properly even though [they] are provided for in the legislation, and [the State] ends up causing climate damage that will affect all of us,” concludes Machado.
Amazon and Tocantins water loss casts doubt on channel’s viability
The Araguaia-Tocantins channel plans disregard 2 years of aggravated drought in Brazil in 2023-2024, when the Amazon lost more than 5 million hectares (12,300 million acres) of surface water, says Souza. During high-water season, “Brazil’s aquifers didn’t recharge adequately. Two years of consecutive drought is sending a very strong alarm signal.”
In October, the Tocantins River was at 2 meters, according to the National Water Agency (ANA), Souza notes. “In the dry season, it [usually] stays around 3-3½ meters. With a drier Amazon, this river level will fall even further.” That would make it challenging for barges with 2.5-meter drafts, as planned by DNIT, to navigate. This suggests a far larger area would need to be dredged than just “critical points” in a 177-km (110 miles) stretch as planned. Souza says: “DNIT project proponents must include climate projections on water availability and climate adaptation and mitigation plans.”
The upper Tocantins sub-basin “lost 42,000 hectares (104,000 acres) of natural surface water since 1985,” Souza notes. The Tocantins River will be reduced by 50% as early as 2050, Rodrigo Paiva, hydrologist in the Hydraulic Research Institute of Rio Grande do Sul University, told Mongabay. “The Tocantins River will become drier with reduced flow. This would hinder a navigation project. DNIT must take this future scenario into consideration.”
The Tocantins’ biggest tributary, the Araguaia River, lost 40-67% of flow since 1980 and will lose 40% more by 2040, says University of Brasília professor Ludgero Vieira. Vieira and Souza say the Araguaia-Tocantins channel will incentivize more conversion of lands to irrigated agriculture in the upper river basin, furthering water loss, which would impede barges’ passage.
“If someone considers shipping channels in the Tocantins River or Madeira River now, they’d think it’s crazy because the Madeira River has extremely low levels, mainly due to the droughts of 2023 and 2024. It’s very risky,” José Marengo, top climatologist and hydrology specialist, told Mongabay.
Transport Ministry studies for new Madeira and Tocantins channels used old “historical” water data, Mongabay found. “This [Tocantins] project was submitted for analysis based on hydrological data up to 2017,” Ibama emailed Mongabay. “However, climate change and the environmental impacts of these alterations on the flow regime have not yet been included in the viability assessments.”
Using antiquated data exposes Brazil to the risk of not getting a return on channel investments, and “wasting public resources, which are scarce,” Luiz Fragoso, senior auditor of the Government Accountability Office (TCU) told us.
Leading experts in climatology and hydrology, Marengo, Souza and former Ibama president Suely Araújo told Mongabay the Transport Ministry must update channel study plans with water availability projections. If not, it risks “wasting billions of public funds,” as Fragoso says.
Dredging can’t guarantee sufficient water for barge passage
Accelerating evapotranspiration in Brazilian rivers, predicted by ANA, means extreme heat could evaporate channel water. “You could have some rain (even if it’s light), but with very high temperatures, evaporation is very high,” says Marengo, Director of Research and Development at the National Center for Monitoring and Alerts of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN).
“When there’s clear sky and intense sun, a lot of the river water evaporates, decreasing the river’s flow. So, applying dredging there is very costly, and no one can guarantee there will be enough water to allow boats or barges to pass, even with dredging. You can dig your river deeper, but, if there’s little water, you’ll have the same problem, getting stuck in sand. Imagine maintaining year-round commerce and transportation when water levels are unpredictable.”
“Only considering waterways with dredging seems to me like shooting yourself in the foot,” says Marengo. “Because if it doesn’t rain, dredging is useless, and it will just be money spent on an abandoned project, like so many others here in Brazil.”
An economic-technical feasibility study of the Araguaia-Tocantins channel was never completed, though it was begun, with R$ 5.18 million ($863,000) paid to a consortium including DTA Engenharia. (Asked why, DNIT mentioned “internal conversations,” without details.) The company was paid R$ 1.4 billion ($233 million) in federal channel-related contracts, and has a contract for nearly R$ 1 billion ($167 million) to blow up the 43-km-long rocky fishery, the Lourenção Rocks.
The fact that a viability study was never done for a channel on a river Brazil is clamoring to start exploding in March 2025 is “concerning and potentially wasteful of taxpayers’ money,” says Fragoso.
“It’s absurd, illegal and unethical,” Machado says. Without viability studies, channels may “create ruins” of riverbeds.
Costly, large-scale “rock-blasting and dredging is not guaranteed to work,” warns CEMADEN’s Marengo. “Railways could be a feasible solution, since they pollute less and don’t depend on water. But many Brazilian governments don’t think much about railways.”
Fragoso says Brazil should think about railways. He notes that the already-operating North-South Railway (FNS) runs parallel to the Tocantins River. So the proposed Tocantins channel and the FNS are “competing” projects, with the same objective in the same logistics corridor. In the 2035 National Logistics Plan, which the TCU audited, Fragoso says, “The Transport Ministry did no cost-benefit comparison analysis, nor an examination of alternatives.” The Ministry failed to justify why, after Brazil paid $40 billion for the North-South Railway, taxpayers should spend billions more to build a parallel, in some places overlapping, project with no viability study.
“Not only are we going to destroy nearly 500 kilometers of river,” but we’ll also spend millions annually on dredging. Why do all that? Couldn’t we find an alternative to accomplish the same logistical objective?,” asks André Ferreira of the Energy and Environment Institute. Dredging a drier Tocantins River might cost billions yearly, based on dredging contracts in southern ports.
“I would exclude the channel from this logistics corridor and use the North-South Railway,” said Ferreira. “Without this channel, Brazil won’t come to a halt.”
Communities worry the channel will halt their way of life, detonating and dredging fish reproduction sites, blocking canoes’ passage to fishing spots, eroding riverbanks, degrading vegetation, cutting flow to sidestreams, taking away their fishing, forcing them to move to cities.
“An invasion of our traditional riverfolk territory” to get license approval, say leaders
Lourenço Rocks leaders accuse DNIT of violating their rights, entering Tauiry village “without our consent,” pressuring them to sign documents to force the license’s approval. On December 12, DNIT and DTA Engenharia entered Tauiry Village, despite leaders officially refusing a meeting without federal prosecutors’ presence, leader Ernanes Soares da Silva told Mongabay. He said fisherfolk were threatened “that if they didn’t sign documents” accepting lower, limited compensation for future fishing damages, “they’d receive nothing,” so many frightened fisherfolk signed. “That must be overturned,” says Silva.
In an email to Mongabay, DNIT said they “had the Itupiranga mayor’s permission” and just “went to dialogue with fishers” in what they claimed was “a public space.”
Representing a collective of 23 riverfolk villages on the Lourenço Rocks, fisherfolk leader Ronaldo Macena Barros told Mongabay, “They are trampling over everything, disrespecting our consultation protocol,” which prohibits entering their riverfolk territory without permission, “infringing on ILO 169 and Presidential Decree 6.040,” which protects the rights of culturally distinct traditional peoples. “When it comes to large projects, we must be consulted.”
Macena described “political pressure” and intimidation tactics. The Lourenço Rocks collective refused to accept a report from a supposed Participatory Action event, because“it does not reflect our reality,” omitting some of the 23 communities. DNIT and DTA “insisted and held this [December 12] meeting without our authorization. This is an invasion of our territory without our consent.”
“I consider this disrespectful to us as riverine populations, as we are traditional communities who have occupied and lived in this region for generations,” said Macena. “We have our traditions here, our ways of life, which are completely different from the city. They are disrespecting our opinion, and they are not listening to what we have been saying.”
“What we want is free, prior, and informed consultation, seeking the consent of the traditional riverine communities of the Pedral de Lourenção Territory. But so far, they have not been respecting that.”
The MPF told Mongabay they requested reports from the Tauiry Village Association (ACREVITA), DNIT and DTA on the disputed meeting. “After reviewing those documents, the MPF will take a position.”
Leaders fear the channel installation license to explode the Lourenço Rocks could be issued without communities having received legally required consultation, and with illegalities pending in the previous license issued under Bolsonaro.
Macena says, “We are awaiting the Justice’s decision on the federal prosecutors’ lawsuit.”
Banner image: At the Tocantins River’s Lourenço Rocks, traditional riverdweller Eva Moraes, seen in November 2022 near her home, Praia Alta Village, mobilizes to stop the rocky fishery’s destruction for a 500-km shipping channel segment. It might not have enough water to work, experts say. Photo by Tiffany Higgins.
Credits
