"Fast track to disaster? Brazil’s Grain Train plan raises fears for Amazon", 07 October 2021

...To the assembled members of Brazil’s agribusiness elite – among them several of the president’s most militant supporters – the “Ferrogrão” (Grain Train) is a long-held dream: an almost 1,000km railway that, if built, will link Brazil’s soya-growing heartlands with the northern ports that send their beans east to Asia...

To opponents, however, the R$25.2bn ($4.6bn/£3.4bn) project is a nightmare: yet another nail in the coffin of the world’s largest tropical rainforest and the indigenous populations who lived there long before Brazil was “discovered” by the Portuguese in 1500.

Alessandra Korap, a representative of the Munduruku people, whose ancestral lands lie near the railway’s final stop...[:]...“The only people standing in the way of this program of death are the indigenous"...

The assembly in Brasília was organised by the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) coalition, which claims the Grain Train will cause an “environmental and humanitarian catastrophe” comparable to the construction of the Trans-Amazonian highway in the 1970s and the more recent Belo Monte megadam...

In recent weeks Grain Train advocates have launched a charm offensive, designed partly to convince indigenous elders not to obstruct construction. In late August politicians and government officials gathered in Novo Progresso, a town on the train’s planned route, to trumpet the bonanza they claimed it would bring. For two days delegates raved about the railway’s supposed benefits to Amazon towns and indigenous villages alike...

Others, however, voiced nervousness over the railway, whose construction was temporarily suspended earlier this year by a supreme court judge because of fears of deforestation, which has soared under Bolsonaro...