por
Life drains away from towns built on destruction of the Amazon rainforest
The clampdown on illegal loggers in Brazil has brought a dramatic decline for local residents
Tom Phillips in Castelo dos Sonhos
Norris's cover was disappearing by the second. Photograph: Alberto Cesar/Greenpeace/AP
Inside, leaning against the bar's garish pink wooden walls, its 41-year-old madame puffed her cheeks. "The city's finished," said Marina Ketts, an immigrant from the southern state of Paraná. "The thing that brought money to Castelo was wood. Now that's all gone."
During the timber boom, Ms Ketts said, the bar made up to R$2,500 (£615) a week in alcohol sales alone. Now it struggles to bring in R$100. "It used to be one big whorehouse around here. Today, as you can see, there is nothing."
The tale of Castelo dos Sonhos's economic decline is the downside of the Brazilian government's success in trying to protect the world's largest rainforest. Until recently, when authorities began clamping down on illegal deforestation in the region, the town was at the centre of a timber boom as lucrative as it was illicit. But the introduction of the national deforestation combat plan in March 2004 brought the industry almost to a halt, leaving thousands of immigrant workers unemployed across the region.
Widespread praise
Few question the effects on the region's ecology. When President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced recently that deforestation in the Amazon rainforest had fallen to its lowest levels since 1991 even the government's fiercest critics were united in their praise. "We are trying to repair, in a short period of time, the carelessness that existed for so long," Lula said, pointing to a 30% drop in deforestation since last year.
Illegal logging has not been completely eradicated. When night falls on Castelo dos Sonhos's potholed streets lorries laden with wood emerge from what is left of the surrounding forest and head on to the BR-163 highway, a dirt road cut through the Amazon rainforest in the 1970s by the military dictatorship. But it is on a much reduced scale - most of the 30-odd sawmills in Castelo dos Sonhos have stopped production. With no alternative economy and little support from the authorities, such communities are falling apart.
Nine miles to the north, down another dirt track off the BR-163, is Nova Brasilia, a community of landless peasants who scratch a living from a patch of land clawed from a wealthy owner. Ask them to explain the region's sudden decline and they respond: "Dorothy Stang". Stang was an American nun, known to some as the Angel of the Rainforest, shot dead on February 12 2005 because of her fight against illegal loggers.
Stang's death is seen as a watershed by many people. Spurred on by the massive international reaction to the murder, authorities stepped up the fight against Amazon destruction.
On February 18, six days after the killing, Lula's government ordered the creation of two vast conservation areas in Para and declared a freeze on logging in an area of 8m hectares around the BR-163, including Castelo dos Sonhos. Almost all of Nova Brasilia's inhabitants were employed by the loggers and with the new regulations they lost their jobs.
"The death of Dorothy was a disaster for us," said Eugenio Sibulski, 46, an immigrant from Rio Grande do Sul in the south of Brazil, who worked with his son Maicon, 18, in a sawmill in nearby Mil, earning around R$450 a month, and was sacked after the crackdown. In search of work he moved his family to Castelo dos Sonhos, to no avail.
Unable to pay their monthly rent of R$120, the family squatted on the side of the BR-163 before moving to Nova Brasilia, where they eke out an existence from a barren patch of cleared forest, flanked by field after field of charred tree stumps.
"All of the sawmills shut because suddenly there was monitoring," said Mr Sibulski, who lost his means of supporting two children and a grandchild virtually overnight.
Immigrants who had benefited from the logging also suddenly found themselves out of pocket. "If they hadn't killed Dorothy maybe we'd still have a piece of land. But the economy has all gone," said Joao Zemnichaq, 58, a lorry driver who says he spent R$12,600 on land near Anapu, where Stang was killed, only to have it confiscated by the government.
Isolation
The knock-on effects were not unforeseen by Brazilian authorities. In March 2005, as the ban extinguished much of the logging around Castelo dos Sonhos, such concerns were outlined in a white paper promoting plans to pave the BR-163 as a means of bringing development to an isolated and notoriously lawless part of Brazil. The paper outlined the urgent need for "social inclusion", in particular job creation, healthcare, education and social services.
Yet in Castelo dos Sonhos and its surrounding area there is little sign of such aid - not for the landless peasants or their children who are almost all out of school, not for the elderly men who eke out a perilous existence in the area's goldmines, and least of all for the luckless prostitutes, who act out the same dismal spectacle each night.
Immigrants continue to arrive looking for work. Some don't stick around, while others find themselves forced into slavery on the region's farms, earning as little as R$10 a day, or prostituting themselves for a similar price. With seven police, one understaffed health clinic and two state schools, Castelo dos Sonhos, a once wealthy town of 12,000, has been brought to its knees.
With 2am approaching, the Charlooe bar was still without a single customer. "If these people who won the elections paid a little bit of attention, Castelo wouldn't be this misery you are seeing," said Ms Ketts. "I came here because of the fame this place had. I thought this would be a city of dreams. Now just look around you. There is nothing here."
Why do I do it?
So you want to have an adventure? He's been shot at in Colombia, marooned in the Amazon, and he nearly froze to death in Alaska. But Benedict Allen wouldn't have it any other way. What drives modern explorers?
I get around ... map reading with camels in Namibia
It's on occasions like this that the question "Why do I do this?" acquires a certain immediacy. Like the time in the Gobi desert when my rebellious camel decided it had had enough and set off for home without me. Or in Colombia when I was shot at by hitmen working for the drug baron Pablo Escobar; or when I was abandoned by my guides in the Amazon - picking up all my supplies, they'd crossed over the log bridge we had constructed, and, before I could join them, kicked it away.
So why do explorers do what they do? Some merely want to be famous, or make their mark, to be remembered in the same way that famous sportsmen are remembered; others are scientists or specialists searching for answers in a remote place; and some, like me, are just driven to have adventures. Is it a sort of madness?
I have never fully understood why I risk my life trekking through the Amazon, or walking across the Gobi. It may sound like a cliche, but I long to be out in the middle of nowhere, confronting nature. It's addictive. The feeling you get after succeeding against countless obstacles is so wonderful that you want to move on to the next challenge.
My own theory is that it's something that, deep down, we are all programmed to do - and would do, given the right encouragement. After all, many of us back home are struggling in our daily lives - trying to hold down a job, meet deadlines or encouraging the kids to do their homework. We are all explorers - surely it's why our human ancestors spread out from Africa.
That said, people like me might still seem like over-indulged adrenaline junkies who don't deserve to be taken seriously. After all, in the age of digital 3D animation and Planet Earth DVD box sets, when information whizzes and whirls round the world at the click of a mouse, who needs to go off and risk his life? Surely, in this modern, hi-tech world, explorers are an anachronism?
Well, for a start, it's a myth that exploration belongs in the past: to some golden age when bearded Victorian gentlemen stalked the earth in pith helmets, or an earlier, even more heroic time, when man sailed the oceans wondering if he was going to fall off the edge of the world.
It's true that the land surface of our planet has been comprehensively mapped - by satellite if not from the ground. It's undeniable that the great romantic journeys have all been done - we can't hop on a camel and expect to discover a new valley or people - but the modern explorer's role is more subtle: to push back the barriers of the known by revisiting distant or inhospitable places and peoples about which we have hazy or wrong ideas.
This is my personal focus. When Livingstone explored Africa, much of the continent was well understood (although uncharted) by Africans, and well known to the Arabs. What he was doing was bringing an interpretation of it back to Victorian Britain, and the wider scientific world. In a similar but less dramatic way, we must keep interpreting these remote "exotic" lands for our current age.
We have more time, more opportunity, more money than our forefathers had 100 years ago when exploration was the preserve of a few specialists. These days travel is much more democratic. Anyone, with enough money, can jump on a plane and disappear into Africa. But the key remains pushing those frontiers of knowledge - and, crucially, reporting back your findings. Otherwise, you remain simply a tourist.
Of course, the way we interact with the rest of the world has changed immeasurably. For a start, "we" no longer own half of it. Yet most travel today continues to be self-indulgent and, while there's nothing wrong with a bit of fun, if you want to achieve something meaningful - for yourself and others - then maybe you should think about becoming a bit of an explorer yourself. I think we all have to acknowledge the world is not a playground - as we become more and more aware of our carbon footprint, we will have to start, whether we like it or not, to justify our journeys.
For me, journeying to remote places is about learning to live in a hostile environment from its indigenous residents. Travel is about shedding our preconceptions and trying to see the world from new perspectives. In other words, the business of exploration today is about two things: science, but also about our own mental landscape - charting our ideas, our hopes and fears. That's why I try not to take a GPS, and certainly not a satellite phone. These things connect me back to home, the place I'm trying to leave. Gadgets prevent you from becoming exposed to the place you're in - from making yourself vulnerable. Exploration to me is about that - not making your mark on a place, but allowing that place to make its mark on you.
One of my heroes is Captain James Cook, who was a navigator of genius, but also wonderfully able to see the indigenous people simply as people. He was good at not judging, a real man of the Enlightenment. When he came across a Maori warrior, he gave him a hug, and rubbed his nose with his in the traditional greeting.
My personal justification for intruding is that I'm recording worlds that are fast disappearing. Increasingly, I get satisfaction out of making the journey for others, not just for myself. And really that's the only justification for a life of travel; it would be self-indulgent indeed to devote a life to following your own dreams, and no use to the world if you didn't share what you'd discovered. Writing, and television, has been my justification - the only reason why I can call myself an explorer, as opposed to an adventurer, is because I'm reporting back to a wider audience.
If we need a sense of purpose, then equally we need to believe in our ability to fulfil it. All the great adventurers - Livingstone, Burton, Stanley, Pizarro - understood this; they didn't think for a moment they weren't going to return.
Unlike other species, we have an ability and desire to do extraordinary things, which stems from our being able to believe in different outcomes. By the same token, without our dreams, we can accomplish nothing.
I think this helps to explain what possesses people to go off to places like the Bering Strait - in my case, in an attempt to reach Alaska alone, without a satellite phone or back-up. To some people, it might seem pointless - lunatic, even - and, it has to be said, I don't think us explorers are quite as noble as we might like to think. We are, in truth, a needy lot - with demons, with cravings for fame.
But whatever personal motives might push us to seek out these great world stages on which to perform our deeds, ultimately I think we are behaving much like all humans - engaged in a struggle for survival.
Out in the Bering Strait, when I did at last find myself reunited with my dog team after a long, freezing night, I headed straight back to the safety of the mainland. And the two days it took me to get back through the pack ice were two of the best days of my life. I was cold, I was exhausted, my fingers ached with frostbite, but the world around me had never looked so good. I had been tested, and I had pulled through.
· Benedict Allen's latest book Into The Abyss: Explorers on the Edge of Survival is published by Faber and Faber at £17.99.
So you want to have an adventure?
When this thought first invaded my head 15 years ago, I bought a motorbike, headed south at Clapham Junction and didn't turn north again until Cape Town.
Ten years of travelling left me with many amazing memories. However, it also left me broke and unemployable. With little to lose, I created my dream job by setting up a company that takes others - without the time, knowledge or desire to throw away their careers - on adventures to fascinating places.
In October 1998, I formed Wild Frontiers Adventure Travel (wildfrontiers.co.uk ) and guided my first trip to the Kalash, a tribe that inhabits the far reaches of the Hindu Kush, where I had lived for three months. This year, we will take over 500 clients to 25 countries.
So who comes on these trips - alpha males? Occasionally, but more often than not it is ordinary people, frequently young women, looking for something different. Take Susie, a thirtysomething publisher who had never been out of Europe. Since first travelling with us to Pakistan in 1999, Susie has trekked in Ladakh, travelled the Silk Road and visited Kashmir. Next year, she's off to Mongolia.
Of course, guiding these trips is different from travelling on my own. But any shortfall I may feel by relinquishing the freedoms of independent travel is easily compensated by the vicarious pleasure I derive from helping open people's eyes to the world around them, and to some extent the world they have inside. These may not be Benedict Allen-style adventures, but for most they're as close as you'll ever need to get.
por Jonny Bealby
Martin Strel, the Amazon swimmer
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday March 29 2007
Amazon swimmer Martin Strel was mistakenly reported below as saying that he was swimming the length of the Amazon river from Peru's Atlantic coast. Peru has no Atlantic coast but the river empties into the Atlantic after flowing through Brazil.
What are you doing right now?
On February 1, I started swimming the length of the Amazon from Atlaya on Peru's Atlantic coast. I swim for about 10 hours a day and by the time I finish I will have completed 5,430km. I'm doing it to raise awareness of the need to preserve the Amazon rainforest because it produces more than 20% of the world's oxygen.
It's a risky venture, and to make it a success I have a big team accompanying me. I see fishermen pull in things that are swimming all around me and some of it is pretty frightening but the main problems are debris, such as logs, and sunburn. This week we'll be coming up to Rio Negro where the currents will be strong enough to overturn the boat. That may prove to be the biggest challenge yet.
Where would you rather be?
In two weeks time I'll finish my swim in Belém in Brazil. Nearby is a place called Santarém where I plan to celebrate.
What would you do there?
Mainly I plan to just lie down, relax with my team (who have become wonderful friends), have a drink and a barbecue and examine the experience we all shared.
What's so special about it?
The floating market sells local produce and is always fun to explore and the town has wonderful access to the jungle where you can see animals.
One of the primary reasons to visit Santarém is to see the "Wedding of the Waters" - a phenomenon that occurs when the Rio Tapajos joins the Amazon and the two run side by side for miles before blending together.
Who will you take with you?
My whole team plus other friends and family who will fly in to meet us.
Where will you stay?
In a hotel organised with my team. All I ask is that is has a comfy bed.
What's the one place you'd like to see before you die?
The north pole. I can't be away from water for long and to experience an environment almost entirely created from it would be incredible.
amazonswim.com
So, we've scaled every mountain and swum every river ...
This weekend, a 52-year-old Slovenian called Martin Strel splashed wearily into the history books when he became the first person to swim the entire 3,000-mile length of the Amazon, having braved crocodiles, piranhas and toothpick fish. Epic boredom too, presumably - which is perhaps why he has announced that he doesn't intend to swim the Nile. "It's long but not challenging enough. It is just a small creek." He has not yet announced how exactly he might top his most recent achievement - if, in fact, he can.The trouble is that increasingly, in this well tramped-over, technologically advanced world, everything is a small creek; even crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat single-handed is child's play, only notable, in fact, if it is child's play - as when 14-year-old Michael Perham did it, three months ago. It would be easy to say that we have run out of places to conquer, and that all we can do is tinker with the permutations - climb poor battered Everest blind, no-legged, at 70 years of age, as fast as possible - but that isn't quite the whole story. No one's touched the true north pole, residing as it does below metres and metres of ice. There are undisturbed cave systems; the Salween river, which flows through Tibet, China and Burma, is a third of the length of the Nile but yet to be fully charted. There are whole (disputed) lists of unconquered mountains - but who, except the most nerdy of mountaineers, wants to know that you've breathed the air atop P 7308? (It's in Tibet, in case you wondered.) There is no point, particularly if you want to make a living at it, or earn money for charity, doing something that doesn't capture the imagination of those of us who stay at home.
But exploration doesn't have to be all about physical endurance and stuntsmanship. The vast expanses of the ocean floor are less well mapped than the moon, but may hold surprising answers about global warming, say, or about disappearing species. A month ago a British ship, the RRS James Cook, set off across the Atlantic to examine a hole in the earth's crust, where hundreds of square miles of the mantle are exposed in defiance of accepted theories of plate tectonics. One feels that puzzling out what happened there will be a tad more constructive than 65 days dodging dentally over-endowed fish.
From rainforest to Bush
Jean-Michel Cousteau on his return to the Amazon and how he's using the family name to help save the world.
The Guardian, Saturday 7 April 2007
Article history
Jean-Michel Cousteau, the son of Jacques Cousteau. Photograph: Manuel Lazcano/AP
Twenty-five years ago, Jacques Cousteau took his son with him while filming one of his classic Amazon series. Now, Jean-Michel Cousteau has made what he calls "a symbolic connection with Dad," by spending four months exploring the river and rainforest for a new documentary, Return to the Amazon.
Journeying from Iquitos in Peru to Manaus in Brazil, Cousteau says he saw with his own eyes the changes man has brought to the richest ecosystem on the planet. Most evidently, the population has increased by 10-15 million people, most of them incomers who are responsible for the illegal logging.
"I don't blame poor people for trying to feed their families," Cousteau says in his measured Franco-Californian accent, "but in the Amazon you really see how humans are changing the natural world in a disastrous way."
Jean-Michel is a zealous environmentalist, but he believes in the power of persuasion rather than in scare-mongering or political bullying. "People in the Amazon aren't any less clever than we are," he says. "If you make it worth their while to save the rainforest, they'll do it. But let's show people how much it's worth!"
Making films is just one of Jean-Michel's activities as president of Ocean Futures (oceanfutures.org), a non-profit foundation he runs from Santa Barbara in California. His mission, as he sees it, is to spread the word that the environmental problems of the Earth are not going to be met by individual nations. "National borders are irrelevant in today's world," he says emphatically. Brazil can't protect the Amazon on its own; the wealthier nations have to pay for it and help with expertise."
He also questions whether NGOs like Greenpeace or the WWF have the right approach: "These organisations do important work, but we don't see the concrete results too often. They don't get their message out to the mainstream enough.
Cousteau, like many other activists, believes that the environment can only be saved when it is seen to have a financial value. He uses his family name whenever he can to get access to decision makers. Last year, he was invited to the White House to have dinner with President Bush and screen a documentary he'd made about the remote northern Hawaiian islands. "Bush was amazed: he had no idea that the so-called marine park was being used for illegal fishing. Four months later, he invoked special presidential powers to declare the area the world's largest marine sanctuary - far bigger than the Great Barrier Reef."
Cousteau concedes that Bush isn't best known for his environmental awareness, calling the President's time in office "six years of lost time for the environment." But he adds that if George Bush can be so radically affected by a documentary there is real hope for other parts of the world. Tourism, he argues, has a crucial role to play in saving the Amazon, but he acknowledges that it hasn't worked as well as it might. He singles out eco lodges in the Mamiraua reserve as role models, but says Amazon tourism doesn't have the broad appeal of say, southern Africa.
The Amazon is only part of the general conservation crisis, but Cousteau believes human beings can solve the problems they've created. "We're a young species - only three million years old. Unlike other species we have this magnificent tool - our brains. But we tend to only use them fully when we are up against the odds."
The long road to ruin for the Amazon forest
$350m plan to pave 600 miles of Brazilian track exacerbates the conflict between settlers and environmentalists
Taking a bus along the BR-163 is an adventure sport. When it is dry, the ride is an exhilarating slalom between gigantic potholes. When it is wet, the bus gets stuck in the mud and the passengers are expected to pull it out by rope.
The 1,100-mile road is the main north-south artery of the Amazon rainforest. It is also the most controversial road in Brazil, built in the 1970s to open up the jungle to colonisation - forgetting, of course, that many indigenous Indians lived there already. It has become a frontier of deforestation. Now President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has announced that one of the major projects of his second term, at a cost of $350m, will be to pave the 600 miles of the road that is still a dirt track.
Roads bring human activity, which has always meant a plundering of natural resources. Yet Lula believes he can develop the region without increasing destruction. The stakes are high, since the area of influence of the BR-163 is a quarter of the Brazilian Amazon. 'The problem in the past is that the government has not had presence in the area,' says Muriel Saragossi, the government's co-ordinator for the Amazon region. 'We now have an integrated vision.' The 'Sustainable BR-163 Plan' involves 20 ministries and is Brazil's most ambitious attempt ever to reconcile growth and conservation.
The road stretches from Cuiaba, near the Bolivian border, to Santarem on the banks of the Amazon. On the first 450-mile paved section the rainforest has been transformed into rolling fields as far as the eye can see. The main crop is soya. Soya - half of it exported to the EU - is the economic force behind the road project. If the BR-163 is paved to Santarem, with its deep water port, farmers could export soya along it. 'This will cut the road journey to the market by 600 miles as well as a similar distance by sea,' says farmer Nelson Piccoli in Sorriso. Piccoli, like other farmers, resents the suggestion that soya is responsible for razing the Amazon: 'We did not destroy this region. We transformed this region from native vegetation to agricultural production. What you are seeing here is how we are supporting humanity. You cannot survive without eating food.'
As I travelled along the BR-163 I was surprised by how much the environmental message seemed to have got through to the timber industry. In Sinop, a lumber town, a building was emblazoned with the words Green Party. Paulo Fiuza, the local Green leader, is a former logger. 'Just because you work in the timber industry it doesn't mean you can't be an environmentalist,' he says. If they carry on destroying the way they have been, he said, they will destroy the land that has brought them wealth.
For almost two-thirds of its length the BR-163, however, is a track. Even though the road is barely passable for several months of the year, settlers came here in their tens of thousands. Here much less of the rainforest is destroyed - but the social problems are much worse. It is not just because buses get stuck in mud; it is that the region is lawless. 'We are completely abandoned here,' says small farmer Irineu Matthes, in Castelo dos Sonhos, a town of about 6,000. 'The government is not present at all. Here we are at the hands of fate.' A week after I left, two local people were assassinated.
Most murders are over land. The government encouraged settlers, but only gave a small minority title. Those who were the most violent kept the largest plots. The largest town on the unpaved section is Novo Progresso (pop. 40,000). The cattle herd here has boomed from 50,000 a decade ago to a million.
'No one put a sign at the beginning of the BR-163 when we came here saying that it was forbidden to destroy the rainforest,' argues Rancher Jose dos Santos. 'Why do we have to pay such a high price because the rest of Brazil - and certainly England - has already destroyed its forests? We just want a little space where we can live and work with diginity.'
For the lorry drivers of the BR-163, the paving will make their lives easier, but at a high cost. 'You used to see tapirs, capybaras - even jaguars - by the side of the road. Now you hardly see anything,' says lorry driver Gustavo Hering. 'When the paving comes, you'll be able to get everything out - and you will finish off the forest completely.
· Alex Bellos's film on the BR-163 will be broadcast tomorrow on Newsnight, BBC2, 10.30pm
The 1,100-mile road is the main north-south artery of the Amazon rainforest. It is also the most controversial road in Brazil, built in the 1970s to open up the jungle to colonisation - forgetting, of course, that many indigenous Indians lived there already. It has become a frontier of deforestation. Now President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has announced that one of the major projects of his second term, at a cost of $350m, will be to pave the 600 miles of the road that is still a dirt track.
Roads bring human activity, which has always meant a plundering of natural resources. Yet Lula believes he can develop the region without increasing destruction. The stakes are high, since the area of influence of the BR-163 is a quarter of the Brazilian Amazon. 'The problem in the past is that the government has not had presence in the area,' says Muriel Saragossi, the government's co-ordinator for the Amazon region. 'We now have an integrated vision.' The 'Sustainable BR-163 Plan' involves 20 ministries and is Brazil's most ambitious attempt ever to reconcile growth and conservation.
The road stretches from Cuiaba, near the Bolivian border, to Santarem on the banks of the Amazon. On the first 450-mile paved section the rainforest has been transformed into rolling fields as far as the eye can see. The main crop is soya. Soya - half of it exported to the EU - is the economic force behind the road project. If the BR-163 is paved to Santarem, with its deep water port, farmers could export soya along it. 'This will cut the road journey to the market by 600 miles as well as a similar distance by sea,' says farmer Nelson Piccoli in Sorriso. Piccoli, like other farmers, resents the suggestion that soya is responsible for razing the Amazon: 'We did not destroy this region. We transformed this region from native vegetation to agricultural production. What you are seeing here is how we are supporting humanity. You cannot survive without eating food.'
As I travelled along the BR-163 I was surprised by how much the environmental message seemed to have got through to the timber industry. In Sinop, a lumber town, a building was emblazoned with the words Green Party. Paulo Fiuza, the local Green leader, is a former logger. 'Just because you work in the timber industry it doesn't mean you can't be an environmentalist,' he says. If they carry on destroying the way they have been, he said, they will destroy the land that has brought them wealth.
For almost two-thirds of its length the BR-163, however, is a track. Even though the road is barely passable for several months of the year, settlers came here in their tens of thousands. Here much less of the rainforest is destroyed - but the social problems are much worse. It is not just because buses get stuck in mud; it is that the region is lawless. 'We are completely abandoned here,' says small farmer Irineu Matthes, in Castelo dos Sonhos, a town of about 6,000. 'The government is not present at all. Here we are at the hands of fate.' A week after I left, two local people were assassinated.
Most murders are over land. The government encouraged settlers, but only gave a small minority title. Those who were the most violent kept the largest plots. The largest town on the unpaved section is Novo Progresso (pop. 40,000). The cattle herd here has boomed from 50,000 a decade ago to a million.
'No one put a sign at the beginning of the BR-163 when we came here saying that it was forbidden to destroy the rainforest,' argues Rancher Jose dos Santos. 'Why do we have to pay such a high price because the rest of Brazil - and certainly England - has already destroyed its forests? We just want a little space where we can live and work with diginity.'
For the lorry drivers of the BR-163, the paving will make their lives easier, but at a high cost. 'You used to see tapirs, capybaras - even jaguars - by the side of the road. Now you hardly see anything,' says lorry driver Gustavo Hering. 'When the paving comes, you'll be able to get everything out - and you will finish off the forest completely.
· Alex Bellos's film on the BR-163 will be broadcast tomorrow on Newsnight, BBC2, 10.30pm
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