by Greg Grandin
Tailândia, a fast-growing city of sixty-five thousand people located two hours south of Belém, is one such potential choke point, home to dozens of small mills and the offices of a number of large timber multinationals. Logging, legal or not, provides needed income to many in the state of Pará, and in Tailândia an estimated 70 percent of the city’s population make their living off wood. So when inspectors arrived in town in February 2008, they were met by thousands of protesters, who burned tires, erected barricades, and took a number of government officials hostage. Rio sent in reinforcements, hundreds of heavily armed police, to retake the town. They restored order, confiscating five hundred truckloads of wood valued at $1.5 million and closing down dozens of unlicensed mills. Federal agents also destroyed hundreds of illegal ovens used to make bootleg charcoal, which is shipped to southern Brazil, where it is used to fire blast furnaces that smelt pig iron. This aspect of the illegal lumber industry is particularly devastating to the Amazon’s future since these charcoal ovens burn young trees too small to be milled—the forest’s most reproductively healthy and active generation. Tailândia’s ovens alone consume tens of thousands of saplings a month.11
The charcoal industry also has horrific human consequences. In December 2006, a Bloomberg News investigation found that much Amazonian charcoal was made by starving, disease-ridden slaves. Lured to the region with promises of good-paying work, whole families were held captive in camps deep in the jungle, given polluted, parasite-ridden water to drink and miserable food to eat and forced to sleep in windowless corrugated tin shacks, unbearably hot on their own but even more so owing to their closeness to the kilns. Children were left to play in the mud, living with malaria, dying from tuberculosis and other illnesses. The Amazon is today home to an estimated twenty thousand modern slaves, “people who have absolutely no economic value except as cheap labor under the most inhumane conditions imaginable,” says Marcelo Campos, an official with the Brazilian Ministry of Labor. The charcoal is used to make pig iron, which is exported to the United States to be turned into steel for consumer products manufactured by some of the world’s biggest corporations, including the Ford Motor Company. This modern form of jungle slavery is, as Campos points out, a “key part of the globalized, export-oriented economy Brazil thrives on.”12*
By some estimates, logging is a two-billion-dollar-a-year industry in Pará, with wood going for $275 a cubic meter, or about $1,300 a tree. It’s a high-stakes business, and violence has become an elemental part of the trade. In 2005 in eastern Pará, gunmen hired by loggers killed Sister Dorothy Stang, a Maryknoll nun from the United States who had been working with local rural communities to oppose illicit logging. In early 2008, just southeast of where Stang was murdered, Emival Barbosa Machado was shot to death as he was leaving his house, probably for providing information to officials about criminal logging. A few years ago, gangs of armed loggers marauded through lands claimed by the Rio Pardo Indians, chasing them away, sacking valuable trees, and leaving desolation in their wake. Between 1971 and 2004, 772 activists working to either defend human rights or slow deforestation have been executed in Pará. Only three cases have been brought to trial.
ROADS, TOO, WHICH Ford promoted, have accelerated the devastation of the Amazon. With the announcement that the Ford Motor Company planned to establish a rubber plantation in the largely roadless jungle came much speculation in the local press that it would build major highways linking interior areas like Mato Grosso to ports and markets. Such projects never materialized, though plantation workers in both Fordlandia and Belterra laid out dozens of miles of roadbed, both to open up the estates’ hinterlands for planting and logging and to allow staff members to go on short car trips to escape boredom. But in the years since Getúlio Vargas traveled from Belterra to Manaus to give his “March to the West” speech, road construction has increased rapidly. In the 1960s, the government built a 1,200-mile highway connecting Belém to the new capital of Brasilia, and the 3,000-mile Trans-Amazonian Highway was inaugurated in 1972, with the hope of promoting migration out of the drought-plagued northeast into the less populated rain forest.
Road building in the Amazon has created what social ecologists have described as a destructive “feedback cycle.” Migrants move in and land values rise. Often, the construction of the road and the arrival of farmers, ranchers, loggers, speculators, and settlers bring disease to, and spark confrontation with, indigenous peoples. Always, the advance of roads puts sudden and rapid pressure on the local ecology. Forest is cleared, cattle are grazed, and crops are planted. Such activity fragments ecosystems—whose biological diversity depends on maintaining an extensive, uninterrupted mass of forest—into smaller and smaller sections, propelling the extinction of flora and fauna and increasing the risk of forest fires. The profits generated from the increased economic activity lead to additional road building, most of it illegal. Dirt spurs shoot off the main spine of the highway, creating a “fishbone effect” startlingly visible from the air. Meanwhile, poor settler farmers, enticed by the prospect of cheap, abundant land, quickly find that, once stripped of trees, the Amazon’s soil becomes exhausted. So they push farther into the forest. And the process begins all over again. There are currently more than a hundred thousand miles of legal and illegal roads cutting through the Amazon, each at one time promising to bring prosperity and development but most often delivering bloodshed, displacement, impoverishment, and clear-cutting.
The road that brings Mato Grosso migrants to Fordlandia, BR-163, continues northeast, eventually reaching its terminus in Santarém. For much of the way, to the left on the northwest side of the highway, stands the Tapajós National Forest, which includes a good portion of the original Fordlandia concession. It’s one of the Amazon’s first protected areas, over a million acres of relatively intact forest and home to a number of indigenous communities. It was here that, starting in 2000, Daniel Nepstad, a scientist affiliated with the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, covered 2.2 acres of land with a clear plastic tarp for five years to simulate a prolonged dry period. The results of the experiment suggested that the kind of multiyear droughts that the Amazon has witnessed of late, along with a general decrease in precipitation during the rainy season—which many identify as an effect of the deforestation—will greatly hinder the jungle’s ability to reproduce. Some trees showed a stubborn resilience, drawing water from more than forty feet in the soil. But the soil eventually dried out, and after four years the death rate of large canopy trees, those that reach up to 150 feet into the open sun, jumped from 1 percent to 9 percent. All trees demonstrated a significant slowing of growth, which means that if the drying trend continues, not only will the forest be shorter and stunted but its ability to absorb carbon, which plays an important role in cooling the earth’s temperature, will be curtailed. “This experiment provides researchers with a peek into the future of this majestic forest,” Nepstad says.13
THE FUTURE CAN be seen quite clearly on the other side of BR-163. Pushing against the road is what environmentalists call the Amazon’s “soy frontier,” open land clear-cut for pastures or plantations, dotted with tufts of trees and the occasional ramshackle hamlet. Ford spent millions of dollars trying to find new uses for soy, and his dream has been more than realized: today’s corporate agribusiness is Ford’s “chemurgy” on steroids. Soy can now be found in an array of mass-produced products, from animal feed, pet food, and baby formula to fast food and biofuels. Over the last two decades, industry scientists have gone beyond anything that Green-field Village chemists could have imagined, as genetically modified soy can be found in about 60 percent of all processed foods, most often as oil or filler. As a result, growing European, Asian, and US demand has turned Brazil into the second-largest producer of soy.14
Soy is one of the Amazon’s leading causes of deforestation. In one year alone, between August 2003 and August 2004, planters cleared over 10,000 square miles of the Amazon, roughly the size of Belgium. Most of this planting is in the
southern scrublands of the Amazon basin, in the state of Mato Grosso. But in recent years, soy has crept north to the Tapajós, and as it does, it disrupts many more lives at a much quicker pace than does logging, notwithstanding all the cruelty and coercion that accompanies that trade. Where logging displaces settlements in scattershot fashion, soy devours communities more inexorably, displacing farming and ranching families with as much disregard as it fells trees. Because the crop is cultivated on large-scale, mechanized plantations, it doesn’t provide much employment for those uprooted by its march. At the same time, the extension of monoculture squeezes out the planting of vegetables and fruits produced for local use, as land is more profitably used to grow soy than, say, papaya and so dramatically raises the price of what crops—more and more imported from outside the region—do get to market.
In 2002, the multinational agroindustry giant Cargill, hoping to induce the federal government to pave BR-163—and thereby make it easier for the company to export its Mato Grosso harvest—spent $20 million to build a granary warehouse and port in Santarém, with a protruding conveyor running to three deepwater chutes designed to fill the holds of the largest cargo ships with soybeans.* Santarém had until recently largely remained a sleepy provincial town not that different from when the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote about her “golden evening” on the Tapajós. That changed after Cargill built its terminal. Speculators and developers moved in, and the price of a hectare (2.47 acres) of land skyrocketed, from $25 in 2000 to more than $500 eight years later. Many poor farmers or ranchers were unable to resist such a payoff. Selling their land, they moved into Santarém proper, whose infrastructure was unprepared to handle the influx. This migration led not just to shanty sprawl but to a dramatic increase in the cost of basic grains, fruits, vegetables, and meat. With over three hundred square miles of surrounding farmland now used for soy, there’s much less room, and considerably less financial incentive, to grow oranges, pineapples, manioc, and greens or to graze cows and pigs.15
Henry Ford placed great hope in soybeans, projecting that the crop would provide a much needed financial lifeline to farming communities struggling to survive as industrialization pushed agricultural prices lower and lower. His promotion of soy was part of his efforts to balance farm and factory so that mechanization would not destroy community but fulfill it. But in Belterra—Ford’s last sustained effort to strike such a balance—soy has wiped off the map the dozens of small villages that had spread out from the center of the town over the last couple of decades and, along with them, the schools, churches, and family networks that are the heart of any community.
Belterra stands just off BR-163, about an hour south of Santarém, on a flat plateau perfect for mechanized soybean cultivation. In 2001, hardly any soy was grown in its boundaries. Today, tens of thousands of Belterra’s flatland hectares are planted with soy. It is expensive to cut down virgin jungle. The former president of Cargill’s Brazilian operations told me that it costs about $1,500 to clear one hectare, which means that a plantation of, say, five hundred hectares would take years to reap a profit, even considering the high price of soy. This expense is why growers like to move into land already cleared for cattle pastures and small farms (often pushing farmers and ranchers to initiate another cycle of deforestation). It is also what makes Belterra, in addition to its level soil, so attractive. Ford’s men already did most of the work.*
The soy frontier: Belterra.
Until recently, stories told about the Amazon tended to emphasize the jungle’s unconquerable enormity, its immense indifference to man’s puny ambitions, a plotline that captures well the history of Fordlandia. That has changed, of course. It’s the forest that now appears frail, as Belterra vividly demonstrates. Nearly eight decades ago, Ford’s men slipped and slid in the mud in their four-cylinder, 20-horsepower Model F tractors or 27-horsepower Model Ns—“iron mules” they were called—to prepare the land to plant rubber trees. Today, developers use Caterpillar D-9s or D-11s, or Komatsu D275s, treaded behemoths weighing as much as a hundred tons and running on up to 900 horsepower to plow down those same trees. They are outfitted with special cutting blades angled to push the felled wood to the right as the machine advances. The protruding part of the blade is spiked, letting operators stab and twist the trunks of obstinate trees. At the rear of the dozers are mounted “rippers,” multishank hydraulic plows to pull up trunks and break rocks. Once the downed trees are gathered in a pile with a backhoe, the same ground is passed over once again, this time by two tractors tethered together by a heavy chain weighed down by a rolling steel ball that yanks out root systems as it is dragged forward. Soy itself does its part in forcing the jungle to yield. Domesticated in temperate Asia, the bean is not native to Brazil, much less is it suited to the hot and humid Amazon. But advances in insecticides, pesticides, fungicides, and phosphate-heavy fertilizer, along with the creation of crossbred “tropical soy,” have allowed Amazon growers not just one crop but two a year. And Brazil has just permitted farmers to use genetically engineered seeds—a logical extension of Fordism into the cellular structure—making possible the spread of soy ever deeper into the rain forest.
Some Belterra residents tried to hold out. But they found themselves, as described in a report in National Geographic, “encircled by an encroaching wasteland, as whining chain saws and raging fires consumed the trees right up to the edge of their land. Their yards were overrun with vipers, bees, and rodents escaping the apocalypse, and when tractors began spraying the cleared fields, toxic clouds of pesticides drifted into their homes.” Their animals died. Family members became ill. João de Sousa has raised cattle for over four decades on his small ranch. His land is now an island in a sea of soy, as all of his former neighbors have sold their farms and moved out. “They never put a dyke up,” Sousa complained of the new soy planters. “Chemicals went into the brook where the cows drank.” He’s lost 88 of his 120-head cow herd as a result. “Once when I was by the field and they were spraying, I started to feel odd and I collapsed on the track.” Elsewhere, in what its former residents now describe as the “ghost village” of Gleba Pacoval, some families at first refused to sell their land. But hired gunmen set fire to their homes, driving them out. Union activists tried to organize against intimidation, only to be barraged by death threats.16
SPARED THE DESTRUCTION suffered by surrounding villages, Belterra’s town center still looks much the way it did when Archie Johnston and Curtis Pringle built it, with white-and-green Cape Cod bungalows set back from straight streets, their front yards planted with neat flower gardens. And just as Ford, buffeted by the changes that swirled around him, looked to the past for solace, Belterra’s municipal authorities, practically swallowed up by soy, have turned to history for relief. In recent years, they have tried to promote their town as a tourist attraction, putting out a brochure recounting its unique role as one of Henry Ford’s most remote outposts, whose architecture “reminds one of a small American town in the Midwest in the 1920s.” “The local people,” it reads, “still preserve the custom of having gardens around their houses,” because the “Ford Company gave prizes for the best garden.” The brochure also calls attention to the well-maintained “House Number One,” a spacious home with large rooms and a privileged view from the balcony. This “house of dreams” was “designed especially for the creator of the Project: Henry Ford.” The industrialist was all set to travel to Belterra, the guidebook says, but forty days before the planned visit Edsel died. The trip was canceled, and “locals wonder if Henry Ford had come, then perhaps he would never have abandoned Belterra.”
Back up the Tapajós at Fordlandia, removed for now from soy’s onslaught, palpable neglect blankets the town, despite its recent bustle. Contrasted with the broad, well-kept streets on display in old photographs of the place found in the Ford Archives, many of its roads are today crowded by scrub and spindly trees, their branches overhanging potholed macadam. In one photo, concrete crosses line the settlement’s cemetery in ne
at rows, with shorn hills and open skies in the background. Now the burial ground is overrun by forest and weeds, its crucifixes off-kilter. A clutch of fallen crosses, most dating from the 1930s, their inscriptions long worn off, have been gathered up and propped against a tree in the center of the graveyard. At Albert Kahn’s decrepit hospital, the floor is strewn with patient records from 1945, the year Ford turned the town over to the Brazilian government, though the building has been used as a clinic periodically over the last couple of decades.
América Lobato in front of her paintings of rubber trees and the water tower.
Some residents have tried to keep up appearances. As in Belterra, in front of many of the still inhabited bungalows, neat patches of rose bushes, tangerine and peach trees, along with Spanish plums and palm fruits, accent the town’s elegiac quality. And inevitably at some point in any conversation, residents will point out that Ford never visited Fordlandia, even though he kept promising that he would. “Fordlandia was born and died expecting a visit from its patron,” writes yet another Brazilian travel guide. Its inhabitants, the guide says, keep “one of the rooms of the best house in the American neighborhood in a permanent state of preparation.”
Given the waste, slavery, and ruination visited on much of the Amazon today their longing is understandable. Henry Ford’s vision of an Emersonian arcadia rising from the jungle canopy, though preposterous, now seems relatively benign. The dream lingers in the sights and sounds of Ford’s cidades fantasmas, ghost cities, haunting reminders of the early twentieth century’s promise of humane development. In Belterra, in the building where Henry Ford never slept, the town has recently installed a “Henry Ford” library and organized a “Henry Ford” children’s choir. And the factory whistle still blows four times a day, summoning workers who no longer live there to a plantation that has long been shuttered.17
