Authorities shut down an important deep water Amazon River soy export port owned by US grain company Cargill Inc, saying the huge agribusiness firm failed to provide an environmental impact statement required by law.
The move by Brazilian federal police and environmental agents closing Cargill's controversial terminal on Saturday was a major victory for environmentalists in Santarem, a sleepy jungle city about 2,000km northwest of Sao Paulo. It came after a ruling late on Friday by Judge Souza Prudente, according to police and the Agencia Estado news service.
Minnesota-based Cargill had prepared an environmental assessment that did not meet Brazilian federal standards, federal police agent Cesar Dessimoni said.
PHOTO: AP
"They'll have to do it correctly, as the law demands," he said by telephone from Santarem.
Environmentalists who blame soy farming, logging and cattle ranching as the primary threats facing the Amazon praised the closure, calling it a milestone in attempts to push the government to more effectively police a region where lawlessness often prevails.
"This is an important day for the Amazon rainforest and for its people," Paulo Adario, Greenpeace Amazon Campaign Coordinator in Brazil, said in a statement. "A big step forward has been taken in enforcing the responsible use of natural resources and bringing greater governance in the Amazon."
Cargill, which has operated in Brazil since 1965, said on Saturday that it plans to appeal the ruling and that it had submitted an environmental impact statement that was accepted by the Amazon state of Para, where Santarem is located.
"We find ourselves caught in a jurisdictional dispute between the state and federal government about which regulations have precedence," Cargill spokeswoman Lori Johnson said. "When we built the facility the permits were issued by the state ... The permitting agency was the port and the state of Para. We did an environmental assessment and all of the assessments required by the permitting authorities."
"Since that time the federal prosecutor has said we should have done another kind of environmental assessment and that is the issue before the courts," she said.
No ships were being loaded or waiting to load when the port was closed, Johnson said.
Cargill opened the US$20 million port in Santarem three years ago to cash in on the rising global demand for soybeans, Brazil's richest agricultural export.
The company became a target for activists who called the port illegal and tried to shut it down. But the port also has strong support from many in Santarem, who see it as a way to ease grinding poverty.
The rain forest, as big as Western Europe, lost 16,700km2 to deforestation between 2005 and last year, a decrease of 11 percent from the year before, according to Brazil's Environment Ministry.
Johnson said industry leaders launched a moratorium last July banning the purchase of soybeans from Amazon land deforested after last July, essentially removing any incentive to cut down trees to plant soybeans.
The impact of soy production on the Amazon is significantly less than "logging or cattle ranching as a source of deforestation, she said.
Environmentalists say deforestation has slowed largely because the price of soybeans has declined on the international market and Brazil's currency has strengthened against the US dollar, making it less profitable for now to cut down the rain forest to plant grain.
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