BR-163 (Cuiaba-Santarem Highway)

node · earth · Mato Grosso and Para

A north-south federal highway running from Mato Grosso to the Tapajos port of Miritituba and on to Santarem on the Amazon, opened in the 1970s and paved in stages over the following decades. Its completion changed the economics of the entire southern basin: it gave Mato Grosso soy a northern route to the Atlantic instead of a two-thousand-kilometre haul to the southern ports, and it converted a barge terminal on the Tapajos into one of Brazil's major grain export corridors. The road is the clearest case in the basin of the general rule that clearance follows access. Deforestation along it advanced in a characteristic fishbone pattern - side roads perpendicular to the trunk, then clearance perpendicular to those - and the pattern intensified with each stage of paving, because paving turns a seasonal track into a year-round one and therefore turns speculative land into productive land.