The line of trucks and four-wheel-drive pickups threw up clouds of red dust as it snaked up the hill on the wide dirt road. From the top, Brazilian rain forest stretched out into the distance. Before it, a vast quadrangle was being carved out of the slope by an army of machines, a scar of red earth in the green hills.
S11D, as this project is unceremoniously known, is an open-cast iron ore mine being dug out of this corner of the Brazilian Amazon, in the state of Para. Brazil’s mining giant, Vale, says the mine was designed for minimum environmental impact and maximum profitability. It is to start operating next year and by 2018 will be producing nearly 100 million tons annually of some of the purest iron ore in the world — a lifeblood for Brazil’s pallid economy.
But environmentalists argue that S11D could destroy rare savannah ecosystems found in two lakes on top of rich iron ore deposits. Dozens of caves that potentially contained evidence of ancient Amazon habitations have been lost. This grandiose $17 billion project is emblematic of a very contemporary, Brazilian dilemma: Can the country develop its rich natural resources without causing irreparable damage to its environment and history?
“I totally disagree when someone says it is not possible to develop while maintaining preservation and sustainability,” said Jamil Sebe, Vale’s director of ferrous projects for the north of Brazil, who is in charge of the mine. Sebe said he had been working a quarter of his 44 years on the project, which employed innovative mining and engineering techniques imported from Canada and Australia to reduce impact and costs.
“This is the year to put it all together,” he said.
S11D is just 30 miles south of the world’s biggest iron ore mine, also run by Vale in the same Carajas National Forest. The company’s activities here, which include copper, manganese and gold, take up 3 percent of the 1,591 square miles of this national park, as rich in nature as it is in minerals.
“Vale wants to mine everything. It will depend on the Brazilian government environmental organs to protect this area,” said Frederico Martins, an environmental analyst at the government’s Chico Mendes Conservation and Biodiversity Institute and manager of the Carajas National Forest. “There is a lot of iron ore there.”
Source: The Washington Post
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