Brazil frees some stranded truckers on soy highway

Brazil's highway police has allowed some grain trucks backed up 80 kilometers on Brazil’s northern soybean export highway to begin traveling again, but other segments of the road remain blocked after getting washed out by heavy rains over a week ago.

Drivers of mostly soybean trucks burned tires across the BR-163 Monday in protest of the lack of progress of resolving the issue over the past week.

Some vehicles have been stranded eight days since several points of the highway were closed following days of heavy rain that turned the unpaved road into impassable mud.

National Highway Infrastructure Director Luiz Antonio Garcia said his department, DNIT, began work on Sunday to reopen the road to traffic after the rain abated temporarily.

Brazil’s Army is helping to distribute food to around 1,900 stranded truckers in the region and it will be involved in rebuilding a 20 km of more than 100 km of still unpaved stretches of BR-163.

Despite the apparent chaos, the number of truckers stranded on the road is still less than half those caught out by rain a year ago on the same steep segment of the road.

The state of Para through which BR-163 cuts is in the peak of its rainy season and local meteorologists expect more showers this week.

The highway is the main corridor between Brazil’s important northern center-west soybean belt and grain export terminals on rivers in the lower Amazon basin.

The northern export terminal in Barcarenas moved a record 4.46 million mt of soybeans in 2017 and Santerem another 1.87 million mt, amounting to nearly 10% of Brazil’s total 2017 soybean exports.

DNIT’s Garcia expects BR163 to be fully paved only in 2019.

The unpaved section of the road is in the Moraes Almeida mountain range that drops from the high center-west savanna and the lower Amazon River Basin.

Only about 10%, or 100 km of the road remains unpaved.