Bulldozers tear open a gash of red soil, which runs like a trail of blood through the jungle of Ucayali. Heavy construction machinery is hauling in, spreading and compacting sand and gravel dredged from nearby rivers. This is the foundation for a new road into the Amazon rainforest – a gateway for loggers and the palm oil industry.
While the equipment was provided by local authorities, no permit was ever issued for the road’s construction, notes Kene, a Peruvian environmental NGO.
While giant trees still reach for the sky along the edge of the clearing, this marks the beginning of the end for the rainforest: loggers will soon be using the road to take out precious tropical timber while illegal settlers, land speculators and palm oil companies crowd in and grab land.
Workers, machines, oil palm seedlings, fertilizers and pesticides will be trucked into the previously inaccessible rainforest. The route connects two huge clearings for oil palm plantations being realized for foreign investors, as the Peruvian media and studies by environmental organizations have documented.
Satellite imagery shows that at least 12,000 hectares of rainforest have been cleared and planted with oil palms since 2011.
The world’s most biodiverse ecosystem is being destroyed for a bleak palm oil monoculture. Violent land conflicts are a further consequence: six smallholders were murdered in early September 2017.
According to the indigenous Shipibo people of the Santa Clara de Ushunya community, the new road threatens more than 100,000 hectares of old-growth forest that they have preserved with their traditional way of life.