Giant Chinese Port In Coastal Peru Has The Capacity To Destroy Most Of What Remains Of The Amazon Basin

Chancay sits at a curve along the ocean, about 50 miles north of Lima. Until recently, it was best known for its medieval-themed amusement park, a crescent of beach and a row of seaside restaurants. Now it’s home to South America’s newest, most technologically advanced deepwater megaport and the epicenter of China’s bid to control the flow of goods to and from this commodity-rich continent. For Peru, the recent opening of the port here was the realization, nearly two decades in the making, of a dream to position itself as South America’s global transportation hub, the continent’s primary launching point for a straight shot across the Pacific to Asia’s biggest economies.

For China, the port delivers a strategically direct route for the critical minerals and agricultural commodities coming off the continent, and in the other direction, a more expedient channel for its cars, machinery and electronics to stream into South American markets. The port represents Peru’s first project under the banner of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s $1.3 trillion bid to remake how the world travels and trades, and collectively speaking, the most ambitious infrastructure project in history. It is China’s flagship infrastructure investment in South America—and a crucial node in Beijing’s global strategy for securing access to critical commodities.

It also brings China logistically closer to one of its chief goals: direct access to neighboring Brazil and the massive amounts of timber, soy and beef produced in the Amazon rainforest. Now, in theory, these commodities no longer have to travel through the politically fraught Panama Canal or around the continent’s southern tip. The new megaport, the only one in South America that can manage the largest class of fully loaded container ships, cuts the transport time by 10 days or more.

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But environmental scientists and forestry experts warn that the economic pull of the port will speed the destruction of the Amazon, the planet’s most critical, climate-stabilizing terrestrial ecosystem. The port and its faster link to massive Asian economies, they warn, will deepen and expand an extractive network of roads, railways and waterways that have already eaten into the rainforest, a web of arteries carrying oil, gold, timber, beef and soy to markets around the world. The pressure could push the rainforest over the edge, transforming it from the world’s largest terrestrial carbon sink into a massive emitter of planet-warming gases. Some research suggests the forest is already at or near this potentially catastrophic tipping point. “China wants everything in the Amazon,” said Julia Urrunaga, director of Peru programs for the Environmental Investigation Agency, an international nonprofit that investigates environmental crimes. “And in one way or another, all these routes are connected to the port.”

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01122025/china-port-in-peru-impact-on-amazon-rainforest/