Waterways cast aside in Brazil’s infrastructure plans

The year 2020 is deemed to be a crucial one for Brazilian infrastructure. Here at The Brazilian Report, we have covered the government’s plans for selling off a number of concessions in the highway, airport, and railway sectors, but one facet of infrastructure has been so far overlooked: the country’s internal system of waterways.

While Brazil has a domestic waterway network of 63,000 kilometers, only 31 percent of it is actually in use by transport infrastructure. Even so, the volume of cargo moved around the country by waterways grew 34.8 percent between 2010 and 2018, reaching 101.5 million tons.

Last year, however, that total dropped to just over 97 million tons, focused mainly on ores (22.6 million tons), seeds (21 million tons), and cereals (17.5 million tons).

In all, Brazil has 12 hydrographic regions, but only six are used for cargo transportation. Among this half dozen, just two—Amazônia and Tocantins-Araguaia, measuring 16,000 and 1,400 kilometers, respectively—make up 95 percent of the cargo transported.

According to the National Transport Confederation (CNT), these unused waterways have not been properly adapted to the function of cargo transport,...