Roads open up the rainforest. They allow people who otherwise would not be able to make their way through the impenetrable forest to get into remote anpreviously inaccessible areas very easily. The roads are built for various industries, including logging, mining, oil and gas extraction, but soon they are used by others too: people, who have perhaps been displaced by farms or war and who find the roads are an easy route to new land that they can use to set up smallholdings.

The Trans Amazonian Highway in northern Brazil was built in the 1970s. It stretches some 2,000 miles across the Amazon rainforest from east to west. The Brazilian government?s plan was to create settlements in previously unused areas. They offered settlers 250 acre plots, 6 months salary and easy access to agricultural loans, but the project ended up costing $65,000 per family settled. As the forest soils were so unstable and easily eroded, the road was often impassable, while harvests failed and the fragile topsoil was washed away.

In more recent times, plans have been drawn up to improve another road through the Brazilian Amazon, the BR-163, which stretches for 1,100 miles from Cuiaba, near the Bolivian border to Santarem on the banks of the Amazon. Around 600 miles of it is still dirt track, but the Brazilian government plans to pave all of it and this is a real cause for concern for environmentalists.

The first 450 miles of the BR-163 are already properly surfaced. Either side of it, what was once untouched forest is now rolling fields. The main crop being grown is soya, half of which is exported to countries in the European Union. Much of that soya is used for cattle feed, which is worrying, as it means eating British or European meat may in some cases be indirectly damaging the rainforest. The soya crop is the main reason for paving the rest of the BR-163. Santarem has a deep water port, and a fully-paved BR163 would shorten the journey of the soya crop by 600 miles over land and by a similar distance by sea, saving on transport costs and increasing profits for the producers.

Many people follow roads into areas of rainforest already damaged by industries like logging, mining and searching for oil.! The Brazilian government used the slogan ?Land without men for men without land? to encourage landless peasants to set up farmsteads in former rainforest that had been cleared as a result of logging operations. !

Using a technique called ?slash and burn?, these small farmers clear an area of forest by cutting down the big trees and setting fire to the rest.! They grow crops on a small scale in the forest, but the soil does not remain fertile for long, so they are forced to move on.! Shifting cultivation is thought to be responsible for up to 60% of tropical forest loss.! In the Brazilian Amazon alone, around 500,000 small farmers are responsible for clearing an estimated one hectare each per year!