Fordlandia (55 page)

THE FUTURE CAN be seen quite clearly on the other side of BR-163. Pushing against the road is what environmentalists call the Amazon’s “soy frontier,” open land clear-cut for pastures or plantations, dotted with tufts of trees and the occasional ramshackle hamlet. Ford spent millions of dollars trying to find new uses for soy, and his dream has been more than realized: today’s corporate agribusiness is Ford’s “chemurgy” on steroids. Soy can now be found in an array of mass-produced products, from animal feed, pet food, and baby formula to fast food and biofuels. Over the last two decades, industry scientists have gone beyond anything that Green-field Village chemists could have imagined, as genetically modified soy can be found in about 60 percent of all processed foods, most often as oil or filler. As a result, growing European, Asian, and US demand has turned Brazil into the second-largest producer of soy.
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Soy is one of the Amazon’s leading causes of deforestation. In one year alone, between August 2003 and August 2004, planters cleared over 10,000 square miles of the Amazon, roughly the size of Belgium. Most of this planting is in the southern scrublands of the Amazon basin, in the state of Mato Grosso. But in recent years, soy has crept north to the Tapajós, and as it does, it disrupts many more lives at a much quicker pace than does logging, notwithstanding all the cruelty and coercion that accompanies that trade. Where logging displaces settlements in scattershot fashion, soy devours communities more inexorably, displacing farming and ranching families with as much disregard as it fells trees. Because the crop is cultivated on large-scale, mechanized plantations, it doesn’t provide much employment for those uprooted by its march. At the same time, the extension of monoculture squeezes out the planting of vegetables and fruits produced for local use, as land is more profitably used to grow soy than, say, papaya and so dramatically raises the price of what crops—more and more imported from outside the region—do get to market.

In 2002, the multinational agroindustry giant Cargill, hoping to induce the federal government to pave BR-163—and thereby make it easier for the company to export its Mato Grosso harvest—spent $20 million to build a granary warehouse and port in Santarém, with a protruding conveyor running to three deepwater chutes designed to fill the holds of the largest cargo ships with soybeans.
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Santarém had until recently largely remained a sleepy provincial town not that different from when the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote about her “golden evening” on the Tapajós. That changed after Cargill built its terminal. Speculators and developers moved in, and the price of a hectare (2.47 acres) of land skyrocketed, from $25 in 2000 to more than $500 eight years later. Many poor farmers or ranchers were unable to resist such a payoff. Selling their land, they moved into Santarém proper, whose infrastructure was unprepared to handle the influx. This migration led not just to shanty sprawl but to a dramatic increase in the cost of basic grains, fruits, vegetables, and meat. With over three hundred square miles of surrounding farmland now used for soy, there’s much less room, and considerably less financial incentive, to grow oranges, pineapples, manioc, and greens or to graze cows and pigs.
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Henry Ford placed great hope in soybeans, projecting that the crop would provide a much needed financial lifeline to farming communities struggling to survive as industrialization pushed agricultural prices lower and lower. His promotion of soy was part of his efforts to balance farm and factory so that mechanization would not destroy community but fulfill it. But in Belterra—Ford’s last sustained effort to strike such a balance—soy has wiped off the map the dozens of small villages that had spread out from the center of the town over the last couple of decades and, along with them, the schools, churches, and family networks that are the heart of any community.

Belterra stands just off BR-163, about an hour south of Santarém, on a flat plateau perfect for mechanized soybean cultivation. In 2001, hardly any soy was grown in its boundaries. Today, tens of thousands of Belterra’s flatland hectares are planted with soy. It is expensive to cut down virgin jungle. The former president of Cargill’s Brazilian operations told me that it costs about $1,500 to clear one hectare, which means that a plantation of, say, five hundred hectares would take years to reap a profit, even considering the high price of soy. This expense is why growers like to move into land already cleared for cattle pastures and small farms (often pushing farmers and ranchers to initiate another cycle of deforestation). It is also what makes Belterra, in addition to its level soil, so attractive. Ford’s men already did most of the work.
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The soy frontier: Belterra
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Until recently, stories told about the Amazon tended to emphasize the jungle’s unconquerable enormity, its immense indifference to man’s puny ambitions, a plotline that captures well the history of Fordlandia. That has changed, of course. It’s the forest that now appears frail, as Belterra vividly demonstrates. Nearly eight decades ago, Ford’s men slipped and slid in the mud in their four-cylinder, 20-horsepower Model F tractors or 27-horsepower Model Ns—“iron mules” they were called—to prepare the land to plant rubber trees. Today, developers use Caterpillar D-9s or D-11s, or Komatsu D275s, treaded behemoths weighing as much as a hundred tons and running on up to 900 horsepower to plow down those same trees. They are outfitted with special cutting blades angled to push the felled wood to the right as the machine advances. The protruding part of the blade is spiked, letting operators stab and twist the trunks of obstinate trees. At the rear of the dozers are mounted “rippers,” multishank hydraulic plows to pull up trunks and break rocks. Once the downed trees are gathered in a pile with a backhoe, the same ground is passed over once again, this time by two tractors tethered together by a heavy chain weighed down by a rolling steel ball that yanks out root systems as it is dragged forward. Soy itself does its part in forcing the jungle to yield. Domesticated in temperate Asia, the bean is not native to Brazil, much less is it suited to the hot and humid Amazon. But advances in insecticides, pesticides, fungicides, and phosphate-heavy fertilizer, along with the creation of crossbred “tropical soy,” have allowed Amazon growers not just one crop but two a year. And Brazil has just permitted farmers to use genetically engineered seeds—a logical extension of Fordism into the cellular structure—making possible the spread of soy ever deeper into the rain forest.

Some Belterra residents tried to hold out. But they found themselves, as described in a report in
National Geographic
, “encircled by an encroaching wasteland, as whining chain saws and raging fires consumed the trees right up to the edge of their land. Their yards were overrun with vipers, bees, and rodents escaping the apocalypse, and when tractors began spraying the cleared fields, toxic clouds of pesticides drifted into their homes.” Their animals died. Family members became ill. João de Sousa has raised cattle for over four decades on his small ranch. His land is now an island in a sea of soy, as all of his former neighbors have sold their farms and moved out. “They never put a dyke up,” Sousa complained of the new soy planters. “Chemicals went into the brook where the cows drank.” He’s lost 88 of his 120-head cow herd as a result. “Once when I was by the field and they were spraying, I started to feel odd and I collapsed on the track.” Elsewhere, in what its former residents now describe as the “ghost village” of Gleba Pacoval, some families at first refused to sell their land. But hired gunmen set fire to their homes, driving them out. Union activists tried to organize against intimidation, only to be barraged by death threats.
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SPARED THE DESTRUCTION suffered by surrounding villages, Belterra’s town center still looks much the way it did when Archie Johnston and Curtis Pringle built it, with white-and-green Cape Cod bungalows set back from straight streets, their front yards planted with neat flower gardens. And just as Ford, buffeted by the changes that swirled around him, looked to the past for solace, Belterra’s municipal authorities, practically swallowed up by soy, have turned to history for relief. In recent years, they have tried to promote their town as a tourist attraction, putting out a brochure recounting its unique role as one of Henry Ford’s most remote outposts, whose architecture “reminds one of a small American town in the Midwest in the 1920s.” “The local people,” it reads, “still preserve the custom of having gardens around their houses,” because the “Ford Company gave prizes for the best garden.” The brochure also calls attention to the well-maintained “House Number One,” a spacious home with large rooms and a privileged view from the balcony. This “house of dreams” was “designed especially for the creator of the Project: Henry Ford.” The industrialist was all set to travel to Belterra, the guidebook says, but forty days before the planned visit Edsel died. The trip was canceled, and “locals wonder if Henry Ford had come, then perhaps he would never have abandoned Belterra.”

Back up the Tapajós at Fordlandia, removed for now from soy’s onslaught, palpable neglect blankets the town, despite its recent bustle. Contrasted with the broad, well-kept streets on display in old photographs of the place found in the Ford Archives, many of its roads are today crowded by scrub and spindly trees, their branches overhanging potholed macadam. In one photo, concrete crosses line the settlement’s cemetery in neat rows, with shorn hills and open skies in the background. Now the burial ground is overrun by forest and weeds, its crucifixes off-kilter. A clutch of fallen crosses, most dating from the 1930s, their inscriptions long worn off, have been gathered up and propped against a tree in the center of the graveyard. At Albert Kahn’s decrepit hospital, the floor is strewn with patient records from 1945, the year Ford turned the town over to the Brazilian government, though the building has been used as a clinic periodically over the last couple of decades.

América Lobato in front of her paintings of rubber trees and the water tower
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Some residents have tried to keep up appearances. As in Belterra, in front of many of the still inhabited bungalows, neat patches of rose bushes, tangerine and peach trees, along with Spanish plums and palm fruits, accent the town’s elegiac quality. And inevitably at some point in any conversation, residents will point out that Ford never visited Fordlandia, even though he kept promising that he would. “Fordlandia was born and died expecting a visit from its patron,” writes yet another Brazilian travel guide. Its inhabitants, the guide says, keep “one of the rooms of the best house in the American neighborhood in a permanent state of preparation.”

Given the waste, slavery, and ruination visited on much of the Amazon today their longing is understandable. Henry Ford’s vision of an Emersonian arcadia rising from the jungle canopy, though preposterous, now seems relatively benign. The dream lingers in the sights and sounds of Ford’s
cidades fantasmas
, ghost cities, haunting reminders of the early twentieth century’s promise of humane development. In Belterra, in the building where Henry Ford never slept, the town has recently installed a “Henry Ford” library and organized a “Henry Ford” children’s choir. And the factory whistle still blows four times a day, summoning workers who no longer live there to a plantation that has long been shuttered.
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The residents of Fordlandia and Belterra are still waiting for Henry Ford.

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Manaus is called a free-trade zone, but there is little “free trade” about it, at least in the way that term implies minimal government intervention in the market. With its remote jungle location deep in the continent’s heartland, the city as a manufacturing center could not survive without significant government subsidies, needed to offset the high cost of transportation.

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When it opened, the River Rouge not only made its own pig iron in furnaces heated with coal coke but recycled coke gas to make chemical byproducts, ore dust to make machine borings, and slag to make cement; today, the Ford Motor Company no longer molts its own pig iron, having long ago sold off its famed River Rouge foundry to a Russian company.