Fordlandia (54 page)

In other words, there is no relationship between the wages Harley-Davidson pays to make its products and the profits it receives from selling them. Instead of Ford’s virtuous circuit of high wages and decent benefits generating expanding markets, a vicious one now rules: profits are derived not from well-paid workers affluent enough to buy what they have made but from driving prices as low as they can go; this in turn renders good pay and humane benefits not only unnecessary for keeping the economy going but impossible to maintain, since the best, and at times the only, place to cut production costs is labor. The result is a race to the bottom, a system of perpetual deindustrialization whereby corporations—including, most dramatically, the Ford Motor Company itself—bow before a global economy that they once mastered, moving manufacturing abroad in order to reduce labor costs just to survive.

Ford’s River Rouge employees were once some of the highest-paid industrial workers in the world. But they now make a fraction of what they did three decades ago and, with Ford’s continued existence as a company hanging by a slender thread, are continually asked for bigger and bigger givebacks. In 2007, the UAW, in an effort to convince Ford to make its new “world market” model Fiesta in the United States, offered to cut starting wages by half, to less than fifteen dollars an hour. It didn’t work. In June 2008, the company announced that it would set up production in Mexico, where the union there agreed to cut wages for new hires to half of the prevailing salary of $4.50 an hour. In order to stay competitive with China, some factories have cut hourly wages to as low as $1.50 an hour. Poverty is not just a consequence but a necessary component of this new system of permanent austerity. In Ford’s day, high wages, aside from their role in creating consumer markets, were needed to build a reliable labor force. Today, misery plays that role. “I guarantee you that if we advertise for 2,000 workers,” admits Juan José Sosa Arreola, the Mexican union leader who helped negotiate wage cuts in order to convince Ford to make the Fiesta in Mexico, “10,000 people are going to show up.” Every year, the same kind of desperation pushes tens of thousands of migrants into Manaus—and millions into cities like it across the globe. In the 1920s, Ford thought that the “flow” of history was moving away from cities. But in 2008, more than half of the earth’s inhabitants were reported to be living in cities, a billion of them—a sixth of the world’s population—in slums.
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In the lower Amazon, then, along about a three-hundred-mile axis, runs the history of modern capitalism. On one end is Fordlandia, a monument to the promise that was early-twentieth-century industrialization. “Ford built us a hospital; he paid his workers well and gave them good houses,” a Fordlandia resident told a
Los Angeles Times
reporter in 1993. “It would be nice if the company would come back.” On the other is Manaus, a city plagued by the kind of urban problems Ford thought he could transcend but whose very existence owes much to the system he pioneered. Trying to reproduce America in the Amazon has yielded to outsourcing America to the Amazon.
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AS MANAUS CONTINUES its outward sprawl, Fordlandia, too, has experienced an influx of new migrants. They largely come not from the northeast, as Ford’s men did eighty years ago, but from the south, from the Amazon state of Mato Grosso, arriving along an eleven-hundred-mile dirt highway that is an impassible mud trench for much of the rainy season. Many of Fordlandia’s recent settlers raised cattle in Mato Grosso, a trade they brought with them to their new home. Ford’s opinion that cows were the crudest, most inefficient machines in the world is not unjustified considering the amount of land and energy it takes to keep one alive. Between 2000 and 2005, cattle ranching accounted for 60 percent of deforestation, and today Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of cows, with its 180,000,000-head herd equaling the size of its population. At least a thousand of them can be found at Fordlandia, grazing along the riverbank and on what was Fordlandia’s golf course. The town’s tennis court has yielded to cattle stalls. But mostly the cows roam and ruminate on the hillsides previously planted with rubber, now converted to pastureland.
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Rather than marking a revival of Fordlandia, the new settlers signal a fresh wave of despoliation, part of a larger shift in the balance of power between man and nature. Many have observed the ironies involved in Ford’s varied efforts to harmonize industry and agriculture, be it in the woods of the Upper Peninsula, along the waterways of southern Michigan, or in Appalachia’s Tennessee Valley. But the most profound irony is currently on display at the very site of Ford’s most ambitious attempt to realize his pastoralist vision. In the Tapajós valley, three prominent elements of Ford’s vision—lumber, which he hoped to profit from while at the same time finding ways to conserve nature; roads, which he believed would knit small towns together and create sustainable markets; and soybeans, in which he invested millions, hoping that the industrial crop would revive rural life—have become the primary agents of the Amazon’s ruin, not just of its flora and fauna but of many of its communities.

There’s a new commercial sawmill in operation at Fordlandia, and though its technology is not much improved from what John Rogge and Matt Mulrooney had available eighty years ago, it’s had much more success at exporting wood than Ford did. The mill’s owner, Raymundo Donato, is amused when asked if he faces the kinds of problems that so vexed Ford, from termites and wood that is too hard or too soft to the valley’s warp-inducing humidity. There are uses now for soft wood that didn’t exist back then, he says. The kapok ceiba is one of the Tapajós’s tallest trees, rising high above the forest canopy, but Fordlandia’s sawyers considered its wood to be worthless pulp. Today, though, the majestic tree can be shredded and then pressed ignobly into particleboard. Many of Ford’s other problems had to do with the fact that his wood sat at the plantation for weeks, often months, vulnerable to the weather until a big enough lot could be assembled to make a shipment back to the United States worth the cost of transportation. Donato only has to send batches of lumber a few hours to the town of Itaituba, where the boards are dry kilned, strapped with metal bands to prevent warping, and then floated downriver to be sold to one of the big timber multinationals.

Donato employs about 125 local residents and produces graded timber for export to the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. His permits are all in order, he insists, and he strictly follows environmental law, using techniques of selective timbering that allow the forest to reproduce. Most of the thousands of small mills that exist throughout the forest, however, operate illegally, and logging is responsible for about 6 percent of deforestation. In early 2008, satellite imagery showed a shocking increase in the rate of rain forest clear-cutting. “Never before have we detected such a high deforestation rate,” said Gilberto Câmara, head of the National Institute for Space Research. The world was reminded that it had already lost 20 percent of the Amazon’s 1.6 million square miles, and if the pace continued, 40 percent of what was left would be gone by 2050. In response, the federal government launched an operation to crack down on illegal logging. Woefully understaffed in relation to the size of the territory to be covered, government agents decided to focus on key towns or cities where contraband wood comes in from the jungle to be “laundered” and transformed, by bribery or faked paperwork, into legitimate export cargo, sold to multinationals like Japan’s Eidai Corporation, China’s Tianjin Fortune Timber, and the New Orleans–based Robinson Lumber Company, which enjoy the patina of legitimacy even though they operate at just a degree of separation from the lawlessness that plagues much of the Amazon’s lumber industry.
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Tailândia, a fast-growing city of sixty-five thousand people located two hours south of Belém, is one such potential choke point, home to dozens of small mills and the offices of a number of large timber multinationals. Logging, legal or not, provides needed income to many in the state of Pará, and in Tailândia an estimated 70 percent of the city’s population make their living off wood. So when inspectors arrived in town in February 2008, they were met by thousands of protesters, who burned tires, erected barricades, and took a number of government officials hostage. Rio sent in reinforcements, hundreds of heavily armed police, to retake the town. They restored order, confiscating five hundred truckloads of wood valued at $1.5 million and closing down dozens of unlicensed mills. Federal agents also destroyed hundreds of illegal ovens used to make bootleg charcoal, which is shipped to southern Brazil, where it is used to fire blast furnaces that smelt pig iron. This aspect of the illegal lumber industry is particularly devastating to the Amazon’s future since these charcoal ovens burn young trees too small to be milled—the forest’s most reproductively healthy and active generation. Tailândia’s ovens alone consume tens of thousands of saplings a month.
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The charcoal industry also has horrific human consequences. In December 2006, a
Bloomberg News
investigation found that much Amazonian charcoal was made by starving, disease-ridden slaves. Lured to the region with promises of good-paying work, whole families were held captive in camps deep in the jungle, given polluted, parasite-ridden water to drink and miserable food to eat and forced to sleep in windowless corrugated tin shacks, unbearably hot on their own but even more so owing to their closeness to the kilns. Children were left to play in the mud, living with malaria, dying from tuberculosis and other illnesses. The Amazon is today home to an estimated twenty thousand modern slaves, “people who have absolutely no economic value except as cheap labor under the most inhumane conditions imaginable,” says Marcelo Campos, an official with the Brazilian Ministry of Labor. The charcoal is used to make pig iron, which is exported to the United States to be turned into steel for consumer products manufactured by some of the world’s biggest corporations, including the Ford Motor Company. This modern form of jungle slavery is, as Campos points out, a “key part of the globalized, export-oriented economy Brazil thrives on.”
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By some estimates, logging is a two-billion-dollar-a-year industry in Pará, with wood going for $275 a cubic meter, or about $1,300 a tree. It’s a high-stakes business, and violence has become an elemental part of the trade. In 2005 in eastern Pará, gunmen hired by loggers killed Sister Dorothy Stang, a Maryknoll nun from the United States who had been working with local rural communities to oppose illicit logging. In early 2008, just southeast of where Stang was murdered, Emival Barbosa Machado was shot to death as he was leaving his house, probably for providing information to officials about criminal logging. A few years ago, gangs of armed loggers marauded through lands claimed by the Rio Pardo Indians, chasing them away, sacking valuable trees, and leaving desolation in their wake. Between 1971 and 2004, 772 activists working to either defend human rights or slow deforestation have been executed in Pará. Only three cases have been brought to trial.

ROADS, TOO, WHICH Ford promoted, have accelerated the devastation of the Amazon. With the announcement that the Ford Motor Company planned to establish a rubber plantation in the largely roadless jungle came much speculation in the local press that it would build major highways linking interior areas like Mato Grosso to ports and markets. Such projects never materialized, though plantation workers in both Fordlandia and Belterra laid out dozens of miles of roadbed, both to open up the estates’ hinterlands for planting and logging and to allow staff members to go on short car trips to escape boredom. But in the years since Getúlio Vargas traveled from Belterra to Manaus to give his “March to the West” speech, road construction has increased rapidly. In the 1960s, the government built a 1,200-mile highway connecting Belém to the new capital of Brasilia, and the 3,000-mile Trans-Amazonian Highway was inaugurated in 1972, with the hope of promoting migration out of the drought-plagued northeast into the less populated rain forest.

Road building in the Amazon has created what social ecologists have described as a destructive “feedback cycle.” Migrants move in and land values rise. Often, the construction of the road and the arrival of farmers, ranchers, loggers, speculators, and settlers bring disease to, and spark confrontation with, indigenous peoples. Always, the advance of roads puts sudden and rapid pressure on the local ecology. Forest is cleared, cattle are grazed, and crops are planted. Such activity fragments ecosystems—whose biological diversity depends on maintaining an extensive, uninterrupted mass of forest—into smaller and smaller sections, propelling the extinction of flora and fauna and increasing the risk of forest fires. The profits generated from the increased economic activity lead to additional road building, most of it illegal. Dirt spurs shoot off the main spine of the highway, creating a “fishbone effect” startlingly visible from the air. Meanwhile, poor settler farmers, enticed by the prospect of cheap, abundant land, quickly find that, once stripped of trees, the Amazon’s soil becomes exhausted. So they push farther into the forest. And the process begins all over again. There are currently more than a hundred thousand miles of legal and illegal roads cutting through the Amazon, each at one time promising to bring prosperity and development but most often delivering bloodshed, displacement, impoverishment, and clear-cutting.

The road that brings Mato Grosso migrants to Fordlandia, BR-163, continues northeast, eventually reaching its terminus in Santarém. For much of the way, to the left on the northwest side of the highway, stands the Tapajós National Forest, which includes a good portion of the original Fordlandia concession. It’s one of the Amazon’s first protected areas, over a million acres of relatively intact forest and home to a number of indigenous communities. It was here that, starting in 2000, Daniel Nepstad, a scientist affiliated with the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, covered 2.2 acres of land with a clear plastic tarp for five years to simulate a prolonged dry period. The results of the experiment suggested that the kind of multiyear droughts that the Amazon has witnessed of late, along with a general decrease in precipitation during the rainy season—which many identify as an effect of the deforestation—will greatly hinder the jungle’s ability to reproduce. Some trees showed a stubborn resilience, drawing water from more than forty feet in the soil. But the soil eventually dried out, and after four years the death rate of large canopy trees, those that reach up to 150 feet into the open sun, jumped from 1 percent to 9 percent. All trees demonstrated a significant slowing of growth, which means that if the drying trend continues, not only will the forest be shorter and stunted but its ability to absorb carbon, which plays an important role in cooling the earth’s temperature, will be curtailed. “This experiment provides researchers with a peek into the future of this majestic forest,” Nepstad says.
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