New China-Funded Port In Peru May Have Ecological Drawbacks

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In a recent article about Chinese cars making inroads in South America, we mentioned there is a new port in Chancay, Peru, that makes it more convenient for those cars from China to gain access to the continent. Previously, ships carrying products from China had to offload in Panama or make the perilous journey around Cape Horn to Vitoria or Itijai in Brazil.

The port at Chancay didn’t just happen. It was built and paid for by China as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. While the US is now focused on bombing neighboring countries to force them to accede to its demands, China is using economic policy to win friends and influence people. We leave it to our readers to decide which strategy is more likely to enjoy long term success.

Yesterday, we reported on another country that is taking advantage of Chinese economic and engineering assistance. Uzbekistan has benefited from more than $80 billion of investment in renewable energy projects from China over the past several years. As a result, it is well on its way to slashing its climate destroying emissions. China is a welcome ally, while the US is sucking its thumb on the sidelines.

There is no free lunch, however. As Inside Climate News reported on December 1, 2025, that spiffy new port facility at Chancay, Peru, will also increase the climate impact of industrialization in a part of the world where deforestation is a constant concern.

The new port is the result if nearly two decades of planning and makes Peru South America’s primary receiving point for goods coming in from Asia. For China, the port delivers a strategically important route for the critical minerals and agricultural products from South America and expedites deliveries of its cars, machinery, and electronics into South American markets. The new port slashes 10 days off the transit time for shipping between China and South America.

It also brings China direct access to the timber, soybeans, and beef produced in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. But first those commodities have to make their way to Chancay, which means crossing the Andes mountains, which make the Alps look like foothills in comparison.

The Dangers Of Development

“The port is a magnet,” Luis Fernandez, executive director of Wake Forest University’s Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation, told ICN. “They will find more efficient ways to get over the Andes, to plug into Chancay.” Environmentalists warn that those new transportation routes will speed up the destruction of the Amazon river basin — the planet’s most critical, climate-stabilizing terrestrial ecosystem.

As a result, the rainforest could be transformed from the world’s largest terrestrial carbon sink into a massive carbon emitter. Some research suggests the forest is already at a tipping point that could result in a climate catastrophe. “China wants everything in the Amazon,” said Julia Urrunaga, director of Peru programs for the Environmental Investigation Agency. “And in one way or another, all these routes are connected to the port.”

Environmental Impact Of Development

China, for its part, is one of the leading nations when it comes to transitioning to renewable energy and electric transportation. But there is very little research into the climate impact of its infrastructure investments, including any kind of holistic analysis of the port and its potential impact on the Amazon. Most of China’s infrastructure investments are in nations that are rich in resources but have weak governments and few environmental safeguards.

When China wants to build something, countries like Peru are quick to ease or overlook environmental standards and requirements for public participation, critics say, even if that means destroying natural resources or communities.

“The Chinese are just like the US. They’re the big power. If they invest here, if they shared their profits, we’d be happy,” one fisherman in Chancay told ICN. Readers will recognize a familiar message in his complaint. Many renewable energy opponents might be more welcoming if some of the electricity being generated was shared with the local population to help lower their utility bills.

Disrupting A City To Build A Port

In Chancay, residents told ICN the developers of the port tore their city apart. City leaders ignored local complaints and the project moved forward without the legally required public input and access to information. Many lives and homes were destroyed in the process.

Jason Guillén Flores is the safety and environment manager f0r the Chancay port. He said building the port required moving 7.6 million cubic yards of dirt and rocks to create a 60 foot deep channel and digging a mile long tunnel under the city. Altogether it took 438 explosive blasts to make the final result happen. The goal of the port was to turn Peru into an agricultural powerhouse, ready to supply hungry Asian markets with produce.

Transportation And Deforestation

The Brazilian government last year announced its plans to build five major new routes through the Amazon to connect with Pacific ports, including Chancay. The roads are part of a larger project that includes modernizing or building 65 highways, 40 waterways, 35 airports, 21 ports, and 9 railways.

From the Brazilian town of Cruzeiro do Sul, in the western Amazon, a long-discussed 430-mile roadway could finally be paved westward to the city of Pucallpa, the heart of Peru’s timber industry. From there, a road already leads to Chancay.

Since the Brazilian military cut roadways into the Amazon to facilitate its exploitation in the 1960s, a growing body of research has tracked the effects of infrastructure on the rainforest. Deforestation here occurs in a “fishbone” pattern where a primary road leads to secondary roads spiking off it, fragmenting and weakening the forest. This pattern, clearly visible from satellite images, crisscrosses much of the region. Researchers say it is even more destructive than clearcutting big swaths of forest.

A study earlier this year found that for every one kilometer of primary road cut into the rainforest, 50 kilometers of secondary road are added and those secondary roads trigger more than 300 times more forest degradation or loss.

“Are railways better than roads?” asked Elizabeth Losos, an adjunct professor at Duke University. “They take up the same amount of space, but for the most part, people get off at stations and can’t get off at multiple places in between. But when they build the railways they create service roads that serve them.”

Salisbury has considered the same question. “Railways are a lot less environmentally and culturally impactful than roads—and that’s crucial,” he said. “But how are you able to control that they remain purely railways? Once you make a linear clearing through the rainforest — how can you stop people from expanding beyond that?”

Lowering Barriers To Development

In July, the Brazilian Congress approved a new bill that would ease licensing requirements for infrastructure projects deemed to be national priorities. Environmental groups called it the “devastation bill” and said the damage to the rainforest and to broader climate goals would be irreversible. “It would make it easier getting infrastructure like railways approved without requiring environmental studies,” said Meg Symington of the World Wildlife Fund. She noted that Peru passed a similar law in 2024.

Leolino Dourado, a researcher at the Center for China and Asia-Pacific Studies at Peru’s University of the Pacific, says that shipping commodities through the Amazon and over the Andes to the Pacific makes no economic sense. It’s still cheaper, he said, to ship commodities out of Brazil. “If you run the numbers, it’s more cost effective to export through the Atlantic, which is the traditional route,” he said.

But infrastructure projects make perfect political sense. Roads, railways, and waterways deliver infusions of cash for cash strapped cities and regions, making these passages through the forest powerful forces, however destructive they may be. “Roads are a good way to get elected,” said Salisbury. “It’s a good way to get politicians in Peru excited about China, even though it doesn’t make economic sense. And it allows the Chinese to have more impact on the Amazon — and Brazil and Peru — just by creating a corridor with a new form of transport, even if it’s not a game changer economically.”

China’s Influence Grows In South America

The port at Chancay is the single biggest flag China has planted on a continent that the United States has long seen as its domain. “China’s in our red zone,” said Laura Richardson, a retired U.S. Army general who served as the commander of US Southern Command from 2021 to 2024.

As Chinese-backed investments expand, projecting Beijing’s power in the region, allegiances and sentiment across South America are shifting. The bumbling US administration decision to impose tariffs and harsh immigration policies that disproportionately impact Latin American countries are increasing anti-American bitterness across much of the region, making China seem like a friendlier, more stable alternative, economically and politically. Who could have seen that coming, huh?

The administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) earlier this year has only amplified resentments. After Colombia, Peru was the continent’s second-largest recipient of USAID funding, much of it directed at curbing coca plantations. USAID funding to Brazil was largely aimed at programs to conserve the Amazon.

China is stepping into the diplomatic and economic vacuum. Trade between the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States’ members and China rose from $450 billion in 2023 to $515 billion in 2024. Earlier this year, Xi announced $9 billion in credit to the region and visa-free entry to China for residents of some countries. And while Chinese direct investment in Latin America for big infrastructure projects has slowed, it remains strong for certain industries.

“Nobody else is offering money for these projects,” General Richardson said. “China comes along offering billions — $3.6 billion, with four-and-a-half billion annual revenue profit for this. How can you turn that down? Nobody else is offering anything like that.”

Environmental Costs

But at the same time, China’s environmental track record, both in the construction of its big infrastructure projects and in the supply chains of its imports, is drawing more criticism from environmental groups, researchers and residents, ICN reporter Georgina Gustin wrote.

China is the largest importer of commodities linked to deforestation, including soy, beef and timber, and the second largest importer of palm oil. In total, those products are responsible for about 40 percent of global deforestation rates. Critics claim this means China has huge potential exposure to illegal deforestation.

In 2021, China signed on to a global pact to reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2035, acknowledging the role of forests in stabilizing the atmosphere. But recent analyses suggest the country may not follow through. The authors of a 2024 study wrote, “China’s foreign policy stance of non-interference and concerns about its food security are key obstacles.”

Kerstin Canby, a senior director with Forest Trends, told ICN that China has implemented robust reforestation programs within its borders, but that has had a direct impact on vulnerable forests elsewhere, including the Amazon. “China has been a star, but that has ripple effects. Everyone’s trying to protect their own forest, but all that does is push demand to those countries that have the least amount of governance, the ones that are not putting in place protections for their own forest.”

Knock-On Effects

When we wrote about Chinese automakers being able to access South American markets via the new port at Chancay in Peru, we didn’t realize what the knock-on effects on the environment would be. More electric cars are a good thing, aren’t they?

The ICN report goes into some detail about the chicanery and outright corruption involved in making the new port a reality. That information is outside the scope of this article, but readers are encouraged to read more on that subject if they have the time and inclination. It sounded very much like the financial shenanigans that went on in the Port of Morrow in Oregon that not only brought new industry to the area but also helped poison the water in the Lower Umatilla aquifer.

Commerce in general has an ugly side, beginning with Christopher Columbus making slaves of the people he encountered on islands in the Caribbean and the pillaging of Central and South America by the Spanish and other colonizers. We may celebrate  China’s investment in clean energy and electric vehicles in Uzbekistan and South America, but we must never lose sight of the environmental costs associated with doing business anywhere in the modern world.