The 4,000 km line from Brazil's Atlantic coast to Peru's Pacific is raising both economic expectations and environmental alarm in Latin America.
For hundreds of years, global traders have faced a problem: how to transport goods as quickly as possible from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. The Panama Canal, which cuts through the narrow Central American isthmus, was a solution to that problem.
However, as the canal has become more congested and costly, a situation only due to worsen because of climate change, the hunt for other trade routes linking the west of the Americas with the east has intensified.
After more than a decade of false starts, the idea of a “bioceanic” railway connecting Peru’s Pacific coast to Brazil’s Atlantic may finally be gaining traction. The inauguration of the Port of Chancay in late 2024 has injected new momentum into plans for a rail link stretching more than 4,000 km as the crow flies to Ilhéus in Bahia.
The port was developed by Cosco Shipping Ports Chancay Peru, a joint venture between Chinese giant Cosco Shipping Ports and the Peruvian mining company Volcan. It has been presented as a sign of the burgeoning trade relationship between China and Latin America, and has heightened the importance of a reliable trade route.
In February, the Brazilian government cemented the South American Integration Routes project, a network of five transport corridors designed to boost trade with Asia and neighbouring countries. The plan includes multiple route options, including a railway which would link up with the proposed bioceanic train.
Brazil and China had previously signed an agreement through their state-owned infrastructure companies to study the feasibility of the bioceanic railway, which Brazilian officials say could cut shipping times from the country’s coast to Asia by up to 10 days.
The memorandum’s exclusion of Peru, vital to the completion of the project, has raised questions. Responding to concerns, Peruvian Foreign Minister Elmer Schialer stressed that the agreement covered only Brazilian territory and that “access to the Pacific is impossible without Peru’s participation”.
Environmental experts warn the bioceanic corridor would cut through sensitive areas including the Amazon and the Andes. A study by GRAIN, CooperAcción and the Federal Institute of Bahia suggested that dozens of protected areas and Indigenous communities within 40 km of the projected route would be impacted in Peru, alongside more than 100 conservation areas and Indigenous territories in Brazil. Some 320 agrarian reform settlements, given to landless farmers as part of land reforms, could also be affected.
Nevertheless, the idea of a railway to cut across South America has never been closer to reality.
Connecting Brazil’s agricultural heartland
The new bioceanic route would connect to two Brazilian rail lines – FIOL and FICO – already under construction, linking the Atlantic port of Ilhéus, in Bahia, to Lucas do Rio Verde, in Mato Grosso, with completion expected by 2028. From there, it would push west through Rondônia and Acre to the Peruvian border, and on to Chancay, 70 km north of the capital Lima.
Brazil sees the bioceanic corridor as a “strategic route” for transporting agricultural and mining goods from its heartlands to the Pacific, giving direct access to Asian markets.
The five Brazilian states along the proposed route – Mato Grosso, Goiás, Bahia, Rondônia and Acre – exported a combined USD 22.4 billion worth of goods to China in 2025, equivalent to 22% of Brazil’s total exports to the country, according to a Dialogue Earth analysis of official trade data.
Soybeans dominated, at USD 15.6 billion, followed by meat at USD 3.7 billion, with wood pulp, cotton and iron ore trailing behind. Mato Grosso alone accounted for USD 12.3 billion – more than half the total.
Brazilian commodities currently reach Asia via Atlantic ports, with shipping either around the Cape of Good Hope or through the Panama Canal. In the first half of 2025, the cost to transport a metric tonne of soybeans from Brazil to Shanghai ranged from USD 70 to USD 124 per tonne, up to 28% of the final price, according to a USDA report.
Supporters argue the railway could lower export costs for commodities bound for Asia.
But Edeon Vaz, logistics director at the farmers’ trade association Aprosoja Mato Grosso, told Dialogue Earth that costs would “skyrocket” if goods were transported over land to Chancay. “Under current conditions, the corridor does not make commodities viable,” he said.
Analysis by Leolino Dourado, a researcher at the University of the Pacific’s Centre for China and Asia-Pacific Studies, suggests that, although the sea route from Chancay to Shanghai is shorter than alternatives, the longer land route could more than double overall transportation costs. “The increase [in costs] for land transport is much more expensive than maritime transport,” he told Dialogue Earth.
There are environmental concerns, too. A report by the investigative outlet InfoAmazonia drawing on the environmental impact study for FICO, the railway already under construction, suggested that project will impact 105 headwaters and tributaries of the Xingu, Tocantins-Araguaia and Tapajós river basins. In Mato Grosso, where the route transitions from the Cerrado into the Amazon, 23 Indigenous territories would be affected, the report says.
COIAB, the Coordination of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon, has since said affected communities were not given adequate time to consider the project.
Into the Amazon
From Brazil’s agri-hub, the proposed route would push further into the Amazon toward the country’s western border, crossing the states of Rondônia and Acre. Alongside Amazonas, these make up the region known by the acronym AMACRO, which is already seen as the rainforest’s latest deforestation hotspot.
Rodrigo Béllo Carvalho, a researcher at Stanford University, argues that Amazon megaprojects have historically led to “deforestation, threats to Indigenous lands, escalating debt and governance challenges”. While the railway is framed as [Global] “South-South cooperation,” he warns that without strong safeguards, it risks “reinforcing extractive development models” and delivering “lasting degradation rather than shared prosperity”.
According to the GRAIN study, the railway’s Amazon section would affect a series of protected areas within a 40 km radius of the projected route. In Brazil, these include the Indigenous lands of the Karipuna, a threatened community of just 63, and the Karitiana, speakers of the sole surviving language of the Arikém linguistic family.
In 2025, Brazil’s planning minister Simone Tebet said a previously proposed route through the Amazon region had been rejected because of concerns over the environment and Indigenous communities.
In the Peruvian Amazon, the proposed route would cut through some of the region’s most significant protected areas, including the Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve, home to uncontacted Indigenous peoples, and Manu National Park, one of the world’s most biodiverse protected areas.
Dourado said it would be impossible to build such a railway without affecting sensitive areas: “Any route would pass through environmental protection areas.”
Geographer Mauricio Pinzás, who was involved in the GRAIN analysis, told Dialogue Earth that the new transport corridor could drive agricultural expansion: “There could be a surge in deforestation to increase plantations because a transport route would already exist.”
However, Marc Dourojeanni, professor at the Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina, has argued that railways hold environmental advantages over roads in the Amazon, pointing out that they pollute less and limit uncontrolled forest access, as trains may only stop at stations.
The exact route through the two countries’ shared Amazonian frontier remains unconfirmed. In August 2025, Tebet ruled out a passage via the Cruzeiro do Sul municipality, which she said would have affected environmental reserves on both sides of the border.
The city of Assis Brasil, already included in Brazil’s official South American Integration Routes, has emerged as the more viable crossing point. It follows an existing highway, avoiding the need to cut through native rainforest.
The Acre regional government has not entirely abandoned the possibility of the railway, however. At a Brazil-Peru border committee meeting in April, local officials argued, while discussing a potential road connection, that a railway “guarantees less environmental impact”.
A previous highway proposal that would have cut directly into Serra do Divisor National Park, home to isolated Indigenous peoples and some of the Amazon’s greatest biodiversity, was suspended by a Brazilian court order in 2023.
From the forest to the sea
From the Amazon, the train would head out of the forest and through Peru towards Chancay on the coast. As the project is currently being propelled by Brazil and China, any route for the Peruvian section is far from certain.
When Epicentro TV, a Peruvian investigative outlet, requested details on the railway from the transport, culture, and environment ministries last year all three said they had no knowledge of the matter.
Brazil’s own integration routes suggest the railway would enter Peru via Iñapari in Madre de Dios, cut north through the Andes towards Cusco before descending to Chancay.
The route could supplement existing railway work in Peru. In February 2025 a 900 km line linking Chancay to Pucallpa, a city in the Amazon in eastern Peru, was announced.
In March, PowerChina, a Chinese state company, was awarded a USD 420 million contract to build a 120 km railway linking the copper and lithium mining zones of Peru’s central Andes in Junín to Chancay.
The Cooperacción and GRAIN study, which models a likely route, claims that the extension of the bioceanic railway could impact Andean protected areas including the Junín National Reserve – a wetland at an altitude of 4,000 metres and the only habitat of the critically endangered Junín grebe. It could also impact the Machu Picchu Historical Sanctuary, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Cusco that draws more than one million visitors a year, the study says.
While the project has not been approved by Peru, Schialer, the foreign minister, has said it would come with “formidable” environmental challenges, while other officials have said it would require thorough evaluation.
Chancay itself is already Peru’s main gateway to China, its largest trading partner. In its first year of operation, the port handled 67.9% of Peru’s agricultural exports to China. If the plans for a railway linking it to the Atlantic come to fruition, the port will become ever more central to this burgeoning trade relationship.
But some activists fear further development could lead to a repetition of the past patterns: infrastructure built, with environmental and community costs left unaddressed.
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