How the strength of agribusiness can shape the country’s infrastructure
Some say agribusiness is pop. The phrase, repeated to exhaustion, has become a slogan, a marketing line and a national identity. But perhaps the central point of this equation still needs to be spelled out: in Brazil, agribusiness does not merely depend on infrastructure; it sets its agenda and its direction. Where agribusiness advances, infrastructure is called upon to follow, and the legal and regulatory apparatus must respond.
Few examples illustrate this balance of power as well as BR-163/MT, on the stretch that crosses Mato Grosso. For years, the highway was more than a logistics corridor: it became a true stress test for traditional concession models.
A constant topic in WhatsApp groups of truck drivers, operators and farmers, it supports two strategic agribusiness flows: (i) the road corridor heading north toward the Northern Arc, connecting Mato Grosso’s production to Miritituba (PA); and (ii) road access to the transshipment terminals in the south of the state, especially Rondonópolis, from where cargo moves on a large scale by rail (Malha Norte/Ferronorte corridor, integrated with Malha Paulista) to the Port of Santos. This dynamic clearly exposed the gap between the contract design and the reality of the demand generated by agribusiness.
The BR-163/MT concession was structured under the so-called “D factor” regime, with investment obligations conditioned on economic and operational triggers. The model, legally sophisticated, proved fragile in the face of demand that grew faster than the contract anticipated and a regulatory environment with little flexibility to deal with frustrated investments. The problem was not only one of execution, but of risk allocation: the contract could not absorb the logistics intensity imposed by agribusiness.
At one point, the very centrality of the highway was questioned, especially after the announcement of Ferrogrão (EF-170), a railway project designed to connect Sinop (MT) to Miritituba (PA) and redesign a significant part of the routes used to ship Mato Grosso’s production to the Northern Arc. From a legal standpoint, the railway put even more pressure on the highway contract.
Even so, even without Ferrogrão “on track”, the volume shipped through the Northern Arc ports has grown significantly in recent years: about 57%, from 36.7 million tonnes in 2020 to 57.6 million tonnes in 2024.
This growth is the result of investments in multimodal infrastructure, with rail expanding and increasing use of the waterways of the Amazon Region. Proximity to new agricultural frontiers, such as MATOPIBA (Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia), directly influences these investments, consolidating the North region as an important hub for shipping agricultural production.
The BR-163/MT concession did not provide for economic and financial rebalancing mechanisms in the event of intermodal competition, which revealed a significant regulatory gap: infrastructure contracts are still conceived as islands, when the logistics reality of agribusiness is systemic. Highways, railways, waterways, terminals and ports do not just compete — they complement each other, replace each other at different times and, above all, require institutional coordination.
A strictly contractual reading might suggest an unsolvable conflict. A more mature regulatory reading, driven by the economic strength of agribusiness, pointed in another direction. The problem was never too much infrastructure, but its chronic insufficiency. Brazilian logistics does not suffer from overlapping modes, but from the lack of coordination between public policies, sector planning and legal instruments capable of accommodating this complementarity.
It was in this context that an institutionally significant transaction took place. BR-163/MT ended up being acquired by the State of Mato Grosso itself, through MT Participações e Projetos (MT-Par), which turned the highway into Nova Rota do Oeste, in a recovery of a distressed infrastructure asset that departed from the classic solutions provided for in concession legislation, such as forfeiture or re-tendering. It was an atypical, but legally revealing, state intervention.
This is no trivial precedent. The transaction signaled a reconfiguration of the role of the public sector, which no longer acts merely as a distant regulator and has begun to take on, more directly, asset and operational risks to ensure the functionality of assets essential to the real economy. It is the Law being stretched by logistics.
Nova Rota do Oeste may no longer be a recurring topic in truck drivers’ WhatsApp groups. But that does not mean it has lost relevance. On the contrary: the stretch remains on the agenda, now within a more sophisticated logic of intermodal coordination.
It is no coincidence that the largest railway project under way in the country will also have grain produced in Mato Grosso as its main cargo and the Port of Santos as its destination. It is an investment led by the state government itself, in direct reference to the state railway expansion and the structuring of new corridors, alongside projects such as EF-118 (RJ–ES), whose studies were approved and which joined the federal concession plan at the end of 2025.
In addition to the Mato Grosso state railway, ANTT validated the technical studies for Ferrogrão (EF-170) and sent them to the TCU, consolidating extensive technical work carried out after the developments in ADI 6553, which had suspended the project in 2021. At 933 kilometers long, Ferrogrão was designed to transform the shipment of agricultural production from the Center-West through the Northern Arc.
The cases of BR-163, the Mato Grosso railway and Ferrogrão reveal more than one-off solutions. They highlight a model in which agribusiness acts as the driving force behind public policies, regulatory design and contract engineering.
If agribusiness is pop, perhaps it is time to recognize that infrastructure dances to its tune: shaped by those who set the pace of the Brazilian economy.
