Day 4 Natural Resource and Port Visit

On day 4 our plan was to visit the port of Paranagua to get an appreciation of the soybean export trade. The port of Paranagua is about an hour drive across a coastal mountain range from Curitiba where we are staying.  Most of the soybeans in this state of Parana must be trucked through this mountain range to the port.  To get to the port, we arranged to take a tourist train through a national park refuge in the Atlantic forest.  The train trip lasted four hours and allowed us to see the lush rain forest in the coastal mountain range.  As we headed down, we saw many spectacular views of the rugged landscape.  The tour ended in a small town called Morretes near the port city of Paranagua where we had lunch at a local restaurant.

Our next stop was the port of Paranagua.  Paranagua is the most important grain port in South America.  It is a multi-modal port for imports and exports.  They work with soybean, soybean meal, sugar, corn, fertilizers, salt, frozen products (poultry) and vehicles. More than half of the raw material for fertilizer for Brazil comes through this port. 16% of Brazils GDP moves through this port. They work 24 hours a day in four shifts. The receiving capacity is about 2800 trucks a day.  Brazilian soybean trucks have up to 9 axles in tandem rigs that hold up to 70 metric tons.  We saw many of these making their way to the port down a winding interstate through the mountain on the way home.

At the port we arranged for a boat to give us a tour of the ships loading at the docks.  We saw soybeans, sugar, and containers being loaded on 10 ships at the same time.  Tugboats move the ships off the docks during an hour long process. It takes 45 days for these ships to get to China and 15 days to get to the US.   We watched one ship leaving the port and could see others in the distance waiting to come in.