provides are of incalculable worth: water cycling (the forest produces not only half its own rainfall but much of the rain south of the Amazon and east of the Andes), carbon sequestering (by holding and absorbing carbon dioxide, the forest mitigates global warming and cleanses the atmosphere), and maintenance of an unmatched panoply of life. But the marketplace has yet to assign a value to the forest: It's far more profitable to cut it down for grazing and farming than to leave it standing. "Tropical deforestation is a classic example of market failure," Schwartzman says. Oddly enough, Maggi would probably agree with Schwartzman's solution: "It's urgent to find mechanisms to compensate forest peoples, and their governments, for the ecosystem services their forests provide." For Cargill, a Minnesota-based food conglomerate, the greatest urgency lies in getting soybeans to market as cheaply as possible. Anticipating the eventual completion of BR-163, Cargill opened a warehouse and deepwater port in Santarm in 2003. Until it can transport soy beans there by road, Cargill, like Maggi, has been moving much of it by barge via the Madeira River. "We've exported close to two million tons [1.8 million metric tons]," Douglas Odoni, the plant's operation manager, told me with pride. We stood on a catwalk above the Cypriot-flagged freighter Evdoxos as a giant nozzle disgorged soybeans into the vessels belly at the rate of 1,350 tons (1,220 metric tons) an hour. Within two weeks,the Evdoxos would dock in Amsterdam and unload 52,000 tons (47,000 metric tons)