Logistics infrastructure: what separates the hospital in China from the BR-163?

The construction of a hospital in just 10 days in China caught the attention of many people in Brazil, even those who do not work, in any way, with infrastructure in the country. Building a hospital is complex, but the need to care for thousands of lives has led the Chinese to invest heavily in labor and machinery, in addition to using more simplified construction models to meet the objective: to have a minimum structure to support care. of all people and try to control a possible epidemic.

 Video – Timelapse shows hospital in China being built in 10 days
Source: BBC Brazil

This is not the first time that an Asian country has shown efficiency in solving infrastructure problems. In 2016, in just two days, the Japanese in Fukuoka City restored a five-lane avenue interrupted by a 30-meter hole! Safety inspections took longer than construction and, after a week, the mayor of the city guaranteed: the avenue was now 30 times more resistant.

Last year, I was with the ILOS Technical Mission in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, and in China, and one point caught my attention: the focus of these two countries on building infrastructure to ensure their economic development. The port of Dubai is connected by internal routes to the country's airport to ensure efficiency in multimodality. In China, Beijing has just opened a second international airport to serve a city with almost 30 million inhabitants. And I could go on for several paragraphs citing examples from these two countries.

What about Brazil? Well… in 2013, I participated in a project to evaluate the competitiveness between transport modes and possible impacts on highways to be concessioned. One of the highways under analysis was the BR-163, between Itiquira and Sinop, in Mato Grosso, a stretch that moves a large part of the production of soy and corn in Brazil. At the time, grain traders were taking the first steps to transport soybeans through the ports of Arco Norte, but one point still stood in the way: 560 km of the BR-163 between Sinop and Santarém was not paved and truck drivers struggled to reach the port in Pará, when arrived!

In 2013, conversations said that, by the end of 2014, the stretch to Miritituba (PA) would be completely paved. Six years have passed since the end of the project and, at the end of 2019, the Federal Government finally announced the completion of the paving to improve the flow of the second most important item in Brazilian international trade.

It took Brazil more than 6 years to pave 560 km of road, while China, in the same period, built 536 km of paved roads! Let's face it, 6 years to asphalt 560 km is a little too much. Not to mention that, in fact, the BR-163 was inaugurated in 1973 and, since then, the country has been promising to finish paving it.

Okay, the realities are very different between the two countries, but it is clear that the lack of purpose and focus of the governments that have passed has led Brazil to wrong policies. This is all added to the excessive bureaucracy of the Brazilian state, which makes any initiative a herculean task. The current Ministry of Infrastructure, together with the Ministry of Finance, has been doing a good job in an attempt to unlock private sector investments and make the country's transport infrastructure more efficient. It seems that we will no longer need 30 years to pave a mere 500 km.