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In
our latest longread, Brian Barth and Flávia
Milhorance report from a groundbreaking
Brazilian community demonstrating how to farm
sustainably in the Amazon rainforest.
Open a
new road in the Amazon and deforestation most often
follows, creating a landscape of big sky, white cows,
and green pastures. But on back roads around the
frontier town of Nova Califórnia, in a remote corner of
northwestern Brazil, a renewed verdant canopy closes
in.
These
forests exist because a local agroforestry cooperative
called RECA has made it economically viable to
plant and tend them, an especially important endeavour
at a time when the rainforest is being razed at
an alarming rate. For decades, cattle
ranching has been the dominant economic activity in the
Amazon, driving 80% of forest loss.
Ranchers
get caught in a vicious cycle, felling forest and
establishing pastures that quickly deplete the nutrients
in the thin tropical soils. Once depleted, yields of
beef per acre diminish, so the ranchers move on,
converting more forest to pastures until those soils are
shot, too. So far, nearly a fifth of the Amazon has
been cleared. But because agroforestry systems require
far less land than cattle to make a living, they could
take the pressure off the rainforest that remains—if
they were more widely implemented.
RECA,
a co-op founded in 1989, demonstrates how it could be
done. The natural rainforest preserves biodiversity,
protects soil and water, and sequesters carbon in its
trees, mitigating climate change. RECA’s farmers
approximate that ecosystem, densely planting up to 40
species in their recreated rainforest parcels.
The
co-op processes about a dozen of these species into food
products sold throughout Brazil: fruit juice, palm
hearts, oils. The rest, including medicinal plants,
supply local markets. Others are planted simply to
benefit soil and wildlife. Some of the harvest is even
exported. RECA’s top crop is cupuaçu, a relative of
the cacao tree. Its seeds are pressed into an oil
purchased by the Brazilian cosmetics conglomerate
Natura, which owns Avon and The Body Shop. L’Occitane,
the French cosmetics company with stores across the
United States, buys the seeds of the cumaru tree,
which lend a vanilla-almond fragrance to the company’s
Cumaru Raiz cologne.
The
more than 300 families in the co-op earn about five
times more per acre from their agroforestry plots
annually than local ranchers do from their
pastures. |
