How bioeconomy could reshape life in Amazon

In essence, the Amazon’s bioeconomy represents a model that prizes biodiversity over scale, and forest health over market dominance. It’s not about mass production, but about sustaining livelihoods, respecting traditional knowledge, and keeping the forest standing. Though now a buzzword in policy and industry circles, the concept is far from new for Amazonian communities like rubber tappers and other gatherers, quilombo communities of former escaped slaves, river dwellers, and fishers whose ancestral activities align with the biome but are invisible in national accounting.

“People say, ‘Let’s implement the bioeconomy in the Amazon.’ What do they mean? That’s what we’ve always done,” quips economist Francisco de Assis Costa, a professor at the Federal University of Pará’s Center for Advanced Amazonian Studies (NAEA). For climate scientist Carlos Nobre, it’s simply “an economy of standing forests and flowing rivers.”Agribusinesses frame the term broadly, grouping “bio” with industrial-scale agriculture of soybean, sugarcane, and eucalyptus trees, and such livestock as cattle and poultry.

Globally, the concept is equally fluid—Finland is a success story with its natural and planted spruces and pines, and biomass replacing fossil fuels—but Finland does not have the world’s largest tropical forest. “Bioeconomy is a ‘terroir’ economy—it values what is specific and unique,” says Mr. Costa. “It deals with diversity. It’s fundamentally different from the homogenizing approach of agricultural bioeconomy.”

Among the Amazon’s signature non-wood-harvesting products is the Brazil nut, gathered exclusively from native forests—never from plantations. Almost all the Brazil nuts consumed globally come from native forests, “collected from century-old or millennia-old trees, many possibly planted by indigenous people before Pedro Álvares Cabral’s arrival,” wrote Salo Coslovski, a researcher with Amazon 2030 and a professor at New York University, in an article. He estimates the international trade in nuts generates $350 million annually, with Bolivia leading at 74% of the market, followed by Peru. Brazil ranks third with 11%.

Cacao is another bioeconomy symbol, with significant production in Pará, at around 950 kilograms per hectare. In a recent study, Mr. Coslovsky identified 64 Amazon-based products exported between 2017 and 2019, including fish, fruits, and peppers. Together, they made up just 0.17% of a $176 billion global market—signaling ample room for growth.

A recent World Resources Institute (WRI) study shows that Pará could become the hub of the Amazon bioeconomy. If R$720 million were invested across 13 bioeconomy value chains—including açaí, Brazil nuts, rubber, native bee honey, cupuaçu, and copaíba—Pará’s GDP could grow by R$816 million, generate R$44 million in additional tax revenue, and create 6,600 jobs. Mr. Costa, affectionately known inside and outside the Amazon as “Chiquito,” developed methods to measure the sector. “I wanted to make it visible,” he says.

Pará already accounts for 75% of all bioeconomy-related production across Brazil’s nine Amazon states. “The bioeconomy is a development strategy based on sustainable use of natural resources, valuing standing forests and fostering production chains tied to sociobiodiversity,” the WRI report states.

But WRI Brazil economist Rafael Feltran-Barbieri warns against expecting the bioeconomy to replicate the scale of soy or cattle. “That would defeat the purpose. Monocultures—even of biodiversity-based products—undermine the principles of the bioeconomy,” he says. “It won’t be massive, but it can do something other industries don’t: include the most vulnerable, who protect and know the forest.”

That warning echoes the cautionary tale of rosewood. Harvesting began in the 1920s, and within 40 years, its oil was one of the Amazon’s top three exports, trailing only rubber and Brazil nuts. But extracting 10 liters of oil required felling and grinding down a nearly one-ton tree. By 1992, rosewood was listed as endangered in Brazil by the National Institute of the Environment and Renewable Resources (IBAMA) and joined similar lists in Colombia and Suriname. A boycott led by French environmentalists in the late 1990s pressured Chanel to seek more sustainable alternatives to cultivate the tree and extract its oil.

Rosewood’s near extinction took place in Amazonas state, but Pará, too, has seen its share of failed ventures. One of the most notable was Fordlândia—a rubber plantation city built by Henry Ford in the 1920s along the Tapajós River between Santarém and Itaituba. Designed to supply the carmaker’s need for latex, the megaproject boasted homes, a hospital, a hotel, even a golf course, some say. All in the middle of the Amazon. The reasons behind its failure are varied and complex: malaria, latex prices, the invention of synthetic rubber. Above all, attempting extensive rubber plantations, combined with the arrogance that technique and science would conquer the tropical forest’s whims, proved fatal. Planted too closely in monoculture style, the trees succumbed to a plague. Without surrounding biodiversity to protect them from pests, the plantation failed. Established in 1928, Fordlândia lasted 18 years and became a ghost town, burying a dream worth $250 million in today’s values.

Trying to industrialize the Amazon like São Paulo or Brazil’s Central-West has repeatedly failed. As Mr. Costa puts it, the region follows a different production paradigm he calls bioecological economy: “A bioeconomy linked to necessary ecology.” It sounds repetitive, but it isn’t. “Problems here aren’t solved by mechanizing or homogenizing more.”

Economist Danilo Araújo Fernandes, also of NAEA, traces the region’s economic invisibility back to its roots. Also a professor at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), he belongs to a tradition of Belém-based intellectuals who experience and study the jungle’s own pace. He cites the past to explain why national GDP does not capture the Amazon’s real economy, which involves thousands of people but isn’t monetized. Unlike other rubber-producing states like Acre and Amazonas in later phases of the latex boom, Pará never had large plantations. “It was the riverside communities—now known for producing açaí—that led the way. The only think that changed was the product,” he says. “The entire region’s economy originates from an ancestral bioeconomy of traditional populations producing various biodiversity products: rubber, nuts, açaí, cocoa.”

This era saw the rise of “regatões,” large commercial boats distributing products and trading between places. The Amazonian economy emerged with strong trade relations. “A powerful, efficient structure developed, able to trade in a region of long rivers and vast distances, with strategies to finance product marketing,” Mr. Fernandes explains.

Financing this organically complex economic architecture followed the logic of “aviamento,” a kind of credit-debt arrangement where rubber tappers received supplies from trading posts in exchange for their harvest. “Of course, this system is often viewed in research literature as a form of servitude. What I mean to say is that there was accounting, but no cash. It created an invisible economy. It’s the opposite of the wage-based, industrial economy that emerged around São Paulo’s coffee sector after the emancipation of slabery, with workers who earned wages to purchase products. There, an industrial economy was created.”

Belém, Pará’s capital, was once a beacon of prosperity. The city’s grand Teatro da Paz, built in 1870, predates the peak of the Amazon rubber boom in Amazonas and Acre. The capital’s mansions are memories of this opulence. “During Amazonas and Acre’s rubber boom, large plantation owners brought migrants from the Northeast to work as rubber tappers. Here, no.” The populous Belém region, with over 40 islands, housed extractivist families who supplied rubber in the first cycle, enriching Belém. “This structure created the merchant elite and the regatões, bringing Belém goods to communities in exchange for riverside products. It spawned the intermediary, still crucial today. Açaí, for instance, relies on it,” Mr. Fernandes explains. “These structures are ancient and biome-conforming. They struggle to generate income at the end but keep the economy running.”

Today’s bioeconomy, shaped by that legacy, faces major inequalities but remains remarkably effective, argues the researcher “These ancient systems wouldn’t survive otherwise,” says Fernandes. Agroforestry practices have emerged from this history, with communities learning to manage the forest’s diversity for production. We need history to understand the economic structure we now call socio-biodiversity bioeconomy or bioecological bioeconomy,” he says. Agroforestry systems are part of it—communities learned to produce by managing the jungle’s diversity.

Roughly 100 kilometers from Belém and just over an hour by boat on the Guamá River lies Santa Maria, a community in the municipality of Acará. There, amid açaí and bacuri palm trees, is the demonstration unit for meliponiculture by the Peabiru Institute, at a site with 600 stingless bee hives. They are native to the Amazon. “We don’t produce honey here—this is a reproduction center. Bees from here go to projects,” says Cleiton José Oliveira Santos, the technician who manages the bees. “I started 19 years ago, and today the bees are my livelihood.”

Each hive holds around 3,000 bees and yields 3 to 4 kilos of honey. “These bees are key pollinators of our forests. Without them, there’s no forest,” he says. Families receive 30 hives each; in Acará alone, 40 producers are currently involved.

The project relies on innovations rooted in local wisdom. Mr. Santos’s mother proposed using PVC pipes to support the hives. “She saw that after a year, wooden stands broke, hives fell, and everything needed rebuilding. PVC doesn’t rot,” the technician recounts. The social technology includes a sponge soaked in used motor oil to deter ants and termites. “Without this old mattress foam soaked in used oil, likely all these nests would’ve been decimated,” says Manoel Potiguar, Peabiru’s project manager. The oil makes the PVC pipe slippery, preventing larger creatures like coatis and collared anteaters from stealing honey. “This technology results from a collective effort of Embrapa researchers, Peabiru’s experiences, and people like Cleiton’s mother. We create a model,” Mr. Potiguar states.

The last two years have been atypical in the region, with heat waves. Flowering patterns of urucum and ingá trees happened out of season and scarcely, when it did happen. “We expected honey collection in some places but couldn’t because the bees consumed their reserves,” Mr. Potiguar says. They improvised a climate change adaptation—a small bottle attached to hives with water and sugar to feed bees when flowers are scarce. “The process brings novelties, but handling honey and these bees is very old,” Mr. Potiguar acknowledges.

In April, Peabiru launched a new front for the project called “Women Friends of the Bees,” which will distribute 400 hives to women in riverside communities as an effort for food-security, sustainability, and social empowerment of female leaders. “We’ll place bee boxes in women’s communities on Combu and Cotejuba islands,” says Luciana Kellen, Peabiru’s communication and engagement manager, who led the team that took Valor to explore bioeconomy activities in the territory.

“Incorporating gender perspective in the project recognizes that women are major leaders and caretakers here,” Ms. Kellen says. “They already produce cocoa, andiroba, and many other fruits. Having a bee box makes perfect sense and is another income source.” says Ms. Kellen.

Açaí, Pará’s flagship product, depends heavily on native bees. “Açaí generates enormous income for Pará, has a well-structure value chain. But the açaí palm needs pollination, and only these bees can do it. If you clear the surrounding forest, production drops. These bees nest in hollow logs—you lose them, you lose açaí,” says Mr. Potiguar

According to Peabiru CEO João Meirelles, the Amazon is home to 185 identified bee species, with between 30 to 50 awaiting classification. “Native bees have been here for 4 million years. A healthy forest has up to 50 stingless bee species. A pasture or a degraded area maybe has one.” He estimates that 80% of açaí’s value comes from pollination—an ecosystem service that goes unpaid. “We treat it like free water. But it’s essential. We’re learning meliponiculture, invented 50 years ago. In Oiapoque, indigenous people said bees increased banana production. Thats what we wanted: to promote food security and a supplementary income.”

In the quilombola community of Guajará Mirim, a few dozen kilometers away, 200 families produce Brazil nuts, murumuru, uxi, cacao, and honey. “I’ve been going to the jungle since I was small. My father was an extractor of forest inputs for sale in Belém. Back then we were the largest producers of uxi, a tiny sweet fruit. We sold around 30 bags with a thousand uxi a week” recalls Carlos Teles, a local farmer. “He even rowed to the Ver-o-Peso market [in Belém]. Now, there are boats and middlemen who come to us.”

Their prized product today is “açaí da hora,” or “fresh açaí”—harvested and delivered on the same day to markets like Ver-o-Peso, one of the oldest in Brazil and a true wonder of Pará. “You have to consume it right away, or it loses value,” says Mr. Teles. “It’s risky work—a branch may break, or you may have an accident with snakes—but it pays off. I leave for the jungle at 6 a.m. and I’m back by 8:30.”

The family farmer says he sells açaí in his community or to traders who pick it up for Belém. “If I sell here, I’ll base the price on Belém’s rate that day. It could fetch R$300 or R$400 for a basket of 18 kilograms. In 2024, during the off-season, a 60-kilogram açaí sack reached R$1,000,” he says.

In communities near Belém, traders have less power. “But in isolated communities, like inland Marajó, the trader sets the price. Producers have to comply or lose what was harvested,” Mr. Potiguar notes. “That’s right: the açaí value chain here differs greatly from Marajó’s,” Mr. Teles agrees.

At COP30, the climate change conference Belém will host in November, bioeconomy may transition from territories to possibly gaining new dimensions. At Porto Futuro 2, the government reserves spaces to highlight it in business and the future. “One space will be dedicated to community businesses and startups, creating an environment to innovate with social technologies and science, boosting the state’s diverse bioeconomy segments,” says Camille Bemerguy, Pará’s deputy secretary of bioeconomy.

Joelson Conceição da Cunha lives near Mr. Teles and is also an açaí producer. Often working with his nephew Anderson Galiza da Cunha, they collect and leave “rasas”—baskets and containers used to sell the fruit—at a simple pier by the river. Someone comes to fetch or takes it himself to market.

He insists that in his community, they don’t only work with açaí: “We bring cupuaçu, bacaba, peach palm, uxi, piquiá, and other Amazonian fruits.” On the dirt road to the small port, Mr. Cunha points out the Amazon’s bioecological economy menu to forest novices. “Our Amazon forest is rich. That’s cocoa; a box with 60 units is worth R$70 or R$80. But for native açaí cultivators, having taperebá, andiroba, and murumuru simultaneously is crucial. That over there is cupuí, a smaller cocoa relative. Who eats it? Humans, bats, quatipurus,” he teaches. Quati, who? “Quatipuru, the famous Amazon squirrel.” Oh, I see.

*By Daniela Chiaretti  — Belém

Source: Valor International

https://valorinternational.globo.com/