A book on challenges to an inclusive bioeconomy in the Amazon

Thirty-two experts affiliated with academic and research institutions in the North, Northeast and Southeast regions of Brazil wrote its 12 chapters.

By Claudia Izique  |  Agência FAPESP – Experts agree that the bioeconomy is crucial to development of the Amazon region. However, in a region as vast as it is complex, fraught with challenges that inhibit sustainable development of supply chains, conservation of biodiversity, and the well-being, employment and income of communities, it is relevant to ask: “Bioeconomy for whom?”

Bioeconomia para quem? is the title of a book that answers the question in 12 forceful articles by 32 Brazilian authors affiliated with academic and research institutions in the North, Northeast and Southeast regions of the country. The volume was launched on June 19 in the auditorium of the Training & Development Directorate of the Federal University of Pará (Capacit/UFPA) in Belém.

“A well-managed bioeconomy, as is essential for sustainable companies, must also satisfy the demands of plant extractivists, fishers and forest dwellers,” the book’s editors write in the introduction. They are Adalberto Luis Val, a researcher at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA), and Jacques Marcovitch, a former Rector of the University of São Paulo (USP).

This perspective is adopted in each of the book’s five parts, offering novel approaches to the subject and recommendations on topics relating to supply chains, social organization, technology, forest restoration, crime and violence in the region.

“The book isn’t an end but a means to open a dialogue on possible routes to sustainable development of the Amazon,” Marcovitch explains. It is the result of three years of work, and every chapter is “an expedition”, with a table of priorities, actions and metrics at the end.

The research on value chains and inclusive bioeconomy synthesized in Bioeconomia para quem? Base para um Desenvolvimento Sustentável na Amazônia (which translates in English as “Bioeconomy for Who? A Basis for Sustainable Development in the Amazon”) was conducted as part of two projects supported by FAPESP (22/14597-8 and 20/08886-1), with Marcovitch acting as principal investigator in both cases. Funding was also provided by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

“A book with these contents is very welcome in the context of the Amazon+10 program,” says the foreword by Carlos Américo Pacheco, CEO of FAPESP, and Márcia Perales Mendes da Silva, President of the Amazonas State Research Foundation (FAPEAM). Both institutions are taking part in Amazon+10, an initiative led by the National Council of State Research Foundations (CONFAP).

Sustainable value chains

The first article analyzes the açaí value chain: the families that pick the fruit of the Açaí palm (Euterpe oleracea), co-ops, processors, and agroindustrial firms. The sector produces more than 1.6 million metric tons per year, worth almost BRL 3 million (now about USD 547 million). The activity is typical of the Amazon’s extractive economy, according to the authors, Peabiru Institute’s Flora Bittencourt, Manoel Potiguar and Thiara Fernandes: “A high degree of reliance on family labor, informality in work-related and commercial transactions, artisanal production, little use of technology, lack of standardization of processes and metrics, a high level of uncertainty, no systematic support in terms of credit or technical assistance, low density of representative institutions and/or interlocutors in the sector, and legal and normative vulnerabilities, especially relating to children and adolescents and to occupational health and safety.” They suggest a number of priority actions, ranging from the development of harvesting technology to an increase in the supply of credit, and a fair and equitable policy for the sharing of benefits.

Another forest product is cocoa, the fruit of the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao), discussed in the second chapter as one of the priorities for the bioeconomy in the Amazon, both as a commodity supplied to processing firms and representing 95% of the world market, and as a high-quality product for manufacturers of specialty chocolate. The Amazon region accounts for over half of Brazilian production, which totals 269,000 metric tons. Cultivation and harvesting of the pods, as well as fermentation and drying of the beans, account for only 4%-6% of the total value of the production chain. In a market governed by price and futures contracts, value appropriation by producers is scant, according to the authors, Lucas Xavier Trindade, affiliated with the State University of Santa Cruz (UESC) in Bahia state, and Fernando Antonio Teixeira Mendes, a member of the Executive Committee for Cocoa Cultivation Planning (CEPLAC). “Better governance is needed to enable the producers to appropriate the full value.”

The third chapter points to illegal fishing, a common practice in the Amazon, as a major obstacle to sustainable management of the Pirarucu (Arapaima giga), the world’s largest freshwater fish. “The law isn’t enforced owing to lack of personnel and money at IBAMA [Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, the country’s main environmental law enforcement agency] to cover a region as vast and complex as the Amazon Basin,” the authors write. They are Maria Sylvia Macchione Saes and Elis Regina Monte Feitosa, School of Economics, Management and Accounting, University of São Paulo (FEA-USP); Alexsandra Bezerra da Rocha, Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG), Paraíba state; and James Douglas Oliveira Bessa, Biodiversity & Forests, Amazonas state, IBAMA. River dwellers whose livelihood depends on the pirarucu have been forced to take the lead role in surveillance and enforcement duties, which make up for costly and dangerous work. The authors recommend several measures, including certification of origin, and monitoring of lakes via satellite, drone and volunteer environmental agents recruited from the community.

The first part of the book ends with a chapter on meliponiculture – stingless beekeeping – a sustainable practice that promotes biodiversity conservation, crop pollination, and income generation for local communities. “Improvements to management and production techniques are essential in order not only to increase productivity but also to assure the quality of the honey marketed,” the authors write. They are Vera Imperatriz-Fonseca, Institute of Biosciences (IB), USP; Camila Maia-Silva, CNPq scholarship awardee; Ana Carolina Mendes dos Santos, Ministry of the Environment (MMA); and Hermógenes Sá de Oliveira and João Meirelles Filho, Peabiru Institute.

Citizenship, knowledge and technology

The second part of the book comprises two articles that discuss the strengthening of “Amazon citizenship” and social organizations in the context of “authentic” and sustainable bioeconomics. In the first, the authors highlight four pillars for a bioeconomy to drive development: zero deforestation; inclusion of and participation by Indigenous communities, and use of their knowledge; diversification of production methods; and equitable sharing of the benefits derived from sociobiodiversity.

“For this to happen, however, it will be necessary to implement a system of bioregional governance and ‘environmental diplomacy’ that promotes better management of natural resources and strengthens human and territorial rights, while also promoting recognition of different identities, rights and knowledge systems,” write Olivia Zerbini, Patrícia Pinho, Ariane Rodrigues and Paulo Moutinho, all of whom are affiliated with the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM).

In the second article, José Augusto Lacerda Fernandes, a professor at UFPA, and Heloise Berkowitz, affiliated with France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), discuss meta-organizations as a strategy to achieve the bioeconomy’s full transformative potential. “What is needed is an ecosystem that enables it to develop and engagement by the various parties interested in the establishment of an inclusive bioeconomy in the region,” they write. This, in turn, requires novel governance mechanisms, especially to connect with the traditional communities involved in this process (Indigenous people, quilombolas [inhabitants of settlements founded in Brazil by escaped slaves of African origin], local residents, fishers, extractivists, etc.), and hence forms of organization based on collaboration.

Information and new technologies

Part three of the book highlights the potential development of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) and of the Amazon Rainforest biome by means of new technologies. The main NTFPs are açaí, cocoa, Brazil nuts, babassu, honey and pirarucu. However, many NTFPs are associated with low levels of productivity and income. “Factors such as economic geography, the level of maturity of production and market systems, and the biological characteristics of the products may impair their economic and environmental sustainability. These factors should be taken into account in designing interventions to create proper conditions for local and inclusive development,” write the authors of the first article, Tomas Rosenfeld and Peter Ponsche, University of Freiburg, Germany.

In the second article, Val and Isabela Litaiff of Nilton Lins University in Amazonas state argue that “a whole Eldorado” is waiting to be revealed in the biodiversity of the forest, provided the knowledge of traditional communities is combined with currently available tools such as genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics. However, this requires “continuous research involving various types of experiment to test novel products and processes and to improve existing ones. It requires profound interaction between the knowledge produced by the original forest dwellers and the modern knowledge produced by scientists in the laboratory. The bioeconomy will exist in direct proportion to the depth of knowledge about an unknown world, a brave new world in the making,” they write.

But this is not enough. “In order to capture this potential, an alternative vision is needed to complement the bioeconomy of sociobiodiversity: computational bioeconomics,” according to the authors of the third article, Juan Carlos Castilia-Rubino, co-founder of the Earth Biogenome Project, and Luciana Russo Correa Castilla of FEA-USP. This technology, they explain, integrates multiple science and engineering disciplines, such as genetic sequencing, artificial intelligence applied to biology, gene editing, synthetic biology, and automation of bioproduct development with laboratory robotics: “The focus is on deciphering the world of biological data for the production of advanced bioproducts of unique quality, relying more on in silico biology than in vitro biology.”

Domesticating the forest

Forest restoration and agricultural practices are the theme of the fourth part. In the first chapter, the authors analyze the distribution of deforestation in the region, taking into account the various players involved and the need to develop differentiated forest restoration strategies. They also describe the most promising large-scale restoration strategies for the Amazon, considering potential income generation, socioenvironmental benefits, and restoration model scalability. “Reconfiguration of the restoration perspective is the priority. Instead of a punitive approach, what is needed is one that recognizes it as a viable and sustainable alternative, both economically and in terms of ecological and climate-related benefits,” write Nathalia Nascimento and Pedro Henrique Santin Brancalion, Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ-USP) in Brazil.

The second chapter focuses on the agricultural practices of Indigenous communities. The landscape in the Amazon was “domesticated” in the sixteenth century, and “both past and present inhabitants appear to share a common type of relationship with what we call nature,” according to the authors, Camila Loureiro Dias and Joana Cabral de Oliveira, State University of Campinas (UNICAMP); and Vera Lúcia Aguiar Moura, a Tukano who lives in the Upper Negro Indigenous Territory in Amazonas state. It was exactly this type of relationship that enabled the Indigenous inhabitants to conserve and increase the biome’s biodiversity, they argue: “In other words, if there is biodiversity, it was and largely continues to be actively constructed by the Indigenous people who live there, through the relationship they establish with the other beings that make up and inhabit the forest. It is a relationship that involves respect, does not entail domination, and values diversity.” We all have much to learn from the agricultural practices of Indigenous communities as far as promoting biodiversity is concerned, they add.

Crime and violence

The last article in the book is by Marcovitch and Val, and discusses a problem as sensitive as it is urgent. “For decades, the region has been rife with localized conflicts, but now there are 22 criminal groups and/or factions occupying local territories and operating in 178 municipalities. Other countries in the Amazon region face similar challenges. The problem is continental and must be tackled,” they write. “Millions of river dwellers throughout the Amazon, one of the planet’s greatest environmental assets, consume contaminated food every day”, they add, stressing the urgency of large-scale decontamination of all rivers that display signs of mercury.

“A concerted effort by government and civil society should be made to promote human wellbeing and conserve nature in the Amazon biome by sending the Supreme Court and Federal Prosecution Service recommendations formulated by the nonprofit FBSP [Brazilian Public Safety Forum] and studies focusing on the poisoning of the Amazon’s rivers, to support decisions by judges and prosecutors. The mechanisms called for by regional organizations should be used. Both governmental organizations such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), and non-governmental organizations such as the Interamerican Network of Academies of Science (IANAS) and the Inter Academy Partnership (IAP), should participate in this effort and extend its scope,” they insist.

Bioeconomia para quem? Base para um Desenvolvimento Sustentável na Amazônia is published by Com Arte, a laboratory of the Publishing Course at the University of São Paulo’s School of Communications and Arts (ECA-USP), with the support of USP, INPA, UFPA and Peabiru Institute. The entire book can be downloaded from: www.livrosabertos.abcd.usp.br/portaldelivrosUSP/catalog/book/1337.