Indigenous community selected for research on sustainable use of land and resources

The vast reservation is well preserved but surrounded by deforested areas and suffers pressure from ranching, logging, mining, and expanding soybean plantations.

By José Tadeu Arantes  |  Agência FAPESP – A’Ukre, one of 19 villages located in the Kayapó Indigenous Territory in southern Pará, Brazil, has been chosen as a socio-environmental “laboratory” for a study of collective land use and natural resource management in the Amazon Rainforest.

The research project, entitled “Governance of land-use change: a collaboration to understand the impacts of institutional arrangements on Amazonian forest resource use”, is being coordinated in Brazil by Patricia Fernanda do Pinho and supported by FAPESP and the University of Michigan in the United States.

“We decided to study the Kayapó Indigenous Territory because it’s a vast island of forest conserved in the middle of a sea of degraded landscapes, suffering enormous pressure from extensive cattle ranching, logging, mining, and steadily expanding soybean plantations,” Pinho said.

“We set out to understand how this proud and warlike Native Amerindian community has successfully protected its endangered natural resources, promoting sustainability and maintaining biodiversity while helping to mitigate climate adversities.”

Pinho is a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics & Atmospheric Sciences (IAG-USP) in Brazil. She graduated in biological sciences from the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in São Paulo State and holds a PhD in human ecology from the University of California Davis in the United States.

The research project is associated with International Forestry Resources & Institutions (IFRI), a global network of 14 institutions called Collaborating Research Centers (CRCs). Coordinated by the University of Michigan, IFRI’s main goal is to study how governance arrangements affect forests, fisheries, and other common resources, as well as the people who depend on them.

“IFRI also works with the users of these resources and public policymakers to help design and implement evidence-based policies,” Pinho said. “So, we set out to survey A’Ukre using the research protocol developed by the network. We analyzed ecological, economic, and social variables and compared local data with IFRI’s global scale based on data collected in other countries. No such survey has ever been performed in Brazil’s indigenous communities.”

Before they began, the researchers consulted the Kayapó community and the non-governmental organizations that work with it to find out whether they were interested and would allow the study to proceed.

“We succeeded in winning the community’s acceptance and began implementing the IFRI’s protocol regarding local resource management strategies. The results were summarized in an article entitled ‘Characterizing sustainable community-based forest management: the case of the Kayapó indigenous people in Brazilian Amazonia’, to be published shortly in a scientific journal,” Pinho said.

“A particularly important outcome was the development of a course to train the villagers from A’Ukre to collect scientific data so that they personally can control and manage the resources available in their territory. The data include tree diameters, changes observed in leaf structure and fruit quality, the quantity of nuts produced by each tree, the abundance of bird species that act as seed dispersers, and the prices for which they sell produce to middlemen who sell it on the foreign market,” she explained.

“All these variables were measured for each of the seasons in the Amazon region: rising water, high water, falling water, and low water. Other important variables are hydrologic, such as the volume of the river, which is the only means to ship out produce and in recent years has been affected by climate change in the region.”

Constant encroachment

For some years, the Kayapó have concentrated on extracting and trading Brazil nuts (Bertholletia excelsa) while also generating income from the region’s biodiversity, which includes such products as coumarin-containing tonka beans, produced by the tree known locally as cumaru (Dipteryx odorata) and valued for their scent, flavor, and medicinal properties.

The vast size of their territory (1.1 million hectares) and the abundance of available natural resources are benefits for the Kayapó, but they also represent a daunting challenge due to the difficulty of controlling access. On this scale, in fact, encroachment can be detected only from the air or by satellite monitoring. And encroachment is constant.

“They’re surrounded by big landowners with rural properties devoted to short-term profit and predatory use of resources,” Pinho said. “And they’re subject to various kinds of violence. Yet, the Kayapó have managed to maintain their autonomy in facing all these challenges.”

The population comprises some 7,000 people living in villages with between 200 and 500 inhabitants each that are dotted along the banks of the main rivers that cross the territory.

The villages are so far apart that it sometimes takes several days to travel from one to another. As a result, decision-making is decentralized, and each village enjoys considerable autonomy. However, the isolation also strengthens the bonds among the inhabitants of each village.

Difficult access and the hazards faced by those who venture into the region tend to favor conservation, as does the Kayapó’s reputation for ferocity in battle – they have sometimes proved implacable with invaders who dare encroach on their lands.

“Another very important point is that profiting financially from traditional forms of economic exploitation of the available resources isn’t their priority,” Pinho said. “Above all else, they prize what we might call ‘socio-environmental well-being’. These elements should be highlighted to set an example to other groups who depend on sustainable management of protected areas, and not just indigenous people.”