by Bill Hinchberger
Antônio Carlos “Carlinhos” de Lara is serving time on parole for poaching palm hearts from a state park near his home. A strapping fellow of 37 with movie star good looks, Carlinhos was caught twice by park rangers. One time he spent 30 days in the hole.
Between meetings with his parole officer, Carlinhos now spends much of his time planting and grooming palm trees rather than slicing stalks with his machete in the protected forest. Adding a loan of 200 Brazilian reals (almost US $70) from the Guapiruvú Neighborhood Association (AGUA) to some savings, he was able to acquire 30,000 palm seedlings. Soon he can begin harvesting his crop, adding a few hundred dollars a month to his modest income as a small-time banana farmer.
Home to 150 families at the end of a long stretch of dirt road, Guapiruvú sits astride an entrance to Intervales State Park in São Paulo state. Two other state parks lie adjacent. The three reserves protect a bit of what’s left of the Atlantic rainforest. Now a series of disconnected green slivers in Brazil’s otherwise gray urbanized east coast, the Atlantic rainforest once occupied a vast expanse of territory comparable to the Amazon.
São Paulo is Brazil’s richest state, but Guapiruvú is in the state’s poorest region, Vale do Ribeira. Protected areas account for over half of the land area in the in the Vale do Ribeira. For poor, undereducated folks like Carlinhos, palm heart poaching has become one of the few viable options for making a living. “I gathered palm hearts out of necessity,” he says. Poaching remains, by most accounts, the leading source of income in Guapiruv.
By promoting community-based, environmentally-conscious economic development, AGUA is helping to offer alternatives to poaching. From a banana-distribution collective to youth litter brigades, from ecotourism to agroforestry, from medicinal plant research to the micro-credit program that benefited Carlinhos—AGUA seems to be doing it all. Sustained in part by a grant from Global Greengrants Fund, AGUA has proven itself to be remarkably ambitious. Its strategy has been to err on the side of experimentation and promote a diversity of development ideas. “They say it’s important to focus,” says community leader Gilberto Ohta de Oliveira, “but we have a focus: sustainable development.”
Guapiruvú has known development before, albeit hardly of the sustainable variety. Carlinhos’ trajectory is illustrative. Two decades ago, he worked in a sawmill that processed illegally logged trees. When officials began cracking down, he sowed the family plot with ginger. Buyers would swing through and offer generous cash advances. Carlinhos and his neighbors were suddenly living the good life. Carlinhos bought a car. But then disease all but wiped out the ginger. The plant’s leaves turned yellow; its rhizome rotted, and with it, the local economy.
A fairly isolated village (Brazil’s ubiquitous cellular phones donít even work there), Guapiruvú is formally part of a municipality called Sete Barras. With the ginger crash, Carlinhos sold his tractor and moved into town. When things didnít work out, he moved back to the land and took up palm heart poaching. Others returned to the region’s traditional commodity, bananas. “Sete Barras was the banana capital,” recalled community leader Matilde Hespanho do Carmo. Bananas worked for a while—until the bottom dropped out of the market and wholesale prices plummeted.
Things may have looked bleak, but Guapiruvú is blessed with a handful of top-notch community activists and boasted a fairly well-organized neighborhood organization. Greengrants’ Brazilian partner Vitae Civilis had worked with people in Guapiruvú on a regional project to promote medicinal plant production. So when Vitae Civilis began looking for cohesive community groups in Vale do Ribeira as potential local partners, the shoe seemed to fit. “We spoke the same language,” noted Ohta.
This was 1997. With Vitae Civilis’ help, the Guapiruvú Neighborhood Association cut through bureaucratic red-tape to get itself recognized before the law. Joint projects in the initial phase included agricultural extension assistance and training for the community’s women.
Many of AGUA’s projects are designed to create an economic buffer to the boom-and-bust cycles that have plagued the community in recent decades. Geraldo Xavier de Oliveira looks like he was sent straight from central casting, a typical peasant. But the 52-year-old farmer actually traces his activist roots to opposition to the 1964-85 military dictatorship as a union leader and to the Catholic liberation theology movement. Showing off some palm seedlings he’s planted among banana trees, he talked about why he’s adopting labor-intensive, limited-input agroforestry. “To earn a quick buck is one thing,” he said. “To earn money with security is another. Weíre thinking here about survival.”
That down-to-earth pragmatism extends to the way AGUA spends its money: cautiously, thoughtfully and frugally. When it received its grant from Global Greengrants Fund, community leaders held the cash in virtual escrow as they debated how to spend it. Eventually they awarded a loan to community entrepreneurs to purchase a trailer to transport tourists to the river for inner-tube float trips. The money will be repaid from ecotourism revenues. The rest went into the revolving micro-credit fund that Carlinhos tapped to help buy his palm seedlings.
In a few short years, AGUA has grown in stature to the point that Vitae Civilis customarily brings it on board for national and international campaigns and projects, notably for the preparatory meetings for the Johannesburg development summit in 2002. “We helped raise this kid,” said Gemima Born, Vitae Civilis program coordinator. “Now it’s our partner.”
Bill Hinchberger is a former correspondent for The Financial Times and Business Week and is now editor and publisher of the website BrazilMax.