Brazilian Restaurant Serves Amazonian Treats

The vast Amazon rainforest has inspired a cuisine pioneer in Brazil. Combining the sensual pleasures of fine dining and the joy of tasting new flavours with a pursuit of sustainable and profitable local farming, a chef is inventing a new Brazilian cuisine and showing the way to create sustainable incomes.

The kitchens of chef Alex Atala are as much a laboratory of food experimentation as a place to cook meals. He applies French and Italian cooking styles to traditional Brazilian dishes and ingredients. Since opening his restaurant D.O.M in 1999 in Sao Paulo, Atala has relentlessly pursued – through adventurous journeys around Brazil and into the Amazon rainforest – new flavours, foods and cuisines native to the country. When he started out, he was surprised to discover the lack of knowledge about native Brazilian ingredients, both within the country and outside. He has turned himself into a champion for local communities, helping them turn local foods into sources of income.

Brazil, home to the largest portion of the Amazon rainforest, is hoping to become the world’s biggest food producer – it is currently second after the United States – addressing a major global problem and providing income for Brazil’s farmers.

The challenge is to increase food production – providing income for Brazil’s farmers and helping address a major global problem – without destroying the Amazon’s complex ecosystem.

Amazonia, the region that takes in the mighty Amazon River and the vast Amazon rainforest, is home to the most diverse range of plant and animal species in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Rainforest).
Brazil is currently debating legislation to ease restrictions on how small farmers can use land in the Amazon rainforest. It would loosen regulations on farming near river banks and hilltops. Many working in Brazil’s agricultural industry believe the country is not living up to its potential. They say Brazil could surpass the United States as an agricultural producer if allowed to use all its arable land.

This is a crucial debate not only for the future of the environment, but also for humanity. World demand for food keeps rising as populations increase and living standards rise in many countries, such as China. Another trend at work is increasing global urbanization, where more people are leaving agriculture as a business to live in cities and peri-urban areas to pursue a better quality of life. These growing megacities will need vast amounts of food to feed their populations.

Brazil has, in recent years, increased the amount of territory designated as a protected area in the Amazon forest.

The National Institute for Space Research in Brazil (http://www.inpe.br/ingles/index.php) has satellite photographs showing deforestation in the Amazon at its slowest pace for two decades. But more recent reports show deforestation accelerating again in 2011.

Sao Paulo’s D.O.M. Restaurante (http://www.domrestaurante.com.br) – the name is an acronym for the Latin phrase “God, the best and greatest” – has used the rainforest’s rich harvest of foods to create an award-winning destination restaurant that prioritises sustainable sources. It was ranked seventh in this year’s S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.

Atala says on his website he “is bringing a new sustainable Brazilian cuisine to the world’s attention.” His motto is “It is necessary to cook and eat as a citizen.”

The restaurant celebrates small-scale producers when sourcing food products (http://www.domrestaurante.com.br/#/en-us/menu/ingredientes).  One pioneering food producer Atala works with is DRO Ervas e Flores (herbs and flowers) (http://www.droervaseflores.com). Located in the city of Cequilho, it grows edible herbs and flowers for restaurants. The flowers cultivated by DRO serve mainly to decorate plates, but can also be eaten. At the company farm, the flowers produced include violas, begonias, borago, monks cress, chrysanthemums, pumpkin flowers, coriander flowers, sweet alyssum, mini roses, basil flowers, roses, rockets and violets.

One notable success has been the Amazonian root priprioca. Once it was used only for cosmetics, but Atala has turned it into an essence for cooking. He has conducted original research into uses for the root, which is produced by small communities in the Amazon.

Other Brazilian foods he champions include black rice, an unusual variety sought after for its health benefits. It has 30 percent more fibre and 20 percent more protein than white rice, and less fat and calories than brown rice. The black rice used at D.O.M is produced in the Paraiba Valley in Sao Paulo state by Chicao Ruzene (http://www.arrozpreto.com.br), who researches new varieties on the rice farm.

Jambu, a herb from the Amazon, gives an electrical sensation when it is chewed. Tucupi, a yellowish liquid from pressed wild manioc tuber, is used to season typical Amazonian dishes made with fish, fowl and ducks.

Already well known in his native Brazil, Atala has become the country’s first internationally known celebrity chef and standard-bearer for the “New Brazilian Gastronomy.”

His origins are inspiring: a former DJ and punk, he sold his records and went on a trip backpacking in Europe when he was 18. He made a living as a painter and dishwasher until a friend convinced him to go to catering school. Upon graduation, he worked in some of the top restaurants in Italy and France. This apprenticeship left Atala skilled in the techniques of French cuisine – considered one of the most disciplined and methodical in the world – and he returned in 1994 to Brazil.

The restaurant has ultra-modern design and the sleek kitchen is home to a collection of Amazonian art. Atala acts as an ambassador for the country’s cuisine and flavours to the world. He opened a second restaurant in 2009, Dalva e Dito (http://www.dalvaedito.com.br), which celebrates home cooking by mothers and grandmothers and features only local produce.

Atala’s inclusion of ‘wild’ ingredients has inspired other chefs. His expeditions into the Amazon continue to discover and study the biodiversity of the rainforest and the culinary culture of its inhabitants.

His long-term agenda is to boost local farmers and food production and to increase the availability of ‘wild’ foods in the nation’s supermarkets. If he gets his way, people around the world will be eating the Brazilian way.

“French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese chefs, for example, have their own cuisine and give value to their terroir (local) produce,” Atala explained his passion to The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. “We have to do the same in Brazil! Our ingredients are exotic now, but can become popular in the near future.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: June 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Shoes with Sole: Ethiopian Web Success Story

Ethiopia’s bustling capital, Addis Ababa, is experiencing a building and business boom. Foreign investors and Ethiopia’s entrepreneurial and widespread global diaspora are investing again in the country. But Ethiopia still relies for most of its foreign currency wealth on exports of unprocessed coffee beans and leather hides — a model that leaves the bulk of the profits made outside of Ethiopia.

But one shoe company provides an example of a home-grown business that is finding success in the international marketplace, while repatriating most of the profits for its goods back to Ethiopia, creating jobs and local wealth.

Ethiopia’s economy is mostly dependent on agriculture, which accounts for 60 percent of exports and 80 percent of employment (CIA World Factbook). The country has a tiny private sector and high youth unemployment. It is difficult to find funding for small businesses. Yet, because of the high population growth, the country needs to create more jobs.

The Economist magazine has forecast Ethiopia’s economy will grow by 7 percent in 2010, becoming the fifth fastest growing economy in the world, and on course to surpass Kenya to become East Africa’s biggest economy. While this sounds impressive, the country has to run hard to create enough jobs to meet its growing population and still faces significant food security problems.

One company, soleRebels, is combining a clever twist on a local tradition – recycling rubber from old truck tires into shoes, locally known as selate shoes – with sophisticated design concepts and high quality craftsmanship to make a global footwear hit.

Co-founder and managing director Bethleham Tilahun Alemu, a 30-year-old African web-vending entrepreneur, has turned this local craft into a global fashion design hit by adding colourful cotton and leather uppers to the tire shoes. The recycled rubber shoes come in many styles: from handmade flip-flops to boat shoes, loafers, and athletic trainers resembling the popular American sports shoe, Converse (http://www.converse.com/).

SoleRebels’ (http://solerebelsfootwear.weebly.com/index.html) shoe factory is on the outskirts of Addis Ababa in the historic village of Zenabework. Despite its location, it is reaching the international markets through online retailers like Amazon.com. Shipments take between three and five days to arrive in the United States.

And the secret to this small start-up’s success? Apart from great shoes and funky design, Alemu puts it down to this: “We are sitting in Addis Ababa but acting like an American company,” she told The Guardian newspaper.

It doesn’t hurt that Alemu is also money-smart: she is a former accountant.

Started five years ago, soleRebels now employs 45 full-time staff making 500 pairs of shoes a day. The shoes cost between US $33 and US $64. They are also being sold in Japan and the United Kingdom on Amazon’s shoe-selling website, http://www.javari.co.uk.

In 2010, Alemu hopes soleRebels will make US $481,000. But soleRebels has an even more ambitious goal: to become “the Timberland or Sketchers of Africa.”

Timberland (http://www.timberland.com/home/index.jsp), an American shoe and boot maker, has been a pioneer in high-quality leather footwear, breaking new ground in adopting green manufacturing processes and exploiting the power of the web by allowing customers to customise their footwear.

SoleRebels has cleverly exploited the advantages of the global marketplace to grow its customers and profits. The business has done this with just one leg-up: a line of credit from the government to help with large orders. With 6.2 million people out of a population of 80 million needing food aid, Ethiopia is still highly dependent on international aid. But Alemu is showing there is a way to build a sustainable successful business.

Inspiration for Alemu came about when she was thinking what Ethiopian product could be produced in a sustainable way. She remembered the sandals worn in the country.

“Recycling is a way of life here – you don’t throw things away that you can use again and again,” she said. “I wanted to build on that idea.”

Ethiopian shoe makers have had a difficult time in recent years, trying to compete with cheaper Chinese imports. But rather than just trying to come up with a shoe that was even cheaper than the Chinese ones, soleRebels decided to build a business selling shoes to the more lucrative export market.

Alemu reasoned that good design would attract a higher price. She did research on the internet to find out which designs worked well and what were the latest trends in footwear.

This research formed the basis of her range of shoes, which have catchy names like Class Act or Gruuv Thong. The sandals and flip-flops are either cotton-covered or leather covered. The Urban Runner shoe sells best and is inspired by the Converse All Star sneaker.

SoleRebels has a regular supplier of old truck tires and inner tubes and has women weave and dye the cotton, jute and hemp uppers for the shoes. Almost all materials are locally sourced. Old army uniforms are cannibalized for their camouflage pattern.

SoleRebels has also been canny in seeking Fair Trade certification (http://www.fairtrade.org.uk) to help with marketing and selling the shoes.

To increase the market for the shoes, Alemu bombarded American retailers with emails and shoe samples to pique their interest. Because of the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act (http://www.agoa.gov), soleRebels’ shoes can be imported into the United States duty-free: a big price advantage in the U.S. marketplace which has helped grab the interest of retailers like Whole Foods and Urban Outfitters.

This interest soon snowballed, and people were placing orders through the soleRebels website (http://solerebelsfootwear.weebly.com/index.html). Orders come by courier from Ethiopia in about a week to the United States.

With all this interest building, Amazon, the leviathan online retailer, decided to become a customer for the shoes. Online retailing has been a huge boost to the growth of soleRebels. According to Alemu, it has enabled the company “to understand the market needs and demands in real time” — a huge advantage to a start-up company far away from its markets.

There is another advantage to using the web to grow a business: it has enabled soleRebels to take greater control of the whole process. The company negotiates directly with retailers, handling orders and credit collection, and this makes sure most of the profits of the business return to Ethiopia.

Making soleRebels quickly profitable has been a benefit to its workers. Starters at the company make US $1.92 a day, while experienced shoe-makers earn US $11 a day (a good wage in Ethiopia).

“In Ethiopia we have become used to taking money from the West, to always getting help,” Alemu told the Guardian. “That does not make for a sustainable economy. We need to solve our own problems.” And what does success enable them to do? SoleRebels are now building a solar-powered factory to replace their current workshop. And there is a steely pride in the firm’s success: “People buy soleRebels because they are good, not just because they are green or from Ethiopia,” Alemu said. “Our product speaks for itself.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: January 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Rainforest Gum Gets Global Market

Mexico is home to the second largest rainforest in the Americas after the Amazon jungle. But the country’s forests face serious threats from logging, cattle ranching and agriculture. As much as 80 percent of Mexico’s original forests have already been lost.

A group of Mexican farmers is now using sophisticated product marketing to preserve their income, and the 1.3 million hectares of rainforest as well. They are called chicleros and they harvest the gum needed to make natural chewing gum, a once-booming industry laid waste by the arrival of synthetic chewing gum in the 1950s. Their story is an excellent example of how a declining industry can turn things around with a smart plan and sophisticated marketing.

A collection of 56 cooperatives comprising 2,000 chicleros – called Consorcio Chiclero – is now making, marketing and selling its own brand of chewing gum: Chicza (http://www.chicza.com/index.php). The chicleros are supporting a community of 10,000 people across the three states of Yucatán, Campeche and Quintana Roo.

Gum has been chewed in Mexico to clean teeth as far back as the ancient Mayan people in the second century AD.

The gum harvesting business was dying out and young people, put off by the low pay, were leaving for jobs elsewhere. The adminstrators of the chiclero co-operative created Chicza Rainforest Gum brand to save the industry. They made a deal with Britain’s Waitrose supermarket chain, which specializes in fair trade products, and the gum is being launched in 100 stores.

The brightly coloured packages of chewing gum are now being sold as organic and a way to preserve the forest. Frustrated by the decades of decline and attendant poverty and community decay, the chicleros decided to take matters into their own hands. Five years ago they decided to avoid the middlemen who would buy their raw gum products, and instead manufacture and market the chewing gum themselves. And it is paying off: by adding value to the raw product, each farmer’s income has grown six times higher than he would earn as a mere provider of raw material.

The gum comes in three flavours: wild mint, heirloom lime and spearmint. Future flavours will blend tropical fruits, herbs and spices.

The Consorcio Chiclero coordinates the production, the logistics, the trade and the finances for the manufacture of gum from the chicozapote tree (Manilkara zapota).

Certified organic, the Chicza gum is completely natural and free of synthetic ingredients and also biodegrades when it is discarded – a boon to city governments who hate the mess and cost of traditional gum left on sidewalks.

The farmers work in the rainforest at the southern end of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucat%C3%A1n_Peninsula), bordering Guatemala and Belize. It is a place with one of the most bio diverse ecosystems in the world, and an environment the farmers are in harmony with. The chicle gum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicle) is harvested from chicozapote trees – some living for more than 300 years – by hacking z-shaped cuts into the bark of the 100 foot trees. The harmless cuts zig zag down the tree and a bucket is placed at the bottom to collect the dripping sap.

Once collected, the sap is boiled, dried and made into a sticky paste, which is then kneaded and shaped into bricks called marquetas. Each marqueta is carefully marked by its maker. Since the sustainable management of their rainforests is certified by FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) (http://www.fsc.org/), these marks contain relevant information that tells the name of the chiclero who harvested it, and the exact location of the harvested tree in the rainforest. Few products offer such perfect traceability.

“I started following my dad around the rainforest when I was 10 and working when I was 12,” farmer Porfirio Banos told The Guardian newspaper. “I am a chiclero to my core.”

Working in a remote area of rainforest jungle with just spider monkeys for company, the chicleros are paid by the amount of chicle harvested

“We don’t kill the trees like farmers do when they clear land to grow corn or graze cattle,” says Roberto Aguilar, 60. “We leave a wound, it’s true, but eight years after it is healed and producing chicle again.”

The chicleros face two main risks while doing the job: falling from the trees if their rope gives out; and being bitten by poisonous snakes.

Chicle was once the basis of all commercial chewing gum. Beginning in New York 141 years ago, it was the only source for chewing gum until the 1950s, when synthetic substitutes destroyed the industry.

It was the economic desperation of a Mexican general, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, living in exile in the United States in 1869, that gave birth to gum-chewing as a global practice. Working with a local inventor, Thomas Adams, he tried to use the chicle to make a rubber substitute. But when this failed, Adams added sugar and flavouring, making chewing gum.

Apart from being a great chew, the natural gum’s unique selling point is saving money: local governments tight for cash are looking for other ways to deal with the menace of chewing gum on pavements. A small fortune is spent every year trying to keep streets clean of gum. The British alone spend over UK £150 million every year trying to clean their streets of chewing gum.

And despite the global recession, the chicleros are optimistic they can do well: during the Great Depression of the 1930s, chewing gum was an affordable treat and sold well.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: April 2009

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Rainforest Rubbers Save Lives

Two development goals are being achieved with one innovative business in Brazil. By using natural rubber tapped from trees in the Amazon rainforest to make condoms, Brazil is able to afford the cost of distributing condoms to tackle its HIV/AIDS crisis. Brazil currently imports more than 120 million condoms every year from China, Republic of Korea and Thailand, making it the world’s biggest single buyer of condoms. The government gives them away for free as part of a national campaign to combat HIV. More than 620,000 people in Brazil are living with HIV out of a population of more than 186 million (UNAIDS, 2005).

The Natex company, co-owned by the public health ministry and the north-western state government of Acre, has established a factory to turn rubber from the world’s biggest rainforest into condoms. The business has created 500 jobs at the factory and 150 jobs for the local indigenous population – the Xapuri – who are traditional rubber tappers.

The factory hopes to produce 100 million condoms a year from local rubber – just 20 million shy of all the condoms the country currently has to import – and could even reach 270 million at full capacity.

“This product will allow people to make love with security and to better plan their futures,” said Raimundo Barros, vice president of the local agricultural association.

The 15,000 Xapuri people who live on the Chico Mendes reserve – named after a conservationist and rubber tapper murdered by ranchers in 1988 – tap seringai trees, which produce rubber that is said to be a more effective barrier to the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), than synthetic rubber condoms.

The factory’s 500 employees will earn a total of Reais $2.2 million (US $1.3 million) while the tappers will see their income increase by 250 per cent as demand goes up for the rubber, according to Natex.

“Because of this I’ve managed to buy a few cows and give my family a better life,” rubber tapper Hugo Paz de Souza, 43, told local newspaper Pagina 20. Paz de Souza said the factory will double his income to US $394 a month.

The fact the trees will be saved because of their value as sources of rubber is a great boon to the world’s environment. The trees in the Amazon rainforest – the “world’s lungs” as some call it – face the threat of being chopped down to make way for Brazil’s booming agricultural economy. Official figures released in January 2008 showed that between August and December 2007, about 2,700 square miles were chopped down illegally in the Amazon rainforest. It was the first increase in deforestation after three years of declines and coincided with a rise in global food prices.

Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister, told the Guardian newspaper the Natex condom would help create “a new pattern of production and a new process of inclusion that would value the forest being left standing”.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: May 2008

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Saving the Amazon Forest While Making a Living

 

The vast Amazon rainforest straddles Brazil (over half is there), and stretches over many countries, including Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. It holds more than 2,500 tree species and 30 per cent of all known plant species – 30,000 in all. It contains the world’s largest tropical forest national park, Brazil’s Tumucumaque Mountains National Park(http://www.amazon-rainforest.org/places-of-interest.html). Over 25 per cent of drugs sold in pharmacies contain rainforest ingredients, and the rainforest acts as the Earth’s lungs, absorbing carbon dioxide, and emitting oxygen.

Logging in the forest is widespread and highly wasteful – 356,000 square kilometres of rainforest have been deforested (WWF). In the past 50 years, Ecuadorhas lost over 50 per cent of its tropical rainforest.

More than 26 million people live in the forest, with 11 million on the Brazilian side. While the Amazon’s indigenous people have little ecological impact, it is people drawn in to logging and farming who do most of the damage. Slash and burn techniques are common.

Preserving this critical natural environment while providing jobs for the local inhabitants is a challenge being taken up by a clutch of entrepreneurs. This new wave of entrepreneurs seeks to run businesses that respect the environment and provide a good living to those they employ.

The global garment industry is one of the most lucrative in the world (in 2000 consumers spent over US $1 trillion on buying clothes). Most of the manufacturing takes place in the poorest places on earth, and the garment and fashion industries contribute to vast quantities of pollution in these countries, either by using toxic chemicals and pesticides, by polluting and depleting water supplies, or through inefficient processes, transport and waste.

Brazilian enterprise Treetap (http://www.treetap.com.br/) (formally AmazonLife) is seeking to change the fashion industry by selling sustainable materials to top designers. Their patented rubberized natural latex is sold under the brand name Treetap. It is made from natural rubber native to the region, and it uses a fair trade system to ensure its suppliers receive a living wage. The company itself uses the substance to produce its own handbags and purses.

By promoting the sustainable use of a rainforest resource and focusing on social as well as financial returns, the company is proving the value of a “triple-bottom line” approach to business – where social and environmental concern is just as important as profit.

The company has placed the preservation of the Amazon rainforest at the centre of its business plan. Tribal communities in the Amazon depend on rubber tree tapping for their livelihoods, and Treetap works with the Rubber Tappers Association (http://www.brazilmax.com/news2.cfm/tborigem/pl_amazon/id/10) to save 900,000 hectares of forest from exploitation.

Over 45 families are supported, and they are paid eight times the market rate for their rubber. Its Rio de Janeiro factory supplies several European fashion designers with their faux-leather fabric to make clothes, backpacks, upscale furniture and handbags.

“Europe is our main market,” said Treetap Project Coordinator and designer Maria Beatriz Saldanha, “We are developing relationships in France, Italy, Germany and The Netherlands.”

High profile French fashion house Hermes Sellier has been using this rubber since 1998 for handbags. Italian furniture company Moroso uses it to upholster chairs. “They (fashion designers) love it. The material is shiny and supple and has the fair fashion appeal.”

Treetap has now moved into making bike courier bags for the world’s largest bicycle company, Giant, selling over 10,000 bags.

Saldanha’s partner, Joao Augusto Fortes, first came upon the idea of using natural rubber when the pair opened a store in Rio in the 1990s.

Wild rubber is favoured because it does not kill the trees and provides jobs for the tappers. The increase in synthetic rubber made from oil-based products has driven down the price for natural rubber, and led to people clearing forests to make way for more profitable products like timber and cattle.

After nasty battles in the 1980s to protect the rubber tappers’ way of life, the Brazilian government began to take action. It has now set aside protected forests for the tappers so they can still make a living.

Saldanha hunted around for products for her EcoMercado store. She came across the rubber tappers of the state of Amazonas, who were using the natural rubber to make their traditional rubber sacks.

“We had the idea, so we met with rubber tappers and ordered laminates from them,” said Saldanha. “We then used the rubber to make a small quantity of bags, briefcases and other products.”

Things did not go swimmingly at the beginning. The first run of 500 bags sold out quickly, but “Two months later all of the bags we had just sold melted,” said Saldanha. “We hadn’t figured out that the rubber needed to be vulcanized.”

Back at the drawing board, they adapted the vulcanizing process used by big factories to a small-scale process that the rubber tappers could do. And then they patented it. The company now sells 30,000 sheets of wild rubber a year.

Another Brazilian company, Hering Instruments, is using sustainability as a marketing boost for its musical instruments. When legendary musician and current Brazilian minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilberto_Gil) played a guitar made from Hering Instruments’ parts, there was pride: “Yes, that was a good moment for us,” said Alberto Bertolazzi, CEO of Hering Instruments. Gil’s guitar was one of the first to be made of Hering crafted parts, all sourced from high-quality woods from the Amazon forests.

They are now being sold by the world’s largest guitar and bass companies. Certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, the wood is harvested from 1.8 million hectares of managed forest in the state of Acre.

Trees are chosen for harvesting based on their age, location and how many have been cut down.

It is targeting the US $30 billion/year global market for musical instruments. The clever marketing has used celebrity musicians and a series of “Amazonas” guitars decorated by well-known painters like Gustavo Rosa and Antonio Peticov.

At Florestas (www.ikove.com) (www.florestas.com), owner Fernando Lima is producing all-natural Amazonian personal care products sourced from across the Amazon. Florestas has successfully partnered with Brazilian university labs to study indigenous Amazonian therapeutics, like Babacu oil, Acerola fruit, and Acai berries. Rain forest plants are rich in nutrients, vitamins and anti-oxidants – all highly coveted by health consumers around the world.

Certified as organic and ecologically sustainable by the French Ecocert group, all goods are purchased from Amazon cooperatives, thus enabling indigenous people to avoid cutting down forests to make a living. Brazilian nuts are purchased directly from the harvesters, avoiding middlemen and increasing the amount Florestas pays local families.

The company uses a range of methods to sell its products: e-commerce, catalogues, stores, including in Japan, France and the US.

An innovative enterprise with another university connection is Ouro Verde Amazonia. Founded in 2002 by University of Sao Paulo Professor Luiz Fernando Laranja da Fonseca, and his wife, Ana Luisa, when they moved to the southern rural region of the Amazon.

The couple has single handily revitalised the declining Brazil nut industry in Mato Grosso, while protecting the ecosystem and generating income for farmers. Ouro Verde, or green gold, enables farmers to avoid having to work in the logging industry. They make nut-based cooking oils, butters and granulated powders. Rich in omega-3, it is marketed as a healthy alternative to conventional cooking oils for the health conscious consumer. At present it is sold in 100 stores in Brazil, but wants to go global.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: November 2007

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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