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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Civet Cat Coffee Brews Filipino Opportunity

In the Philippines, one animal’s call of nature has become a business opportunity.

The civet cat, a member of the mongoose family, ingests the fruit of coffee plants, and expels the beans. This has created an unexpected by-product – a prized beverage for the world’s savvy coffee drinkers seeking the next taste sensation. The partially digested coffee beans are gathered from the faeces of the cat and used to make a much-coveted, smooth-flavoured cup of coffee.

It is a good example of how value can be added to a product, in this case coffee beans, producing a substantially higher income. The coffee is startlingly expensive: 50 grams cost US $70, 100 grams US $90, and 1 kilogram is a whopping US $870. The coffee is a blend of Arabica, Liberica and Exelsa beans, all of which have passed through the civet cats.

The highly prized coffee is driving a growing market for these rare beans around the world. But as demand rises, it becomes clear it is a market needing quality control and ethical practices.

One business that is trying to do this is Coffee Alamid (www.arengga.com), based in Las Pinas in the Philippines. It bills the coffee as the “World’s Rarest Brew. The Philippines’ Pride.”

Coffee Alamid’s founders, Basil and Vie Reyes, call themselves “coffee entrepreneurs” who started in the business from scratch.

“When we started Cafe Alamid, we were not even coffee drinkers,” they explain on the company’s website. “We didn’t know anything about coffee at all!”

Experienced in making Arengga vinegar (http://www.arengga.com/index.php/arengga-pinnata-its-not-just-a-vinegar.mpc), they discovered the civet cats that lived among the sugar palm trees used for making the vinegar. They did some research and were inspired by the Kopi Luwak, the Indonesian variety of civet cat coffee and wondered why they couldn’t do the same thing in the Philippines.

They consulted with the local forest-dwellers of Indang, Cavite and Batangas, who confirmed they gathered the civet cat droppings to make into coffee, part for personal consumption, with the rest sold in local markets. Gathering the civet droppings provides an income to the forest residents, who collect an average of one kilogram a day.

Some were sceptical of the idea: why bother with such a time-consuming product? But the Reyeses were inspired by the success of civet coffee in Indonesia and it inspired them to try it in the Philippines. They see themselves as “enlightened entrepreneurs” who believe in marrying business with social development.

The coffee is made from the wild civet cat droppings harvested from the forest floors of mountains in Malarayat, Lipa, Batangas and Mount Matutum, General Santos and South Cotabato in the Philippines. The beans are roasted and exported to Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, the United States and Italy. The company produces between 1 and 1.5 tons of beans a year.

A proud moment for the business was becoming the first Filipino firm to participate in the Tea and Coffee World Cup in Geneva, Switzerland in 2007.

The brand’s name, Alamid, is the local name for the civet cat (Paradoxorus Philippinensis). It belongs to the mongoose family and forages for food at night, eating the ripest and sweetest coffee cherries during the coffee season.

By morning the civet cats excrete the undigested beans. While inside the cat’s stomach, enzymes and stomach acids go to work on the beans, altering their structure. The beans ‘ferment’ in the cat’s stomach, a process that has been analyzed by Dr. Massimo Marcone, a scientist from Canada’s University of Guelph.

Marcone traveled to Ethiopia and Indonesia in 2003 to collect the rare coffee beans. He found the beans’ taste – described as “earthy, musty, syrupy, smooth and rich with jungle and chocolate undertones” – was due to the lack of protein in the bean.

“The civet beans are lower in total protein, indicating that during digestion, proteins are being broken down and are also leaked out of the bean,” Marcone told the Luwak Kopi website. “Since proteins are what make coffee bitter during the roasting process, the lower levels of proteins decrease the bitterness of Kopi Luwak coffee.”

“Civet beans are typically extensively washed under running water after collection, which dislodges bacteria,” he said.

Marcone published his research into the beans in the paper “Composition and properties of Indonesian palm civet coffee (Kopi Luwak) and Ethiopian civet coffee.” (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0963996904001309)

The beans are greenish-brown when they come out in the cat faeces. Marcone found the process in the civet cat removes some of the caffeine, giving a strong cup of coffee less kick; this also makes the flavour smoother.

Supply is tight and this has led to some people forging the coffee or using unethical practices to get their hands on the beans. It is a business that needs to be run in an ethical way to ensure the rich profits are shared with everyone involved.

Marcone warns against imitations. “About 42 percent of all the kopi luwaks that are presently on sale are either adulterated or complete fakes, unfortunately,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

Coffee Alamid’s parent company, Bote Central, started as a family-owned company in 2002, with the idea of using agro-forestry products to create sustainable livelihoods and help preserve the environment. It wanted to introduce Fair Trade principles to the Philippines coffee industry.

Structurally, the company uses community roasting business units (CRBU) across the Philippines, in particular the countryside, to improve the way coffee is sold and make it more profitable for local economies. There are currently 12 such units, and more are planned. The company has put together a guide book on best practice for harvesting Arabica coffee beans based on their first-hand experience. It also explains how they maintain quality control (http://www.scribd.com/doc/19991462/Production-Guide-for-Arabica-Coffee-by-Bote-Central-Inc-Maker-of-Coffee-Alamid).

The company deals directly with farmers to avoid middlemen gouging profits, and tries to use technology to make the business more efficient and sustainable.

To keep quality improving, the company has also produced a manual on how to grow and harvest Arabica coffee beans. It is designed to tackle the practical realities of coffee production and show how to improve current methods to produce a better-quality bean. This is critical for the overall business as competition is fierce and quality has to constantly be improved.

Coffee Alamid has successfully positioned itself as a high-end, high-cost product. It is sold by Japan Airlines and by department stores in Japan and specialty coffee shops around the world.

Civet cat coffee continues to develop new fans. In Britain, the Birmingham-based Urban Coffee Company (http://www.urbancoffee.co.uk) has started selling the coffee.

‘It’s actually really nice,” sales manager Mark Bridgens told the Daily Mail newspaper. “It has a unique, soft taste. I’d definitely buy a cup of it, it’s very different.”

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.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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Indonesia Best for Entrepreneurs

A global survey has unearthed hotspots across the global South for start-up businesses and private enterprise. It shows there are now many places in the South where people are actively encouraged to start businesses and engage in innovation and enterprise. The top place in the world for entrepreneurship, according to the survey for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), is Indonesia.

The poll shows that Indonesians perceive their country as a place where it is easy to put ideas into practice. Innovation and creativity are highly valued in Indonesia as well, two important elements of business success. Asia as a whole, with a few exceptions, stood out for valuing these qualities.

India came second in the survey, while China and Nigeria were also perceived by their own people as relatively favourable places for new businesses.

The survey for the BBC’s Extreme World TV series polled more than 24,000 people across 24 countries (http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbc2011_entrepreneur/backgrounder.html). Respondents were asked whether innovation was highly valued in their country; whether it was hard for people like them to start a business; whether entrepreneurs were highly valued; and whether people with good ideas could usually put them into practice.

Interestingly, not only were several countries in East Asia and the Pacific doing well, but three sub-Saharan African countries – Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana – ranked above the global average.

The survey found work still needed to be done in Latin America. While Mexico and Peru scored highly, Brazil and Colombia ranked below average.

So, what are the things that make Indonesia so positive for entrepreneurs and private business? And what do they do – or not do – for small business start-ups?

According to Bali International Consulting Group, the Indonesian economy is highly dependent on small and medium-sized enterprises: they make up 99.95 percent of the total number of enterprises, and provide most of the country’s jobs. Authorities have identified a problem with the sector, however: productivity per worker is very low compared to large enterprises. Poor productivity matters because it means people are working very hard for low return and this affects the overall standard of living in the country and its human development.

The Indonesian government has set about boosting productivity in the sector, adopting a ‘clustering’ approach in partnership with non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Like-minded businesses tend to cluster together across the archipelago of islands that makes up the nation. By targeting these places with resources and support, it can use those resources more efficiently. The country has a dedicated ministry for small and medium enterprises (http://www.depkop.go.id) and a wide range of businesses and services targeting them. From dedicated trading and office facilities (http://www.smescoindonesia.com) to an online marketplace to display, trade and sell SME products (http://www.smescotrade.com), extensive resources are applied to give SMEs a boost and a competitive edge in the global marketplace.

From past experience, Indonesia learned it was more effective to use business development services in clusters to promote and develop SMEs, rather than centralised, top-down government models or other approaches.

As Bali International Consulting Group notes, “The government has introduced many models for promoting SMEs, including business incubators, business consulting clinics and technology centers. However, those sponsoring programs have not been productive and could not sustain themselves for a long time. The government then turned to supporting BDS (Business Development Services) providers to serve a certain cluster in a selected area.”

Developed countries like the United States significantly grew their wealth by allowing entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises to flourish. The USA’s highly innovative and globe-straddling high tech and information technology businesses would not have been so successful without entrepreneurs. Think of Bill Gates, one of the founders of Microsoft, or Steve Jobs, one of the pioneers behind the Apple computer brand.

China – the country that has seen the largest lifting of people out of poverty in our time – is awash with entrepreneurs. So successful at providing manufacturing services to foreign companies, China is fast on track to become the wealthiest country in the world. The International Monetary Fund recently issued a report predicting China would be number one within five years.

Entrepreneurs play a key role in any country’s economic strategy. The more they are encouraged to flourish – and build wealth and their businesses – the better a country can do. Large human development gains can come about when entrepreneurs are matched with a fair and transparent tax system, balancing between social and economic needs.

China is the source of one of the most successful aids to small business growth in the global South. Hong Kong-based Alibaba (http://www.alibaba.com) is an online trading and selling marketplace aimed at small businesses and start-ups. Packed with support, advice and inspiration, it makes it possible for people anywhere in the world to get trading and selling.

To help small businesses trade with each other, New Delhi, India-based Go4World Business.com (http://indonesia.go4worldbusiness.com) has for the past 12 years helped exporters and importers to explore new markets and increase their international business in a simple, cost effective manner.

The Internet has not only radically transformed how to trade and sell, it has also opened up many ways for small and medium-sized businesses to raise funds and borrow money. Examples include Zopa (www.zopa.com) – “Where people meet to lend and borrow money”; social lenders like Kiva (www.kiva.org)w, whose mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty; and Betterplace (www.betterplace.org), an online marketplace for projects to raise funds. It is free to use, and it passes on 100 percent of the money raised on the platform to the projects. For those with a creative business idea, Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com) is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, and explorers.

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.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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The e-Reader Battle Reaches India

The rise and rise of e-books and electronic publishing has prompted the development of e-readers: handy, portable devices that try to mimic the reading experience of paper books while offering the storage and navigation capability of computers.

A good example is the very popular e-reader from Amazon, the Kindle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle). The latest version boasts the ability to store up to 3,500 books.

The utility of these e-readers for people in the global South is clear: they can enable people to bypass the lack of local library facilities to store vast, personal archives of books. This is a powerful educational tool: imagine a village doctor with easy access to thousands of medical texts and papers, or a child preparing for university exams no longer having to worry they can find study texts. It also is a cost-effective way to publish in many local languages and break the stranglehold English-language publishing has had on delivering e-books.

Over the past decade, India has developed a reputation for its fast-growing information technology industries, making software and providing IT-related services.

Now India has produced a rival to the Kindle. The Wink (https://www.thewinkstore.com/ereader/index) is designed to accommodate 15 common Indian languages. (The 2001 census in India found 29 languages with at least a million native speakers). It comes in an eye-catching design and is complemented by a sleek website stuffed with e-books ready for download. The entire package is very well-thought-out and marketed.

The Wink was developed and built by EC Media International and retails, according to its website, for Rs 8,999 (US $200). It looks similar to the Kindle, but where the Kindle is grey the Wink is white. This Indian rival has some impressive capabilities: it can not only support 15 Indian languages, it can also access an online library of more than 200,000 book titles. They range from arts and entertainment to biography, newspapers and science topics. There is also a large archive of free books for download.

But it has come in for criticism for its price, which some say is far too high for the Indian market.

The Tech 2 website also criticized the Wink for its “frustrating performance, which actually detracts from the pleasure of reading.” Overall it found the reader “a decent first attempt, but there are many issues that need to be ironed out.”

It can be a rocky road to information technology hardware innovation. And maybe this first attempt at a made-in-India e-reader still has a way to go to get it right. There have been a number of high-profile, over-hyped disappointments in the last few years. One was the pledge to make a US $35 tablet computer. The project was launched in 2010 with much fanfare, but by January 2011 the Indian government had dropped manufacturers HCL Technologies for failing to honour its 600 million rupee (US $13 million) contract.

It joins the disappointing attempt at rivalling the One Laptop Per Child (www.onelaptop.org) computer from MIT (Massachusetts Institute for Technology) with an Indian version for US $10. What was offered instead in 2009 was a device with no screen or keyboard, requiring an additional laptop and paper to access its stored files. It was also made in Taiwan, rather than India.

What these first steps show is the complexity of hardware development and how challenging it is to get the user experience right for customers while keeping the price affordable.

But from these tries comes experience, and in time better products will be developed as lessons are learned.

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.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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