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 (about US$70 at the time) 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. “He'll be jumping with joy,” predicted one neighbor.
Home to 150 families at the end of a long stretch of dirt road, Guapiruvú sits astride 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 slivers of green that hold out in Brazil's otherwise gray urbanized East Coast, the Atlantic Rainforest once occupied a vast expanse of territory comparable to the Amazon.
Guapiruvú is situated in the poverty-stricken Vale do Ribeira, in the southeastern corner of São Paulo state. Protected areas account for over half of the land area 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 said. Poaching remains, by most accounts, the leading source of income in Guapiruvú.
By promoting community-based, environmentally-conscious economic development, AGUA is helping to offer alternatives to predatory hunting and gathering. Its projects span a wide range of activities, from a banana-distribution collective to kiddy litter brigades, from ecotourism to agroforestry (sustainable cropping within the natural forest), from medicinal plant research to the micro-credit program that benefited Carlinhos. The state capital São Paulo prides itself as the Brazilian city that never sleeps. In Guapiruvú, community development seems to run 24/7. “They tell us we should focus,” said 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 wasn't the only guy on the block to buy a car and live fast—and almost die young when disease all but wiped out the ginger. The plant's leaves turned yellow; its rhizome rotted. With it went the local economy.
A fairly isolated village (not even Brazil's ubiquitous cellular phones 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 didn't 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. It boasted a fairly well-organized neighborhood organization. The Greengrants Foundation's Brazilian partner Vitae Civilis had worked with people in Guapiruvú on a regional project to promote medicinal plants. 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 astride 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. We're thinking here about survival.”
That down-to-earth realism extends to the way AGUA spends its money: cautiously, thoughtfully, and frugally. When it received a grant from the U.S. 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 floating 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 is our partner.”
A former correspondent in Brazil for The Financial Times and Business Week, Bill Hinchberger is the founder and editor of BrazilMax (www.brazilmax.com) and contributor to the IRC Americas Program: (www.americaspolicy.org). The Center for Social and Environmental Support (CASA) and the Greengrants Alliance of Funds (GAF) (www.greengrants.org) provided support for this article.
