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IT IS DELICIOUS, but can it save the Amazon rainforest? Rainforest dairy
ice-cream contains cupuaca (pronounce it Coo-poo-a-soo) and biriba, two
fruits of the Amazon. Although not yet on sale from the back of an ice-cream
van, it went down well at a recent conference on ‘The Rainforest Harvest’
in London.

The rediscovery by Western entrepreneurs and botan-ical adventurers
of these and other fruits, nuts and resins in the forests has led to a fever
of excitement among some environmentalists that they could provide an economic
lifeline for the forests, an alternative to their destruction by chainsaws
and firebrands. Could the same market forces that seem hell-bent on destroying
the rainforests be harnessed to save them? ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the
green consumer’ seems to be the message.

Besides the hand-outs of rainforest ice cream, the assembled environmental
ists, anthropologists and journalists were offered pots of Zambian honey
culled by villagers from bark hives, and Brazil-nut hair conditioner from
the Amazon. Green-minded wood carvers displayed samples of wood imported
from a Peruvian ‘sustainable forestry’ project.

The working thesis of the conference was that you don’t have to destroy
rainforests to make money out of them. You can make as much, and perhaps
more, without upsetting the ecology, by harvesting the forests’ natural
products. And you can do this in cooperation with the inhabitants of the
forests, whose unparalleled knowledge of the riches of the forests can lead
hardy Westerners to a biological El Dorado.

To ensure that conservation can meet capitalism on equal terms, campaigners
are calling for the creation of ‘extractive reserves’, forest land set aside
to be exploited without destroying the forest. ‘The concept of the extractive
reserve seems to us to be the key to protecting those areas of the rainforest
which, for understandable social and economic reasons, cannot be set aside
as totally protected areas,’ pronounced Jonathan Porritt, outgoing director
of Friends of the Earth. The idea, he said, is ‘both practical and visionary’.
But will it work? And what do the people whose reserves are being eyed by
the new eco-entrepreneurs think about it?

The ice-cream merchants, marketing consultants flush from a year spent
selling environmentally friendly washing powder and catalytically converted
cars at premium prices, are excited. Cambridge Market Research has established
that 76 per cent of ‘housewives’ would pay extra for ice cream containing
rainforest fruits. Paul Beresford, a former buyer for J. Sainsbury, Britain’s
largest food retailer, and marketing manager for Nestle, is now ‘creator’
of the rainforest ice cream. He believes it is worth braving the problems
of establishing a supply infrastructure from the forest to the fast-food
counters, and of juggling currency fluctuations in any nascent cupuacu futures
market, provided, he said, he had ‘the support of you in the industry’.
He meant the environment industry, and he was angling for an endorsement
of his products from Kew Gardens.

High priest of the rainforest harvest is Jason Clay. He runs a rainforest
marketing project for Cultural Survival, a group that campaigns for the
rights of American indigenous peoples. Clay is behind another ice cream,
Rainforest Crunch, a confection flavoured with hand-picked Brazil and cashew
nuts from the Amazon that is already on sale in the US. And he is in charge
of the well-publicised forays into the Amazon forests by the Body Shop,
a fashionable international chain of cosmetics stores run by environmental
enthusiast Anita Roddick.

‘For the forests,’ Clay says, ‘it is a question of use it or lose it.
The value of the rainforest will have to be tested in the marketplace. But
the point is to change the market, not the forest.’ None of his suggested
products has yet reached the Body Shop counters, but Clay has tested 250
in the past year and found 30 with potential for incorporating into the
rubs, balms and smells in which Roddick’s growing empire specialises.

Cultural Survival imposes a 5 per cent ‘environmental tax’ on its commercial
clients, which it invests in its activities round the world on behalf of
traditional societies. In addition, Clay advises Roddick on how to put her
considerable profits to good use by aiding self-help projects organised
by the forest people themselves. Rumbles of outrage when Roddick copied
the rock star Sting by giving an Indian chief a private plane may have reformed
her style. Money today is going to a university research centre run by the
Union of Indian Nations in Brazil and to a village factory that shells nuts
and processes their oil. Such projects may cut out rapacious middlemen.
Currently, says Clay, ‘Brazil nut collectors receive 2 to 3 per cent of
the New York wholesale price of their nuts’. And according to the green
cabinet-maker, Chris Cox, commercial traders give Peruvian natives $6 for
mahogany trees that fetch up to Pounds sterling 4000 in Britain.

Can the lands and their inhabitants really be saved by reducing the
rainforest to an exotic bazaar to service the yearnings of Western consumers
for nutty snacks and foot lotions? Andrew Grey, an anthropologist at the
University of Cambridge and former director of the International Work Group
on Indigenous Affairs, thinks it unlikely. ‘We are spending our time talking
about what we can get from the people of the rainforest, not what they can
get from us. We are preserving the biodiversity of the market, not the rainforest.’

Where Clay and the Body Shop see partnership, Grey sees a new round
of economic imperialism. The best of intentions have a habit of going wrong,
he warns. The idea of a rainforest harvest has an unfortunate ancestry.
‘The rubber boom in the Amazon early this century was at the time painted
as a sustainable use of a forest resource,’ he says. But the rubber barons
in remote corners of Colombia and elsewhere, became engaged in an ill-disguised
form of genocide. ‘Genocide won’t happen now,’ he says. ‘But there are risks
of ethnocide from the market economy. We risk enticing native people into
a market over which they have no control.’

Both Grey, who has studied the spiritual underpinnings of Indian societies
in Peru, and Martin von Hildebrand, who has done similar work in Colombia,
believe that market economics could be very dangerous for Indian cultures.
‘In their societies economics take place in a spiritual environment. If
we take it out of that spiritual control, we impose a very different set
of priorities. We have to decide whether we are really interested in Indians
or profits,’ says Grey.

The list of products already taken from the rainforests appears endless.
Oriana seed used by some Amazon tribes as a body make-up and to ward off
flies is now known to readers of the small print of food labels as E160b,
an orange food colouring used in butter among other things. Balata latex
turns up in chewing gum and to coat golf balls. Numerous foods, medicines
and industrial products are derived from the rainforests – hardly surprising
as perhaps half of the world’s species of plants and animals have their
homes there.

Clearly, there is nothing new about Westerners raiding the rainforests
to feed their markets. But it has been a raid rather than trade. Once botanists
have taken their samples home and repotted them or tucked away the seeds
in gene banks, the forests are often no longer needed. Either, like rubber
or palms, production is transferred to plantations, or the required chemical
is refined and synthesised in Western laboratories. Certainly neither Third
World governments nor forest people receive any reward from the subsequent
exploitation.

The classic example is the rosy periwinkle, a native plant of Madagascar.
Taken from the forest by the American company Eli Lilly, it has been turned
into a treatment for Hodgkin’s disease, worth Pounds sterling 60 million
a year. A study for the World Wide Fund for Nature concluded that ‘if Madagascar
had received a significant part of this income, it would have been one of
the country’s largest (if not the largest) single source of income’.

Just another business deal?

The Prince of Wales is blunter: ‘Many Third World countries are apprehensive
that they will be ripped off. . . The rainforests must not just be seen
as another business opportunity.’ At the Rainforest Harvest conference,
he called for a system of royalty payments to the forested nations for the
use of their genetic resources. But benefits must go to local people, he
said, not just to national governments.

Two things may soften the impact of the latest drive to make money from
the forests. First, many of the new initiatives are based on detailed study
and dialogue with the rainforest peoples. The work is done by ethnobotanists,
who realise that an understanding of native culture is essential to understanding
the wealth of the forests. Brian Booth, of the New York Botanic Garden,
who works among the Chacabo Indians of Bolivia, has found that they use
more than three-quarters of the vast range of tree species in their forests
as poisons, medicines, food or in construction. ‘We need to protect these
people and decipher their knowledge,’ he says.

But ethnobotanists, too, may have to decide whether their first loyalty
is to Western sponsors or to the people who invite them into their villages
and share their secrets. When native knowledge is deciphered and added to
the databanks of multinationals, who will save the people then? A second
cause for optimism lies in the fact that many entrepreneurs now feel that
a green image for their products commands a premium in the marketplace.
Optimists believe that the combination of these two facts can lead to the
development in the West of markets for products that the local people are
already harvesting, and increasingly processing as well. And that could
be a market in which, with Western environmentalists ever ready to leap
to their defence, the producers retain control.

The Rainforest Harvest conference brought to London several old hands
at the business of extracting a sustainable profit from the forests. Hives
made from bark and scattered through the remote forests of northwest Zambia
yield honey and wax that provide a source of cash for thousands of families.
The beekeepers, said Bob Malichi from North Western Bee Products during
a sales pitch aimed at opening up European markets, are organising to defend
their forests against foresters and ‘developers’. The outsiders threaten
the survival of the wild bees on which they depend. Their case may be heard
more loudly in Lusaka if they can show that forest bee products earn foreign
exchange, the life blood of most Third World governments.

Delbert Rice, an American missionary who has lived with the Ikalahan
people of northern Luzon in the Philippines for more than 30 years, told
the story of their battle with the authorities to win back control of their
land in a ‘communal forest stewardship agreement’. Since then, they have
pioneered new techniques for increasing their harvest of sweet potatoes
by planting trees alongside. This has freed land for replanting with trees.
Rice described how they have harvested wild fruits to make jams and jellies
for the ‘gourmet market’. ‘We make all our own equipment and process the
products as much as possible before sale,’ said Rice. The more they do themselves,
the better the community can persuade its university-educated children to
return home to run their businesses.

No one would pretend that the Ikalahan are not having an important effect
on their local ecology. But in reality a human footprint is present everywhere
in the rainforests. Even harvesting brazil nuts can have a devastating effect
on the birds and animals that would otherwise have eaten them. And where
humans hunt, the vulture goes hungry and patterns of seed dispersal, normally
sustained by fruit-eating animals, go haywire. ‘There is no such thing as
a virgin forest,’ argues Kent Redford of the Centre for Latin American Studies
in Florida. ‘I challenge you to find a 100 square kilometre area of the
Amazon rainforest that is not altered by humans.’

The key to successful ‘sustainable’ exploitation of the forests and
their products is secure land tenure for the forest people themselves. When
the Philippine government declared the land of the Ikalahan a forest reserve,
the people had no interest in preserving the forest and began to destroy
it. When it was returned to them they protected it.

From Borneo to Brazil, land rights are at the heart of the fight to
preserve the rainforests and it is here that the idea of extractive reserves
offers its best claim to being a genuine panacea for the problems of the
rainforests.

The first extractive reserves

The idea of extractive reserves grew out of the struggle of tenant rubber
tappers in Acre, the remote westernmost state of the Brazilian Amazon. They
wanted to hang onto their livelihoods in the mid-1980s when their landlords,
whose legal rights to the land were frequently tenuous, began to sell out
to speculators and cattle ranchers as one of the great Amazon highways entered
the state. Chico Mendes, shot dead by the sons of a local landowner 18 months
ago, was at the centre of the movement, which had excited the interest of
Western environmentalists.

The struggle was crowned in January this year when the government granted
a series of extractive reserves to the local rubber tappers and Brazil nut
collectors. Few of the existing landlords could substantiate their legal
rights to their estates and forfeited them. The reserves now cover some
4 million hectares. The National Council of Rubber Tappers, which Mendes
headed, has transformed an apparently archaic form of landholding, the traditional
Amazonian rubber estate, into ‘a new form of occupation of land in the Amazon’,
says Steve Schwartzman, an anthropologist from the Environmental Defense
Fund in Washington.

But even before the reserves are fully operational, they are the subject
of intense debate. The central question is this: Are the extractive reserves
of Acre a local solution to a particular social problem in that state, or
do they represent a model for the sustainable exploitation of the Amazon
rainforest? Are extractive reserves the right way forward for Indians and
new migrants, as well as the second and third-generation migrants that make
up the population of rubber tappers? The Union of Indian Nations in Brazil
has formed a strong alliance with the rubber tappers in support of creating
more reserves. But conventional development economists are sceptical. Tony
Anderson, who works for the influential Ford Foundation in Rio de Janeiro,
argues that if extractive reserves are to be economically viable, much of
the forest will have to be transformed or even removed – which appears to
destroy the happy notions behind their adoption by environmentalists such
as Porritt. Rubber tapping, says Anderson, is economically viable in the
Amazon only because of large price subsidies. Even so, most of the rubber
tappers live in poverty. ‘Their access to markets is poor and their social
services nonexistent,’ he says. The reserves are little more than a means
of preserving the way of life of a group of people which, thanks to the
assassination of Mendes, has become known round the world. To survive on
a reserve, a typical family needs 300 to 500 hectares of land, far more
than the allocations made in the disastrous colonisation programmes for
farmers elsewhere in the Amazon. On that basis, says Anderson, there is
simply not enough land in the Amazon to go round.

According to John Browder, from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
a member of the Latin American Studies Association, the real question is
what should be done with the million or so families of migrant farmers strung
out across the Amazon. ‘If the reserves are to survive, they must incorporate
other forms of land use.’ Only in that way will they attract outside investment.
Anderson suggests the model provided by Japanese immigrants, improbably
holed up in the forest near Belem. Bank loans and hired labour help them
to run prosperous farms amid the forests on 28 hectares per family. But
in this notion, many people feel, lies the unacceptable face of capitalism,
desperate for a way to exploit the Amazon region and muscling in on a scheme
devised to allow local people in the forest to control their own lives.

For most of those involved in the debate, what the Amazon and other
rainforests need is people power, not economic models. Speaking for the
rubber tappers, Antonio Macedo, coordinator of the National Council of Rubber
Tappers in Brazil, insists that extractive reserves should not be seen as
the basis of a capitalist model for the Amazon. ‘We cannot accept the beginning
of a new race by international capital to identify new rainforest products.
We are capable of managing our own riches with our own projects,’ he says.

For Macedo an early priority for the rubber tappers is to begin manufacturing
small rubber products themselves. The first job would be to supply local
markets rather than international traders. Nonetheless, we may all soon
be able to buy condoms from the rainforest. Clay offers the marketing slogan:
‘Protect yourself; protect the rainforests.’

The rubber tappers may find their own way, but what about the Indians
of the Amazon and other tribal peoples in other rainforests. Do they face
ethnocide, with or without the aid of green capital? Again, the issue may
come down to land rights. The government of Colombia has been systematically
handing back its corner of the Amazon rainforest to the native Indians.
As a result, says Martin von Hildebrand, an anthropologist who worked in
the region for 20 years before becoming the government’s head of Indian
affairs, there has been a renaissance of Indian ritual and culture: ‘We
have given them an alternative path of development to integration. They
can advance and retain their culture. Being able to do this depends on them
having control of their own areas.’

They will trade. ‘The Indians need the outside world – for metal tools,
batteries, flashlights and medicines to combat Western diseases,’ says von
Hildebrand. But they will trade on their own terms, according to their own
needs. They have already had one recent narrow escape. Coca traders arrived
in the area in the early 1980s to buy leaves to supply the North American
cocaine market. Coca is a highly sustainable crop with a highly sustainable
market and in some ways, perhaps, the ideal forest product. The traders
soon left again, unhappy with the quality of the local coca leaves, but
before then, many of the young men that von Hildebrand was staying with
became rich enough to buy tape recorders and other Western goods. It could
have destroyed the tribe, but the culture was strong and the young men spent
most of their time using their tape recorders to record and learn traditional
songs from the elders. Now they are using them to map their lands and document
their way of life.

‘The culture is changing, but developing,’ says von Hildebrand. ‘They
need space and time to adapt to the modern world in their own way and on
their own terms.’ If rainforest ice cream and brazil nut body rub can help
to buy that space and time, then the rainforest bazaar may yet, despite
the forebodings, serve their purpose as well as ours. But, as Grey warns,
‘the voice of the indigenous people has to come first’.

Fred Pearce is the author of Green Warriors, to be published by The
Bodley Head in the autumn. The Rainforest Harvest conference was held at
the Royal Geographical Society, 17 to 18 May.

Further reading ‘Guardians of the Amazon’, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, 16 December
1989. ‘Fruits of the rainforest’, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, 13 January 1990.