How agroforestry can restore degraded land and generate income in the Amazon
As Brazil tries to reverse the environmental damage of the Bolsonaro government, finding sustainable and economically viable alternatives for the Amazon region remains a challenge.
Experts defend agroforestry as a sustainable agricultural alternative to soy monoculture and livestock. Successful projects can restore degraded pastures and provide a steady income for small farmers.
One of these projects is Reca, a sustainable agricultural cooperative and pioneer in agroforestry in the Brazilian Amazon, with more than 30 years of experience.
However, specialization, financing, scale and technical assistance are still significant challenges for its development.
Hamilton Condack smiles and points to an imposing ipe rooted in the land where he lives and grows food. “When I bought the farm, about 15 years ago, the guy who came to clean the heap wanted to cut down the ipê for 500 reais”, says Condack about the ipê, one of the most valuable hardwoods in the Amazon, coveted by loggers. “Today they say it’s worth 15 to 20 thousand reais, but I don’t even sell it for 100 thousand.”
Condack acquired its land in a degraded, overgrown condition after previous owners cleared it for cattle and then moved when the soils became depleted.
He set to work bringing barren grassland back to life using agroforestry systems , a mixed-use farming method where plantations mimic natural forests. Over time, soil nutrients returned.
Today, Condack's site is an oasis of plant and tree species, including cupuaçu, açaà and andiroba — sold for the production of high-value goods, such as jam, pulp and oil, in the sustainable agricultural cooperative that he directs.
Known by the acronym Reca (Consortiated and Dense Economic Reforestation), the cooperative has more than 300 member families. Headquartered in Nova California, district of Porto Velho, in Rondônia, it is a pioneer in the agroforestry system in the Brazilian Amazon.
As the planet faces increasing hunger and increased droughts, torrential rains and floods caused by climate change, experts and policy makers around the world are increasingly advocating regenerative agriculture to address the diverse planetary crises.
Advocates of agroforestry in Brazil say this is a sustainable alternative to soy monocultures and cattle ranching that could help restore some 30 million hectares of degraded pasture in the Amazon.
They argue that well-planned and managed agroforestry systems can provide a decent and stable income for the Amazon's smallholder farmers, many of whom are extremely poor , while protecting the environment by increasing biodiversity and carbon stores.
Often referred to by the acronym SAFs, agroforestry systems combine species as varied as açaÃ, andiroba, copaÃba, cupuaçu, cocoa and banana, as well as crops such as maize and cassava, with trees in relatively small areas – a practice that goes back hundreds of years .
“The populations of the Amazon practice the agroforestry system since they developed agriculture, 2 thousand years before the European invasion of Brazil”, said Judson Valentim, agronomist and researcher at Embrapa, to Mongabay.
Low income and malaria
Reca, with more than 30 years of experience, is for many an example of what sustainable agriculture in the Amazon could be.
Mongabay was on Reca land two days after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the presidential elections. The now president promised to put the protection of the Amazon at the top of his agenda and signaled lower interest rates on rural credit for sustainable production and recovery of degraded areas.
Reca is 354 kilometers from the capital of Rondônia, Porto Velho, almost on the border with Acre, with access via the BR-364 highway, where soy plantations and cattle ranches stretch to the horizon, and vultures, often seen feeding on dead animal carcasses, they are the only birds in sight.
On the trip, Mongabay passed roadblocks set up by supporters of Jair Bolsonaro – one of them visibly armed with a pistol –, which at the time was still very popular in Rondônia. The state gave him the second-highest number of votes for re-election, second only to Roraima, another Amazonian state where environmental crimes such as deforestation and illegal mining soared during Bolsonaro’s term – especially on lands where indigenous Yanomami live, triggering a major humanitarian crisis. .
Deforestation in Rondônia in 2021 reached 1,673 square kilometers, the highest level in more than a decade, according to the Prodes system, from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research). In Nova California, where Reca is located, twelve trucks carrying illegal timber were seized in December.
The state has the sixth largest cattle herd in Brazil, with 15.1 million in 2021, while soy production has more than doubled in the last 10 years, to 400,000 hectares, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
Reca's history began in 1984, when the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra) ceded forest plots to farmers who migrated from the south to the Amazon.
“We arrived here, in Nova California, with the intention of producing what we produced in the south”, told Mongabay Bernardete Mattos Lopes, a farmer who moved from Santa Catarina at that time. However, she and others soon realized that conditions in the rainforest were very different from the subtropical climate of their home state. Crop yields were much lower.
“We didn't have a local market, we didn't have local trade, we didn't have a way to sell our production,” she said. “And it started to get difficult. Malaria caught everyone, the disease prevented them from working”
The settlers banded together, working with the region's traditional rubber tapper populations to discover new products such as cupuaçu, Brazil nuts and pupunha, leaving behind traditional southern cultures such as coffee.
The cooperative was officially founded in 1989. Today, Reca sells high-value products, such as jelly and fruit pulp, throughout Brazil and even for export, with açaà and cupuaçu products being the ones with the highest yield. The cooperative also maintains a carbon credit program with the cosmetics giant Natura, through which farmers receive economic compensation for protecting the forest and reducing carbon emissions in the company's production chain.
Alongside the Cooperativa Agropecuária Mista de Tomé-Açu (Camta), in the state of Pará, specialists consider Reca the most successful example of agroforestry in the Brazilian Amazon.
For Valentim, from Embrapa, a large part of Reca's success is due to its organizational model as a cooperative. He praises the economic benefits of the agroforestry model not only as a way to lift small farmers out of poverty, but also as a prospect for the future, halting Amazonian migration and advancing the frontier of deforestation.
“An agroforestry system with açaà and a consortium of crops, including a short-term production crop, can place a family farmer with 5 hectares of land in the Brazilian middle class”, he explains.
Agroforestry systems are more economically resilient because producers are less exposed to price shocks if the value of a product changes, but also environmentally, which is critical at a time of increasingly accelerating droughts and floods.
immense challenges
However, despite the utopian buzz about agroforestry and regenerative agriculture as a whole, there are serious specialization, financing and technology challenges for its implementation in the Brazilian Amazon.
Valentim adds that access to credit, an essential component for large-scale Brazilian agriculture, is insufficient for family farmers and agroforestry and is much more directed towards large-scale agriculture and commodity production.
“There are some initial lines of credit for multidiverse systems. But it is still not adequate”, he says. “Often, the payment period is very short. This is not compatible with the cycle of some crops in an agroforestry system, such as açaÃ, cupuaçu and other species that sometimes take four or five years to start production.”
Ferreira says that the structural problems of the Brazilian Amazon, such as power outages, poor roads and difficult access to markets — even more problematic in the handling of delicate fruits at high temperatures — hinder the widespread implementation of AFSs.
“The proliferation of cattle in the Amazon is not a coincidence,” she says. “It is so common because it fits perfectly in a place where there is no structure.”
In the short and medium term, therefore, he says that strengthening the cooperative model that Reca has is the most effective solution, as well as a general agrarian reform in Brazil.
For Ferreira, from Embrapa, public policies that encourage the production of small farmers, such as the purchase of school lunches — a policy that Brazil has successfully implemented in the past — are essential for the growth of agroforestry models in the Amazon.
Reca hopes to finance new initiatives with the support of the Amazon Fund by Norway, frozen during Bolsonaro's presidency and reactivated by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on his first day in office. In 2018, the cooperative received BRL 6.4 million from the fund to strengthen its production chain, recover degraded areas and train farmers in agroforestry techniques. Thanks to these resources, the cooperative managed, among other things, to leverage the incipient production of vegetable oils, today one of its main products.
Back at his farm, Reca leader Hamilton Condack talks about the good perspectives for the cooperative and for agroforestry in the Brazilian Amazon: “I believe that our work is successful because the agroforestry system today is the culture of the future .”
This report is the first in a three-part series produced with support from the Serrapilheira Institute .
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