26 LISTENER SEPTEMBER 7 2019
trunks that soar 30-50m towards the tropical
sun.
Castanhas, or brazil nuts, can’t be farmed,
as their pollination needs are too complex.
The fat teardrops of protein that appear in
packets and bulk bins around the world
come straight out of the forest.
And if that comes as a surprise, as it did
to me, then a bigger part of that surprise is
contained in a recent paper from Brazil’s
National Institute for Amazonian Research.
It debunks the popular colonialist myth
of an “empty” Amazon populated with a
scattering of indigenous people subsisting
in a virgin forest.
Data gleaned from 1000 surveys casts
the Amazon in a totally different light.
Researchers discovered 85 domesticated
plant species such as açaí and cacao widely
distributed across 3000 archaeological sites.
It demonstrates that the trees thatprovide food and shelter didn’t just grow
haphazardly, they’d been cultivated,
transplanted and nurtured by the
inhabitants over millenniums. It’s less an
impenetrable forest than a jungle garden
or a giant tree farm.
That vision doesn’t quite mesh with the
rhetoric from the nation’s capital, Brasilia.
The far-right Government has been offering
up the Amazon as an undiscovered treasure,
an unoccupied resource ripe for economic
development. It is repeating the sort of
expansionist anthems first sung when
they put the Trans-Amazonian Highway
through in the 1970s, kicking off the first
round of deforestation. “Let’s use the riches
that God gave us for the well-being of our
population,” Bolsonaro said on a recent visit
to the region.
To get to S’s house, we’ve come three hours
up a river from the nearest town, Boca doAcre – think Ashburton, with much less
money and far more unregistered guns. We
left at sunrise, perched on loosely attached
moulded plastic seats in a motorised skiff. A
puff of air and a fleeting pink fin announce
the presence of boto, the endangered
freshwater dolphins that are said to change
into desirable forms and slip into the
hammocks of unsuspecting humans at night.
R is S’s neighbour, 20 minutes away by
boat. At harvest time, he and his family of
five leave their riverside huts and tramp into
the selva with wicker baskets on their backs.
They collect the castanhas by hand, a job
with perils beyond the crocodiles, snakes
and spiders. There are reports of strangerscoming up the river, burning and pulling
down the castanha trees, and a warning that
rural encroachment is reaching parts of the
forest that are supposed to be off limits.
In more benevolent times, large tracts
of the Amazon were set aside, specifically
protected by law for indigenous populations
and traditional communities such as R’s. The
areas, known as reserva extrativista, support
communities who live off the forest without
radically changing it, hunting, fishing and
harvesting wild plants.
In recent months, R says, various outsiders
with a different vision for the Amazon have
started breathing down their necks – a
breath with the distinct whiff of beef.THE ARC OF DEFORESTATION
Brazil’s cattle herd numbers 221 million
and growing. Reports say 80% of the areas
of the Amazon already deforested have
been converted into ranches. There’s a
strong correlation between the levels of
deforestation and the growth of cattle farms,
although the relationship is complicated.
You won’t see cattle ranchers with lassos
riding into the rainforest on four-wheelers
dragging their steers behind them. The
landowners and farmers tend to keep their
hands clean. Their dirty work is done by
nefarious groups, called land grabbers orGE grileiros, who are often accompanied by
TT
Y^ I
MA
GE
S
SAVING THE AMAZON
Brazil nuts can’t be
farmed. The fat teardrops
of protein that appear
in bulk bins around theworld come straight
out of the forest.Expansion for cattle
ranching: from top,
satellite images of the
Amazon fires; an area
of deforestation; bulls
at a cattle feedlot in the
Amazon.