The Brazil Nut Industry - Past, Present, and Future

• Title

  The Brazil Nut Industry - Past, Present, and Future

• Authors

  Scott Alan Mori

• Description

  Reprinting of this article is done with permission from Sustainable Harvest and Marketing of Rain Forest Products. Plotkin, M. and L. Famolare (eds.). Copyright Island Press, 1992. Published by Island Press, Washington, D.C. & Covelo, California. To order a copy of this book, please call 1-800-828-1302, or write to: Island Press, Box 7, Covelo, CA 95428 Amazonian forests harbor numerous plants of economic value (Balick, 1985; Farnsworth, 1984). In fact, intact Amazonian forests are often more valuable for their timber and nontimber products than are the agricultural plantations or pastures that too frequently replace them (Peters et al., 1989; Menezes, 1990). Moreover, Amazonian forests have inestimable value as reservoirs of biodiversity, regulators of hydrological cycles, protectors of fragile soils, and stabilizers of the atmosphere. Because of the value of Amazonian forests, those who wish to replace them with agriculture or pastures should be required to demonstrate that their projects will yield more than the value of the intact forests. One of the most important economic plants of the Amazon is the Brazil nut (, family Lecythidaceae). The edible seeds of this species, along with the latex of , are often cited as the most important products of extractive reserves in Amazonia. Brazil nuts are collected mostly during the wet season and rubber is tapped mostly during the dry season. The combination of these two forest products provides year-round income for those living by extractivism. Collection of the Brazil nuts and rubber has relatively little impact on the ecology of Amazonian forests. Therefore, it is often stated that conservation of biodiversity and exploitation for these and other nontimber products is compatible. However, those who gather nontimber forest products are almost always involved in other activities such as slash-and-burn agriculture, timber extraction, mining, and hunting. As a result heavily used extraction reserves usually protect only part of the vast biodiversity found in Amazonian forests. Consequently, any conservation plan for the Amazon must include large reserves of all Amazonian ecosystems that are protected from excessive economic exploitation. In this chapter, I review the natural history, the value of the Brazil nut harvest, the possibilities for plantation cultivation, and the future of the Brazil nut industry. Because of its economic importance, the Brazil nut has been the target of many studies of its biology and agronomy. The greatest number of these studies has been carried out under the auspices of the "Centro de Pesquisa Agropecuária do Trópico Umido" (CPATU) of the "Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisas Agropecuária" (EMBPRAPA) at Belém, Pará, Brazil. A bibliography of the Brazil nut with 259 titles is available (Vaz Pereira and Lima Costa, 1981), and a recent summary of Brazil nut biology and agronomy can be found in Mori and Prance (1990b).