Brazil Nut Harvest

• Title

  Brazil Nut Harvest

• Authors

  Scott Alan Mori

• Description

  Brazil nuts are harvested almost entirely from wild trees during a five to six month period in the rainy season. The fruits, which weigh from 0.5 to 2.5 kilograms and contain 10 to 25 seeds, are gathered immediately after they fall in order to minimize insect and fungal attack of the seeds, and to control the number of seeds carried away by animals (Mori and Prance, 1990b). According to Miller (1990), the number of capsules produced per tree ranges from 63 to 216. More detailed descriptions of the methods of Brazil nut harvest can be found in Almeida (1963), Mori and Prance (1990b), and Souza (1963). Collection of Brazil nuts has a major impact on local Amazonian economies. Available figures, however, only provide approximations of total production because of the difficulty in obtaining accurate data from the Amazon. Brazilian production has ranged from 3,557 tons in 1944 to 104,487 tons in 1970. Since 1980, annual production has been around 40,000 tons (Mori and Prance, 1990b). In the past, the welfare of many Amazonian towns, such as Puerto Maldonado, Peru (Sánchez, 1973) and Marabá, Brazil (Dias, 1959) depended heavily on Brazil nut production. In 1986, the total value of shelled and unshelled Brazil nut seeds exported from Manaus alone was $5,773,228. (Mori and Prance, 1990b). Most of the seeds are sent to England, France, the United States, and Germany. Calculations by Miller (1990) have estimated the primary value (money paid to the collectors) of Brazil nut stands to be $97 per hectare. This value includes an arbitrary 25 percent discount to allow for seeds left in the stands. The secondary value --- in other words, the money received by the exporting company for unshelled nuts by a United States based importing company---was estimated at $175.56 per hectare. The tertiary value---the cost of a bag of unshelled nuts in a Florida supermarket---was calculated at $1059.44 per hectare. Shelled and processed nuts are much more valuable. Efforts, such as those by Cultural Survival, to place some of the shelling and some of the processing in the communities of the collectors provide additional incentive for maintaining extractive reserves. Over a ten year period, utilization of a forest for Brazil nut production appears to be more profitable than extracting timber or cutting the forest for pasture (Miller, 1990).