Commitment

Project Background

Deforestation is currently the main threat to biodiversity conservation in Amazonia. Approximately 12% of the original rainforest has already been lost due to inadequate government policies, inappropriate land use systems, and unsustainable resource use activities. Only 1.8% of the total area (5.0 million sq. km) of the Brazilian Amazon is officially declared as federal indirect use protected areas. The Cerrado and the Atlantic Forest also have limited protection and natural remnants are being rapidly cleared.

It is in the remotest, most biologically rich and intact ecosystems where Brazil's biodiversity and poverty intersect. Remote rural populations, living in direct contact with the planet's greatest biological riches, are without schools, health care or sanitation. They generally live by primitive subsistence strategies, including hunting, gathering, and forest burning for shifting cultivation. They are connected to market economies with enormously unfavourable terms of trade.

These communities extract and sell products such as salted fish, live ornamental fish, rubber, Brazil nuts, palm heart, timber, dried flowers, and manioc flour in exchange for salt, sugar, cooking oil, medicine, clothes, batteries, tools and implements. Typically, they are indebted to traders, have little physical access to alternative markets and suppliers, a lack of knowledge and skills such as literacy, arithmetic, or awareness of market mechanisms.

Given the juxtaposition of poor rural communities with biological richness, and considering the link between poverty and disempowerment on the one hand and resource over-harvesting or destruction on the other, WWF and other environmental and social development organisations invest in improved utilisation of natural resources as a means to achieve both nature conservation and socio-economic development. The focus of these efforts is to promote the sound utilisation of natural resources by communities as an alternative source of income to slash and burn agriculture, wildlife trafficking, or over-fishing. A desired outcome is to make the natural ecosystem more economically valuable than the alternatives which require destruction of the natural ecosystem. The goal is to demonstrate this economic conservation complementarity both to the local communities, who are often the direct agents of destruction or protection, and to the wider society, including government decision-makers and their urban constituents, who also benefit from increased economic productivity and sustainability.

Project Objectives

Social and Economic Development of Marginalised Communities through the Sustainable Utilization of natural products in key Brazilian Biomes.

Intended Outputs

• Conservation: knowledge on the ecology of specific natural resources increased and improved management practices for selected natural resources implemented.
• Business management: target communities and their grassroots organisations able to implement improved business and administration practices.
• Commercialisation: Product quality adequate to market demand produced, and effective marketing strategies for natural resource products identified and applied by target communities.
• Analysis and dissemination: lessons learned from FIBRARTE and other initiatives effectively documented and disseminated.