Section:NewsScan
Important new evidence argues strongly for the preservation of tropical rainforests: every hectare soaks up a ton of carbon dioxideone the gas whose buildup could cause catastrophic global warming.
That's the conclusion of a team of British, Australian, and Brazilian ecologists whose calculations, published in Science, are being hailed as the first proof that tropicalrainforests counteract many of the atmospheric ills produced by burning fossil fuels.
Today the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is nearly one-third higher than at the turn of the century. The world's remaining rainforests, according to thenew calculations, may absorb only one-sixth of the amount produced by burning fossil fuels. The world's oceans are the largest absorbers of carbon dioxide but, according to Pieter Tans of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "it's clear theforests are helping us."
The botanical riches of the tropics could help solve some of the world's most pressing medical problems-if we can find out what's there before it all disappears.
Nearly ten years later, the mixture of excitement and trepidation that ethnobotanist Walter Lewis felt on his first visit with the Jivaro people still echoes in his voice.
"We were hoping to spend more than a month living in a village in therainforests of northern Peru, but we didn't know if the Jivaro would welcome us, " Lewis recalls. "They distrust even peaceful outsiders, and with good reason. Most white visitors show up to sell them either God or goods."
Yet Lewis had traveled hundreds of miles by transport plane, army helicopter, dugout canoe, and foot neither to convert the Jivaro nor to convince them to buy blue jeans or infant formula. He hadn't come to observe the local fauna, or to study the daily routines of a traditional tribe in the Amazon Basin.
What he wanted was a guided tour of the plants the Jivaro use to treat everything from athlete's foot to hepatitis. "The Jivaro, like most indigenous peoples, use dozens of different plants for medicinal purposes," Lewis says. "These plants have the potential to treat a host of diseases, possibly including cancer and AIDS."
Lewis and his wife, medical microbiologist Memory Elvin-Lewis, are two of a growing number of researchers on the same quest. The search for medicines from plants is under way in therainforests of Latin America, Asia, and Africa; at multinational drug companies; and at the National Cancer Institute, host to the most ambitious plant-testing program yet unveiled.
Without exception, the researchers involved believe that medicinal plants will eventually yield important new weapons in the age-old battle against disease. But these plants may accomplish even more: They may provide a means of preserving the dwindling rainforest itself, as well as the indigenous tribes struggling to survive there.
"Developing even a few medicines from rainforest plants --and then returning some of the profits to the local people --could help make the forest more valuable to preserve than to destroy," says ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin, vice-president for plant conservation at Washington-based Conservation International. "We shouldn't need an economic reason to save tropical forests, but clearly we do."
SITTING IN HIS CLIMATE-CONTROLLED OFFICE, which is decorated incongruously with finely wrought wooden blowguns and spears, Plotkin seems filled with impatience and barely restrained energy. He spent years in the forests of Suriname and other tropical countries learning the medicinal lore of local shamans. Theknowledge he gained has made him a spokesman for preservation of the tropics' diverse plant life.
That diversity is astonishing: Tropical forests contain the vast majority of the world's 250,000 flowering-plant species. Yet only about one percent of them have been thoroughly examined for medicinal properties, says Plotkin; he's concerned that valuable plants may be exterminated before they are ever studied.
Despite their superficial study, scientists have already reaped a valuable harvest--about 120 plant-derived medicinal chemicals from about 100 species. Today, Plotkin points out, nearly a quarter of all prescription drugs contain ingredients derived from plants--including many known to folk wisdom for centuries. Whenever you take an aspirin, for example, you're ingesting a chemical found in the bark of willow trees--and sharing an ancient medical tradition with Native Americans. Travel to a tropical country, and it's possible you'll carry an antimalarial medication containing quinine, extracted from the bark ofthe cinchona tree of South America and first introduced tothe developed world by the Jivaro in the early 17th century. And foxglove, a common European plant originally described in the first century, has been touted for centuries for its ability to combat rapid pulse, dropsy, and many other conditions. More recently researchers learned that the same plant also contains digitoxin, thesource of digitalis, a potent weapon against heart failure.
"You'd think that such successes would have major research institutions and drug companies collecting and testing plants with all their resources," Plotkin says. "But interest in plant-based medicines has been dwindling for much of the 20th century. "
In the 1950s and '60s scientists became proficient at synthesizing drugs in the laboratory. They soon developed an attitude that chemist Gordon Cragg ofthe National Cancer Institute describes as "anything nature can do, we can do better." Most research institutions neglected medicinal plants, yet they couldn't synthesize many of thecomplex chemicals found in them. Even when they could recreate natural substances, they often discovered that chemicals made in the lab were far more expensive than those extracted from a plant.
Meanwhile, individual researchers continued to identify, collect, and test plants. Though few in number, these scientists made important contributions to medical knowledge. They found, for example, that a kind of wormwood (Artemisia annua) contains artemisinin, a chemical the Chinese have used to combat malaria for nearly 1,000 years. Scientists who recently confirmed artemisinin's efficacy believe that it can successfully combat the skyrocketing number of malaria strains that have grown resistant to quinine-based medicines.
Native Americans and the early European settlers who reamed from them relied on the root of the mayapple (also known as the American mandrake) to treat venereal warts, parasites, and other conditions. During the past decade etoposide (derived from a chemical found in the root of the mayapple) has become a potent, widely used treatment for testicular and lung cancers. The most publicized--and by far the most influential--discovery of the past 30 years is the rosy periwinkle, a plant native to Madagascar (and long used medicinally by local people), the leaves of which contain the alkaloids vincristine and vinblastine. Vincristine alone has quadrupled the survival rate for children with leukemia, and both drugs have become important weapons against Hodgkin's disease.
"Each year, sales of vincristine and vinblastine combined exceed $100 million," says Cragg. "The possibility that more such money-makers exist is a powerful incentive to continue the search for medicinal plants."
Walter Lewis and memory Elvin-Lewis aren't necessarily expecting to find a new rosy periwinkle in the Peruvian rainforest. But they do think the Jivaro pharmacopoeia can provide out-siders with effective medicines. "We've had tremendous preliminary results from several plants with antihepatitis B activity," Lewis says.
Elvin-Lewis found she had access to information unavailable to her husband. "The men would tell Walter what plants they thought the women used for contraception," she recalls. "The Jivaro women and I would listen, nod, and remain quiet. Then the men would take Walter off into the forest, and thewomen would start to smile. They'd say to me, 'Those men don't know anything. We'll show you what we really use."' The researchers learned that several species in the sedge family, rarely used medicinally by Jivaro men and neglected by most ethnobotanists, are prized by local women. They cultivate theplants, take them along when the tribe moves, and rely on them for a variety of pediatric, gynecological, and contraceptive uses.
Even as they uncovered the medical secrets of the Jivaro, Lewis and Elvin-Lewis realized that their efforts and those of a handful of other individuals were not enough to sample and test rainforest plants adequately. "The entire field needed some larger institutional support," Walter Lewis says. "Luckily, theNational Cancer Institute stepped in."
With a yearly budget of $2 million, the institute's Natural Products Branch in Frederick, Maryland, has injected new vigor into the effort to develop medicines from plants and other natural substances. It did not initially focus on rainforest plants, however; during the decade after its founding in 1975, thebranch concentrated on screening plants native to the United States and other temperate regions. It broadened its focus to the tropics in 1986, and began to look for anti-AIDS as well as anticancer activity in 1988.
Thus far, the temperate-region search has produced several promising leads, as well as one significant success: taxol, a substance in Taxus brevifolia,the Pacific yew. Now in final testing stages, taxol has already proven to be one of the most effective treatments yet found for ovarian cancer (which claims 12,000 lives a year in theUnited States alone), and may combat several other types of cancer.
"We had been testing a small number of rainforest plants submitted by Walter Lewis and other scientists all along," explains Gordon Cragg, the branch's director. But once the National Cancer Institute intensified its rainforest efforts in September 1986, it awarded five-year contracts totaling more than $2.5 million to three organizations already skilled at collecting tropical flora: the New York Botanical Garden (for samples from Latin America and theCaribbean), the Missouri Botanical Garden (Africa), and the University of Illinois at Chicago (Southeast Asia). During the life of its contract, each group must identify and deliver 1,500 samples a year tothe branch's laboratories.
A few large drug companies--including Glaxo, Eli Lilly, and Merck Sharpe & Dohme--are analyzing plant samples as well, screening them for antiviral, antibacterial, and anticancer activity. Merck's 30 person Natural Products Chemistry department, for example, examines 500 plants a year donated by theNew York Botanical Garden. Its staff tests soil organisms and molds as well as plants, and attempts to synthesize promising natural products in thelaboratory.
Given the ongoing deforestation of the Amazon and other tropical forests, though, these efforts may not be proceeding quickly enough. "Our best estimates indicate that 50 to 150 plant species will become extinct every day during the next 20 years," says Brian Boom of the New York Botanical Garden. "Most of them are found in thetropics, and most will never have been studied or collected. Who knows what invaluable medicines are contained in plants we'll never even know existed?"
AS THEIR HOMELANDS ARE DESTROYED BY deforestation, rainforest peoples are also disappearing; in Brazil alone, more than 90 tribes have dispersed (or succumbed to disease) since the beginning of this century. Those that survive are sometimes moved to distant reservations, where theplants are unfamiliar and the tribe's healing arts wither.
Even when their homelands remain intact, native peoples are subject to the incursions of industrialized societies. In 1982, when Walter Lewis and Memory Elvin-Lewis first visited the Jivaro, they found that a process of acculturation had already begun, even in the most remote villages. "The healers were all growing old, but theyounger members of the tribe were expressing little interest in inheriting their wisdom," Lewis says. "Where once a healer was the most respected man in the village, now the Jivaro were beginning to prefer prepackaged medicine from the United States."
Conservation International's Mark Plotkin has seen similar signs of cultural deterioration elsewhere. "In Suriname, many of the shamans are already more than 70 years old, yet few have found apprentices," Plotkin says. "When one of these shamans dies without passing his arts on to the next generation, thetribe--and the world--loses hundreds of years of irreplaceable knowledge. "
While Western medicine can supplement native knowledge and help people live longer and healthier lives, it's no substitute for their own healing arts. TheWorld Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of the world's population depend on traditional preparations for their health care needs. "No matter how much they crave medicine that comes out of a box, they'll never be able to afford to buy enough to replace their herbal medicines," Plotkin says.
In an attempt to forestall a health-care catastrophe among rainforest peoples, Conservation International has made the sustainable harvesting of medicinal plants (as well as foods, oils, pigments, and other forest products) the cornerstone of a ten-year plan it calls the "Rainforest Imperative." The plan, announced last year, aims tosave tropical forests and the cultural integrity of their inhabitants by working with host countries to make the forests more profitable to preserve than to destroy.
As they visited the Jivaro over the years, Walter Lewis and Memory Elvin-Lewis witnessed firsthand the ever-intensifying pace of acculturation. But on their later visits, toward the end of the decade, they noted a countercurrent: a rebirth of interest in traditional medicine among younger members of thetribe, a rebirth that Lewis believes was at least partly because of the researchers' obvious respect for the village healers.
"The Jivaro would tell us, 'You are like babies in the rainforest, but we will teach you,'" Lewis recalls. "During the next few years, we'll find out if we're smart enough to learn what they have to teach."
he Amazon: It's What's for Dinner. By: Scott, Cameron, Earth Island Journal, 10410406, Winter2009, Vol. 23, Issue 4Database:MasterFILE Premier
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The Amazon: It's What's for Dinner
Edilberto Sena is a priest in the liberation theology mold. After running a community development project deep in the Amazon for six years, he now manages Radio Rural, a Catholic radio station in the Amazonian city of Santarém. He uses the post to advocate for the rainforest and its people — a task that is more difficult than ever.
"Oh, man, you should come here to see with your eyes what is happening here," he wrote me in an e-mail. "I become angry anytime I start thinking about this. You know, the government, the judges, the politicians, the First World — nobody comes here to help us to stop the destruction of the Amazon. … The only help is this financial crisis in the world, because this way the commodities markets will cool down."
It's the seemingly innocuous soybean that has Padre Sena so upset. During the last decade, industrial soy farming has joined cattle ranching as a primary cause of deforestation in the rainforest. As room for agriculture runs out in the woodland savannah that borders the Amazon to the south — an extraordinarily rich ecosystem in its own right — soy producers have begun to buy up land in the rainforest. Far from stopping them, the government has waved them in.
Brazil began growing soy on a large scale in the 1970s, during the long rule of a leftist military dictatorship. Soy functioned mostly as an export crop, but the regime tried to encourage Brazilians to integrate it into their diets. When the spread of soybeans resulted in a shortage of black beans, a traditional staple, the government distributed a soy-based version of a popular recipe. Even then, it was clear that large-scale soy production had environmental and social costs: Almost three million small farmers from the states of Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul were displaced. Many made their way north to the Amazon, where they cleared jungle to settle. Government infrastructure projects undertaken at the time spurred dizzying rates of deforestation.
In 1975, as a result of the Brazilian government's efforts to popularize soy, state researchers developed a crop variety that fared well in the heat and humidity of the tropics. Then, in the late 1990s, genetically modified soy, designed to withstand the powerful weed killer Roundup, was illegally introduced in Argentina. The Roundup Ready soy quickly appeared in Brazil and stimulated still more cultivation of the crop.
Also in the late 1990s, the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture publicized results of a study that showed that soy grew well in the Amazonian state of Para. The state tried to dodge the environmental implications of the report by directing growers away from virgin forest — thereby easing environmental pressures there — to "non-pristine areas," ratcheting up the pressure on small family farms in those locations.
The boom was on. Brazil's soy production has nearly doubled since 1998, and the Amazon is now home to at least 14 million of the country's 284 million acres of plantations. Summer deforestation rates more than tripled from 2007 to 2008, and in the 12- month period ending in August, close to two million acres of rainforest were razed. The destruction amounted to 2.7 percent of the sprawling rainforest's total acreage — well over the two percent the UN considers a dangerous annual deforestation rate.
Brazil's left-leaning president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has justified his largely pro-development stance on the Amazon with populist claims that the rainforest belongs to Brazilians. But the soy plantations there clearly don't. Brazilians consume just a small fraction of the soy grown in their country. Most of it travels to Europe and China, where it is fed to livestock to support the world's growing demand for meat.
The major players in Brazil's soy boom are agribusiness conglomerates Cargill, ADM, Bunge, and the Frenchowned Louis Dreyfus. The traders provide seeds and fertilizer in exchange for a low price on the resulting crop. Only one Brazilian company — Grupo Andre Maggi, which owns more than 400,000 acres — has a real share of the soy pie.
When asked whether the soy boom benefited the country's economy, Sergio Schlessinger of Brazil's Federation of Agencies for Social and Educational Assistance (known by its Portuguese acronym, FASE) replies: "In my opinion, no. The benefit is international."
A widely cited statistic says that 11 small farmers are displaced by soy plantations for every one that finds a job in the highly mechanized industry. In Brazil Is Naked: The Advance of Monoculture Soy, the Grain That Grew Too Much, a book Schlessinger authored with Silvia Noronha, he writes, "The idea that soy generates jobs in Brazil is absolutely false….Although it represents 44 percent of the area planted with grains in the country, soy generates just 5.5 percent of farm-sector jobs."
Stephen Vosti, a UC Davis economist who supports limited development in the Amazon, believes that selling their land to industrial plantations can help peasants economically. "But," he acknowledges, "the real question is where they go afterward. They could go further into the forest or to urban areas, and either way you have the potential for increased poverty."
The orgy of deforestation brought about by Brazil's soy boom has garnered international attention, but its effects on the rural communities of the Amazon have been largely overlooked. While providing food to the rest of the world, the giant soy fields leave more Brazilians at risk of hunger. The soy boom is also foreclosing one of the best options for forest conservation. In displacing small farmers, the soy plantations are removing those people who are perhaps best suited to protect the forests.
Santarém sits at the junction where the Tapajós River folds its blue waters into the muddy, powerful Amazon. A Cargill soy port — operating in defiance of a Brazilian high court ruling — dominates a beach once used by local fisherman. Surrounded by dense forest, including several reserves, Santarém is at the heart of Pará's growth spurt in soy.
Outside Santarém, huge growers, backed by government loans unavailable to smallholders, are buying out small farmers' plots. Thugs sometimes help seal the deal; other times, aerially sprayed pesticides do. Even when sales are legal, the end result is the same: Seas of soy displace the fruit, bean, manioc, and rice crops of small farmers, many of whom came to Para through government settlement projects.
Between 1998 and 2004, the Pastoral Land Commission recorded 641 land disputes in Para alone. The steady stream of refugees from these conflicts slips into Santarém's urban life in a human version of the process Brazilians call "the meeting of the waters" that takes place at the city's edge.
Eric Stoner, the general coordinator of environment programs for USAID Brazil, first arrived in Brazil 35 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer. He describes the industrialization of agriculture in states like Para and Mato Grosso as a radical transformation.
"It's like capitalism on steroids here," he says. "People who couldn't make it moved on. They have jobs in cities or small towns, and they have to buy their food, which is a change."
Stoner insists there's enough economic activity in Santarém and cities like it "to absorb" small farmers who sell their land to soy plantations. But he acknowledges the absurdity of moving the rural poor around the country like so many checkers.
"Big landowners buy land, and the government resettles the people," usually elsewhere in the Amazon. "That goes on again and again," Stoner sighs. "The government knows it's not going to establish a productive future for these people. And the dynamics of it destroy the forest."
Sena, Santarém's radical priest, also paints a bleak picture. "The farmers have three choices after they sell their land," he wrote. They can go deeper into the forest and clear land, try to buy poor agricultural land along one of the Amazon's controversial roads, or "take the money and go to the outskirts of Santarém. Here they buy a poor house, build a small room in the front and sell bananas that they buy from others, or they go to the streets to sell ice cream or popcorn."
Leila Salazar-Lopez, who directs Rainforest Action Network's campaign to pressure US-owned agribusinesses to stop clearing rainforests to grow commodity crops, notes that the Cargill plant created only a few dozen jobs at the cost of doubling deforestation rates in the region. She says, "There's raw sewage on the streets near the main plaza. I'd say there's a long way to go to really develop Santarém."
In a 2003 interview praising the newly elected Lula's attempts to address hunger, Andrew MacMillan, the director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's field operations, couldn't help remarking on the irony that "the very success of agriculture has been disastrous for poor rural people." MacMillan elaborated: "In most developing countries, small farmers have either had to remain on the land, often with a diminishing size of plot as families have grown, or to migrate to the cities with no job in sight. Most chronically food insecure people are, therefore, small farmers or recent urban migrants who have fled rural destitution."
Though few Brazilians are starving, roughly 10 percent don't get enough to eat every day. The problem is worst in Lula's native Northeast, where the land and weather make farming nearly impossible, and in the cities. Those who farm in fertile areas or fish in one of the Amazon's many rivers aren't rich by any measure, but they get enough to eat.
The people who live in the cities located in the rainforest are not as lucky. FASE's Schlessinger told me, "Hunger is worse in the Amazon, because food has so much further to travel to get to the small cities."
Lula's Zero Hunger initiative provides direct payments to those in need. But even with the monthly payments, Brazil's undernourished are among the 75 million people around the world teetering on the brink of hunger as a result of the recent spike in food prices. The same price spikes, in turn, fuel the expansion of soybeans in the rainforest, which displaces even more people.
And fuel is the right word: The eager embrace of biofuels in the US and Europe has dramatically increased the price of vegetable oils. As food prices spiraled out of control in early 2008, the UN released a report concluding that 30 to 65 percent of the price increases were due to demand for cropbased fuels.
Blairo Maggi, the owner of Grupo Andre Maggi and the governor of Mato Grosso, told a São Paolo newspaper, "With the worsening of the global food crisis, the time is coming when it will be inevitable to discuss whether we preserve the environment or produce more food. There is no way to produce more food without occupying more land and taking down more trees."
There isn't much good news when it comes to the Amazon. But there are two strategies that could improve the forest's chances for survival. The first is to increase pressure on the Brazilian government to enforce its own forestry laws. As concern about the soy boom spreads, the government has faced more international pressure to uphold the requirement that large landowners leave 80 percent of their lands intact.
"A lot of environmental groups have kind of a spotlight" on landowners and agribusinesses, says Stoner of USAID. "They're having to be careful not-to clear additional land unless they've got permission to do it."
Another limit on soy's growth spurt is a Greenpeace-brokered moratorium, now in its third year, on agribusinesses buying soy grown on newly cleared land. The agreement has won significant buy-in from NGOs, agribusinesses, and the Brazilian government.
Still, some environmentalists are quick to point out that the current setaside laws don't go far enough. "When we're talking about a global ecological crisis," says Salazar-Lopez, "we don't think there should even be 20 percent allowed for deforestation."
The second, andperhaps best, strategy is to promote an entirely new model of development. The Amazon crisis has intensified long-simmering doubts among aid groups about the value of commodity-based agriculture. At the same time, climate change has nurtured a keener awareness of agribusiness's contributions to deforestation, which account for at least a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Oxfam now prominently features the soy price problem on its Web site. Its recommendations echo those of groups working with rural farmers in Brazil, whose support for small-scale farming would once have been considered naïve and unrealistic. Calls to increase support for family farmers with credit, seeds, and education have entered mainstream development debates. Even USAID is supporting various traditional farming efforts around the Amazon.
Yet supporting small farmers who grow diverse crops has not been undertaken in a systematic way. Stoner says, "Tropical forests are the world's biggest diversity machines. The forest doesn't want to have one crop — people know that by now."
Small farmers need the forest to remain healthy for their crops to thrive: Unlike industrial soy growers, they can't just add fertilizer and pesticide. Agribusinesses like Blairo Maggi's like to say that small farmers can't compete bushel for bushel, but small farmers' beans, rice, manioc, and bananas go directly toward feeding human beings, whereas ' soy's nutritional value is whittled away as it is processed for cows processed into meat. Include the fossil-fuel energy required to transport food from Brazil to China, and soy's advantage all but disappears.
To a Westerner's eye, the life of a small farmer eking out a living in the Amazon may look- like both a meager existence and a threat to the rainforest. But the real appeal of diversified smallscale farming in the Amazon is that it isn't just what the forest wants; it's also the solution rural poor communities envision for themselves. They don't want modern urban jobs: They just want to work their land and earn a fair price for what they grow.
"Tropical forests are the world's biggest diversity machines. The forest doesn't want to have one crop — people know that by now."
Section:EARTH WATCH
Though it uses materials from the world's rainforest in its products, The Rainforest Company has made sure not to bite the hand that feeds it.
"Our goal is to provide a viable economic alternative to the farming and ranching that is destroying the rainforest," says John Huhn, president and cofounder of TheRainforest Company. The St. Louis, Missouri-based company harvests ingredients from rainforests for its gourmet and specialty foods in a way that sustains the land's original chemistry and produces no long-term damage.
As a result, the company has created economies other than the "slash and burn" that has been predominate in those areas.
"We want to be able to encourage understanding and conservation of the rainforest," says Huhn. By utilizing and not destroying the rainforest, thecompany hopes to show that the world's forests are most valuable as a living resource. The Rainforest Company has marketed its line of confections including Rainforest Crunch, a blend of Brazil nuts, cashews and caramel butter; Sweet River Chocolate, a dairy-free chocolate; and JABBO, chocolate clusters with rainforest cashews. Brazil nuts and cocoa beans from the Amazon, for over a year. All use ingredients fromrainforests and are preservative-free.
Not only is the company helping preserve the rainforest, it has spurred economies for the indigenous people by purchasing materials from non-profit groups such as Conservation International and suppliers who work directly with cooperatives.
Candela-Peru, an organization in the Madre de Dios region of Peru, for example, helps improve the region's living standards by maintaining sustainable practices, establishing ways to finance social projects deemed important by producers, and developing renewable resources through various projects.
Candela-Peru works with about 250 Brazil nut farmers and their families.
"Our product reflects value for the rainforest," says Charles Kinsolving, marketing director for The Rainforest Company. "We see that as more valuable than just giving money."
In addition to purchasing material directly from those groups, The Rainforest Company donates 10 percent of its profits to such organizations.
Founded by Huhn and Paul Nagel in 1992, the company began distributing products such as Rainforest Crunch. Eventually, however, they switched its focus to product development.
Rapidly growing, the company plans to increase its distribution and create new products.
"The potential for new products is as vast as therainforests themselves," adds Nagel, whose company achieved $3-$3.5 million in sales last year.
In addition to food, the company markets body care products that use scents from rainforests. Its products are sold in select gift and gourmet shops. supermarkets, zoos and botanical gardens nationwide.
Montgomery, Sy. "Rainforests' importance upheld." Animals 129.1 (Jan. 1996): 6. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=9601316424&site=ehost-live>.
Rainforests' importance upheld. By: Montgomery, Sy, Animals, 00306835, Jan/Feb96, Vol. 129, Issue 1Database:MasterFILE Premier
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RAINFORESTS' IMPORTANCE UPHELD
Section: NewsScanImportant new evidence argues strongly for the preservation of tropical rainforests: every hectare soaks up a ton of carbon dioxideone the gas whose buildup could cause catastrophic global warming.
That's the conclusion of a team of British, Australian, and Brazilian ecologists whose calculations, published in Science, are being hailed as the first proof that tropicalrainforests counteract many of the atmospheric ills produced by burning fossil fuels.
Today the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is nearly one-third higher than at the turn of the century. The world's remaining rainforests, according to thenew calculations, may absorb only one-sixth of the amount produced by burning fossil fuels.
The world's oceans are the largest absorbers of carbon dioxide but, according to Pieter Tans of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "it's clear theforests are helping us."
Wallace, J. "Rainforest Rx. (cover story)." Sierra 76.4 (July 1991): 36. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=9109021830&site=ehost-live>.
RAINFOREST RX
The botanical riches of the tropics could help solve some of the world's most pressing medical problems-if we can find out what's there before it all disappears.Nearly ten years later, the mixture of excitement and trepidation that ethnobotanist Walter Lewis felt on his first visit with the Jivaro people still echoes in his voice.
"We were hoping to spend more than a month living in a village in the rainforests of northern Peru, but we didn't know if the Jivaro would welcome us, " Lewis recalls. "They distrust even peaceful outsiders, and with good reason. Most white visitors show up to sell them either God or goods."
Yet Lewis had traveled hundreds of miles by transport plane, army helicopter, dugout canoe, and foot neither to convert the Jivaro nor to convince them to buy blue jeans or infant formula. He hadn't come to observe the local fauna, or to study the daily routines of a traditional tribe in the Amazon Basin.
What he wanted was a guided tour of the plants the Jivaro use to treat everything from athlete's foot to hepatitis. "The Jivaro, like most indigenous peoples, use dozens of different plants for medicinal purposes," Lewis says. "These plants have the potential to treat a host of diseases, possibly including cancer and AIDS."
Lewis and his wife, medical microbiologist Memory Elvin-Lewis, are two of a growing number of researchers on the same quest. The search for medicines from plants is under way in the rainforests of Latin America, Asia, and Africa; at multinational drug companies; and at the National Cancer Institute, host to the most ambitious plant-testing program yet unveiled.
Without exception, the researchers involved believe that medicinal plants will eventually yield important new weapons in the age-old battle against disease. But these plants may accomplish even more: They may provide a means of preserving the dwindling rainforest itself, as well as the indigenous tribes struggling to survive there.
"Developing even a few medicines from rainforest plants --and then returning some of the profits to the local people --could help make the forest more valuable to preserve than to destroy," says ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin, vice-president for plant conservation at Washington-based Conservation International. "We shouldn't need an economic reason to save tropical forests, but clearly we do."
SITTING IN HIS CLIMATE-CONTROLLED OFFICE, which is decorated incongruously with finely wrought wooden blowguns and spears, Plotkin seems filled with impatience and barely restrained energy. He spent years in the forests of Suriname and other tropical countries learning the medicinal lore of local shamans. Theknowledge he gained has made him a spokesman for preservation of the tropics' diverse plant life.
That diversity is astonishing: Tropical forests contain the vast majority of the world's 250,000 flowering-plant species. Yet only about one percent of them have been thoroughly examined for medicinal properties, says Plotkin; he's concerned that valuable plants may be exterminated before they are ever studied.
Despite their superficial study, scientists have already reaped a valuable harvest--about 120 plant-derived medicinal chemicals from about 100 species. Today, Plotkin points out, nearly a quarter of all prescription drugs contain ingredients derived from plants--including many known to folk wisdom for centuries. Whenever you take an aspirin, for example, you're ingesting a chemical found in the bark of willow trees--and sharing an ancient medical tradition with Native Americans. Travel to a tropical country, and it's possible you'll carry an antimalarial medication containing quinine, extracted from the bark ofthe cinchona tree of South America and first introduced tothe developed world by the Jivaro in the early 17th century. And foxglove, a common European plant originally described in the first century, has been touted for centuries for its ability to combat rapid pulse, dropsy, and many other conditions. More recently researchers learned that the same plant also contains digitoxin, thesource of digitalis, a potent weapon against heart failure.
"You'd think that such successes would have major research institutions and drug companies collecting and testing plants with all their resources," Plotkin says. "But interest in plant-based medicines has been dwindling for much of the 20th century. "
In the 1950s and '60s scientists became proficient at synthesizing drugs in the laboratory. They soon developed an attitude that chemist Gordon Cragg ofthe National Cancer Institute describes as "anything nature can do, we can do better." Most research institutions neglected medicinal plants, yet they couldn't synthesize many of thecomplex chemicals found in them. Even when they could recreate natural substances, they often discovered that chemicals made in the lab were far more expensive than those extracted from a plant.
Meanwhile, individual researchers continued to identify, collect, and test plants. Though few in number, these scientists made important contributions to medical knowledge. They found, for example, that a kind of wormwood (Artemisia annua) contains artemisinin, a chemical the Chinese have used to combat malaria for nearly 1,000 years. Scientists who recently confirmed artemisinin's efficacy believe that it can successfully combat the skyrocketing number of malaria strains that have grown resistant to quinine-based medicines.
Native Americans and the early European settlers who reamed from them relied on the root of the mayapple (also known as the American mandrake) to treat venereal warts, parasites, and other conditions. During the past decade etoposide (derived from a chemical found in the root of the mayapple) has become a potent, widely used treatment for testicular and lung cancers.
The most publicized--and by far the most influential--discovery of the past 30 years is the rosy periwinkle, a plant native to Madagascar (and long used medicinally by local people), the leaves of which contain the alkaloids vincristine and vinblastine. Vincristine alone has quadrupled the survival rate for children with leukemia, and both drugs have become important weapons against Hodgkin's disease.
"Each year, sales of vincristine and vinblastine combined exceed $100 million," says Cragg. "The possibility that more such money-makers exist is a powerful incentive to continue the search for medicinal plants."
Walter Lewis and memory Elvin-Lewis aren't necessarily expecting to find a new rosy periwinkle in the Peruvian rainforest. But they do think the Jivaro pharmacopoeia can provide out-siders with effective medicines. "We've had tremendous preliminary results from several plants with antihepatitis B activity," Lewis says.
Elvin-Lewis found she had access to information unavailable to her husband. "The men would tell Walter what plants they thought the women used for contraception," she recalls. "The Jivaro women and I would listen, nod, and remain quiet. Then the men would take Walter off into the forest, and thewomen would start to smile. They'd say to me, 'Those men don't know anything. We'll show you what we really use."' The researchers learned that several species in the sedge family, rarely used medicinally by Jivaro men and neglected by most ethnobotanists, are prized by local women. They cultivate theplants, take them along when the tribe moves, and rely on them for a variety of pediatric, gynecological, and contraceptive uses.
Even as they uncovered the medical secrets of the Jivaro, Lewis and Elvin-Lewis realized that their efforts and those of a handful of other individuals were not enough to sample and test rainforest plants adequately. "The entire field needed some larger institutional support," Walter Lewis says. "Luckily, theNational Cancer Institute stepped in."
With a yearly budget of $2 million, the institute's Natural Products Branch in Frederick, Maryland, has injected new vigor into the effort to develop medicines from plants and other natural substances. It did not initially focus on rainforest plants, however; during the decade after its founding in 1975, thebranch concentrated on screening plants native to the United States and other temperate regions. It broadened its focus to the tropics in 1986, and began to look for anti-AIDS as well as anticancer activity in 1988.
Thus far, the temperate-region search has produced several promising leads, as well as one significant success: taxol, a substance in Taxus brevifolia,the Pacific yew. Now in final testing stages, taxol has already proven to be one of the most effective treatments yet found for ovarian cancer (which claims 12,000 lives a year in theUnited States alone), and may combat several other types of cancer.
"We had been testing a small number of rainforest plants submitted by Walter Lewis and other scientists all along," explains Gordon Cragg, the branch's director. But once the National Cancer Institute intensified its rainforest efforts in September 1986, it awarded five-year contracts totaling more than $2.5 million to three organizations already skilled at collecting tropical flora: the New York Botanical Garden (for samples from Latin America and theCaribbean), the Missouri Botanical Garden (Africa), and the University of Illinois at Chicago (Southeast Asia). During the life of its contract, each group must identify and deliver 1,500 samples a year tothe branch's laboratories.
A few large drug companies--including Glaxo, Eli Lilly, and Merck Sharpe & Dohme--are analyzing plant samples as well, screening them for antiviral, antibacterial, and anticancer activity. Merck's 30 person Natural Products Chemistry department, for example, examines 500 plants a year donated by theNew York Botanical Garden. Its staff tests soil organisms and molds as well as plants, and attempts to synthesize promising natural products in thelaboratory.
Given the ongoing deforestation of the Amazon and other tropical forests, though, these efforts may not be proceeding quickly enough. "Our best estimates indicate that 50 to 150 plant species will become extinct every day during the next 20 years," says Brian Boom of the New York Botanical Garden. "Most of them are found in thetropics, and most will never have been studied or collected. Who knows what invaluable medicines are contained in plants we'll never even know existed?"
AS THEIR HOMELANDS ARE DESTROYED BY deforestation, rainforest peoples are also disappearing; in Brazil alone, more than 90 tribes have dispersed (or succumbed to disease) since the beginning of this century. Those that survive are sometimes moved to distant reservations, where theplants are unfamiliar and the tribe's healing arts wither.
Even when their homelands remain intact, native peoples are subject to the incursions of industrialized societies. In 1982, when Walter Lewis and Memory Elvin-Lewis first visited the Jivaro, they found that a process of acculturation had already begun, even in the most remote villages. "The healers were all growing old, but theyounger members of the tribe were expressing little interest in inheriting their wisdom," Lewis says. "Where once a healer was the most respected man in the village, now the Jivaro were beginning to prefer prepackaged medicine from the United States."
Conservation International's Mark Plotkin has seen similar signs of cultural deterioration elsewhere. "In Suriname, many of the shamans are already more than 70 years old, yet few have found apprentices," Plotkin says. "When one of these shamans dies without passing his arts on to the next generation, thetribe--and the world--loses hundreds of years of irreplaceable knowledge. "
While Western medicine can supplement native knowledge and help people live longer and healthier lives, it's no substitute for their own healing arts. TheWorld Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of the world's population depend on traditional preparations for their health care needs. "No matter how much they crave medicine that comes out of a box, they'll never be able to afford to buy enough to replace their herbal medicines," Plotkin says.
In an attempt to forestall a health-care catastrophe among rainforest peoples, Conservation International has made the sustainable harvesting of medicinal plants (as well as foods, oils, pigments, and other forest products) the cornerstone of a ten-year plan it calls the "Rainforest Imperative." The plan, announced last year, aims tosave tropical forests and the cultural integrity of their inhabitants by working with host countries to make the forests more profitable to preserve than to destroy.
As they visited the Jivaro over the years, Walter Lewis and Memory Elvin-Lewis witnessed firsthand the ever-intensifying pace of acculturation. But on their later visits, toward the end of the decade, they noted a countercurrent: a rebirth of interest in traditional medicine among younger members of thetribe, a rebirth that Lewis believes was at least partly because of the researchers' obvious respect for the village healers.
"The Jivaro would tell us, 'You are like babies in the rainforest, but we will teach you,'" Lewis recalls. "During the next few years, we'll find out if we're smart enough to learn what they have to teach."
Works Cited
Scott, Cameron. "The Amazon: It's What's for Dinner." Earth Island Journal 23.4 (Winter2009 2009): 22-24. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=35825532&site=ehost-live>.
he Amazon: It's What's for Dinner. By: Scott, Cameron, Earth Island Journal, 10410406, Winter2009, Vol. 23, Issue 4Database:MasterFILE Premier
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The Amazon: It's What's for Dinner
Edilberto Sena is a priest in the liberation theology mold. After running a community development project deep in the Amazon for six years, he now manages Radio Rural, a Catholic radio station in the Amazonian city of Santarém. He uses the post to advocate for the rainforest and its people — a task that is more difficult than ever."Oh, man, you should come here to see with your eyes what is happening here," he wrote me in an e-mail. "I become angry anytime I start thinking about this. You know, the government, the judges, the politicians, the First World — nobody comes here to help us to stop the destruction of the Amazon. … The only help is this financial crisis in the world, because this way the commodities markets will cool down."
It's the seemingly innocuous soybean that has Padre Sena so upset. During the last decade, industrial soy farming has joined cattle ranching as a primary cause of deforestation in the rainforest. As room for agriculture runs out in the woodland savannah that borders the Amazon to the south — an extraordinarily rich ecosystem in its own right — soy producers have begun to buy up land in the rainforest. Far from stopping them, the government has waved them in.
Brazil began growing soy on a large scale in the 1970s, during the long rule of a leftist military dictatorship. Soy functioned mostly as an export crop, but the regime tried to encourage Brazilians to integrate it into their diets. When the spread of soybeans resulted in a shortage of black beans, a traditional staple, the government distributed a soy-based version of a popular recipe. Even then, it was clear that large-scale soy production had environmental and social costs: Almost three million small farmers from the states of Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul were displaced. Many made their way north to the Amazon, where they cleared jungle to settle. Government infrastructure projects undertaken at the time spurred dizzying rates of deforestation.
In 1975, as a result of the Brazilian government's efforts to popularize soy, state researchers developed a crop variety that fared well in the heat and humidity of the tropics. Then, in the late 1990s, genetically modified soy, designed to withstand the powerful weed killer Roundup, was illegally introduced in Argentina. The Roundup Ready soy quickly appeared in Brazil and stimulated still more cultivation of the crop.
Also in the late 1990s, the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture publicized results of a study that showed that soy grew well in the Amazonian state of Para. The state tried to dodge the environmental implications of the report by directing growers away from virgin forest — thereby easing environmental pressures there — to "non-pristine areas," ratcheting up the pressure on small family farms in those locations.
The boom was on. Brazil's soy production has nearly doubled since 1998, and the Amazon is now home to at least 14 million of the country's 284 million acres of plantations. Summer deforestation rates more than tripled from 2007 to 2008, and in the 12- month period ending in August, close to two million acres of rainforest were razed. The destruction amounted to 2.7 percent of the sprawling rainforest's total acreage — well over the two percent the UN considers a dangerous annual deforestation rate.
Brazil's left-leaning president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has justified his largely pro-development stance on the Amazon with populist claims that the rainforest belongs to Brazilians. But the soy plantations there clearly don't. Brazilians consume just a small fraction of the soy grown in their country. Most of it travels to Europe and China, where it is fed to livestock to support the world's growing demand for meat.
The major players in Brazil's soy boom are agribusiness conglomerates Cargill, ADM, Bunge, and the Frenchowned Louis Dreyfus. The traders provide seeds and fertilizer in exchange for a low price on the resulting crop. Only one Brazilian company — Grupo Andre Maggi, which owns more than 400,000 acres — has a real share of the soy pie.
When asked whether the soy boom benefited the country's economy, Sergio Schlessinger of Brazil's Federation of Agencies for Social and Educational Assistance (known by its Portuguese acronym, FASE) replies: "In my opinion, no. The benefit is international."
A widely cited statistic says that 11 small farmers are displaced by soy plantations for every one that finds a job in the highly mechanized industry. In Brazil Is Naked: The Advance of Monoculture Soy, the Grain That Grew Too Much, a book Schlessinger authored with Silvia Noronha, he writes, "The idea that soy generates jobs in Brazil is absolutely false….Although it represents 44 percent of the area planted with grains in the country, soy generates just 5.5 percent of farm-sector jobs."
Stephen Vosti, a UC Davis economist who supports limited development in the Amazon, believes that selling their land to industrial plantations can help peasants economically. "But," he acknowledges, "the real question is where they go afterward. They could go further into the forest or to urban areas, and either way you have the potential for increased poverty."
The orgy of deforestation brought about by Brazil's soy boom has garnered international attention, but its effects on the rural communities of the Amazon have been largely overlooked. While providing food to the rest of the world, the giant soy fields leave more Brazilians at risk of hunger. The soy boom is also foreclosing one of the best options for forest conservation. In displacing small farmers, the soy plantations are removing those people who are perhaps best suited to protect the forests.
Santarém sits at the junction where the Tapajós River folds its blue waters into the muddy, powerful Amazon. A Cargill soy port — operating in defiance of a Brazilian high court ruling — dominates a beach once used by local fisherman. Surrounded by dense forest, including several reserves, Santarém is at the heart of Pará's growth spurt in soy.
Outside Santarém, huge growers, backed by government loans unavailable to smallholders, are buying out small farmers' plots. Thugs sometimes help seal the deal; other times, aerially sprayed pesticides do. Even when sales are legal, the end result is the same: Seas of soy displace the fruit, bean, manioc, and rice crops of small farmers, many of whom came to Para through government settlement projects.
Between 1998 and 2004, the Pastoral Land Commission recorded 641 land disputes in Para alone. The steady stream of refugees from these conflicts slips into Santarém's urban life in a human version of the process Brazilians call "the meeting of the waters" that takes place at the city's edge.
Eric Stoner, the general coordinator of environment programs for USAID Brazil, first arrived in Brazil 35 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer. He describes the industrialization of agriculture in states like Para and Mato Grosso as a radical transformation.
"It's like capitalism on steroids here," he says. "People who couldn't make it moved on. They have jobs in cities or small towns, and they have to buy their food, which is a change."
Stoner insists there's enough economic activity in Santarém and cities like it "to absorb" small farmers who sell their land to soy plantations. But he acknowledges the absurdity of moving the rural poor around the country like so many checkers.
"Big landowners buy land, and the government resettles the people," usually elsewhere in the Amazon. "That goes on again and again," Stoner sighs. "The government knows it's not going to establish a productive future for these people. And the dynamics of it destroy the forest."
Sena, Santarém's radical priest, also paints a bleak picture. "The farmers have three choices after they sell their land," he wrote. They can go deeper into the forest and clear land, try to buy poor agricultural land along one of the Amazon's controversial roads, or "take the money and go to the outskirts of Santarém. Here they buy a poor house, build a small room in the front and sell bananas that they buy from others, or they go to the streets to sell ice cream or popcorn."
Leila Salazar-Lopez, who directs Rainforest Action Network's campaign to pressure US-owned agribusinesses to stop clearing rainforests to grow commodity crops, notes that the Cargill plant created only a few dozen jobs at the cost of doubling deforestation rates in the region. She says, "There's raw sewage on the streets near the main plaza. I'd say there's a long way to go to really develop Santarém."
In a 2003 interview praising the newly elected Lula's attempts to address hunger, Andrew MacMillan, the director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's field operations, couldn't help remarking on the irony that "the very success of agriculture has been disastrous for poor rural people." MacMillan elaborated: "In most developing countries, small farmers have either had to remain on the land, often with a diminishing size of plot as families have grown, or to migrate to the cities with no job in sight. Most chronically food insecure people are, therefore, small farmers or recent urban migrants who have fled rural destitution."
Though few Brazilians are starving, roughly 10 percent don't get enough to eat every day. The problem is worst in Lula's native Northeast, where the land and weather make farming nearly impossible, and in the cities. Those who farm in fertile areas or fish in one of the Amazon's many rivers aren't rich by any measure, but they get enough to eat.
The people who live in the cities located in the rainforest are not as lucky. FASE's Schlessinger told me, "Hunger is worse in the Amazon, because food has so much further to travel to get to the small cities."
Lula's Zero Hunger initiative provides direct payments to those in need. But even with the monthly payments, Brazil's undernourished are among the 75 million people around the world teetering on the brink of hunger as a result of the recent spike in food prices. The same price spikes, in turn, fuel the expansion of soybeans in the rainforest, which displaces even more people.
And fuel is the right word: The eager embrace of biofuels in the US and Europe has dramatically increased the price of vegetable oils. As food prices spiraled out of control in early 2008, the UN released a report concluding that 30 to 65 percent of the price increases were due to demand for cropbased fuels.
Blairo Maggi, the owner of Grupo Andre Maggi and the governor of Mato Grosso, told a São Paolo newspaper, "With the worsening of the global food crisis, the time is coming when it will be inevitable to discuss whether we preserve the environment or produce more food. There is no way to produce more food without occupying more land and taking down more trees."
There isn't much good news when it comes to the Amazon. But there are two strategies that could improve the forest's chances for survival. The first is to increase pressure on the Brazilian government to enforce its own forestry laws. As concern about the soy boom spreads, the government has faced more international pressure to uphold the requirement that large landowners leave 80 percent of their lands intact.
"A lot of environmental groups have kind of a spotlight" on landowners and agribusinesses, says Stoner of USAID. "They're having to be careful not-to clear additional land unless they've got permission to do it."
Another limit on soy's growth spurt is a Greenpeace-brokered moratorium, now in its third year, on agribusinesses buying soy grown on newly cleared land. The agreement has won significant buy-in from NGOs, agribusinesses, and the Brazilian government.
Still, some environmentalists are quick to point out that the current setaside laws don't go far enough. "When we're talking about a global ecological crisis," says Salazar-Lopez, "we don't think there should even be 20 percent allowed for deforestation."
The second, andperhaps best, strategy is to promote an entirely new model of development. The Amazon crisis has intensified long-simmering doubts among aid groups about the value of commodity-based agriculture. At the same time, climate change has nurtured a keener awareness of agribusiness's contributions to deforestation, which account for at least a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Oxfam now prominently features the soy price problem on its Web site. Its recommendations echo those of groups working with rural farmers in Brazil, whose support for small-scale farming would once have been considered naïve and unrealistic. Calls to increase support for family farmers with credit, seeds, and education have entered mainstream development debates. Even USAID is supporting various traditional farming efforts around the Amazon.
Yet supporting small farmers who grow diverse crops has not been undertaken in a systematic way. Stoner says, "Tropical forests are the world's biggest diversity machines. The forest doesn't want to have one crop — people know that by now."
Small farmers need the forest to remain healthy for their crops to thrive: Unlike industrial soy growers, they can't just add fertilizer and pesticide. Agribusinesses like Blairo Maggi's like to say that small farmers can't compete bushel for bushel, but small farmers' beans, rice, manioc, and bananas go directly toward feeding human beings, whereas ' soy's nutritional value is whittled away as it is processed for cows processed into meat. Include the fossil-fuel energy required to transport food from Brazil to China, and soy's advantage all but disappears.
To a Westerner's eye, the life of a small farmer eking out a living in the Amazon may look- like both a meager existence and a threat to the rainforest. But the real appeal of diversified smallscale farming in the Amazon is that it isn't just what the forest wants; it's also the solution rural poor communities envision for themselves. They don't want modern urban jobs: They just want to work their land and earn a fair price for what they grow.
"Tropical forests are the world's biggest diversity machines. The forest doesn't want to have one crop — people know that by now."
Works Cited
Amire, Roula. "Confections ring up sales, help rainforest." Candy Industry 163.2 (Feb. 1998): 13. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=274411&site=ehost-live>.
CONFECTIONS RING UP SALES, HELP RAINFOREST
Section: EARTH WATCHThough it uses materials from the world's rainforest in its products, The Rainforest Company has made sure not to bite the hand that feeds it.
"Our goal is to provide a viable economic alternative to the farming and ranching that is destroying the rainforest," says John Huhn, president and cofounder of TheRainforest Company.
The St. Louis, Missouri-based company harvests ingredients from rainforests for its gourmet and specialty foods in a way that sustains the land's original chemistry and produces no long-term damage.
As a result, the company has created economies other than the "slash and burn" that has been predominate in those areas.
"We want to be able to encourage understanding and conservation of the rainforest," says Huhn. By utilizing and not destroying the rainforest, thecompany hopes to show that the world's forests are most valuable as a living resource.
The Rainforest Company has marketed its line of confections including Rainforest Crunch, a blend of Brazil nuts, cashews and caramel butter; Sweet River Chocolate, a dairy-free chocolate; and JABBO, chocolate clusters with rainforest cashews. Brazil nuts and cocoa beans from the Amazon, for over a year. All use ingredients fromrainforests and are preservative-free.
Not only is the company helping preserve the rainforest, it has spurred economies for the indigenous people by purchasing materials from non-profit groups such as Conservation International and suppliers who work directly with cooperatives.
Candela-Peru, an organization in the Madre de Dios region of Peru, for example, helps improve the region's living standards by maintaining sustainable practices, establishing ways to finance social projects deemed important by producers, and developing renewable resources through various projects.
Candela-Peru works with about 250 Brazil nut farmers and their families.
"Our product reflects value for the rainforest," says Charles Kinsolving, marketing director for The Rainforest Company. "We see that as more valuable than just giving money."
In addition to purchasing material directly from those groups, The Rainforest Company donates 10 percent of its profits to such organizations.
Founded by Huhn and Paul Nagel in 1992, the company began distributing products such as Rainforest Crunch. Eventually, however, they switched its focus to product development.
Rapidly growing, the company plans to increase its distribution and create new products.
"The potential for new products is as vast as the rainforests themselves," adds Nagel, whose company achieved $3-$3.5 million in sales last year.
In addition to food, the company markets body care products that use scents from rainforests. Its products are sold in select gift and gourmet shops. supermarkets, zoos and botanical gardens nationwide.
Works Cited
Tangley, L. "Saving the rainforests." Issues in Science & Technology 7.2 (Winter90/91 1990): 100. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=9103182074&site=ehost-live>.