Families from Pará earn money from the fruits of the Amazon. They organize themselves into associations to sell raw materials for the production of food, medicine and clothing.

The murumuru comes from a palm tree that reaches 15 meters. The fruit falls due to the force of the rain, wind and animals that speed up the work of the riverside dwellers. Despite the height, the object of the rural workers' search is within reach: the seed.

Extractivist Andrelino Barbosa collects up to 50 kg of seeds in a day's expedition. But it is not always necessary to go deep into the forest to do this work. Some of these fruits travel to the beach. The movement of the tides carries the andiroba seeds to the sand where the riverside dwellers collect them.

The andiroba harvest runs from December to July, being an alternative to the closed season, when commercial fishing is prohibited. What is the bioeconomy of sociobiodiversity?

The sustainable exploitation of nature, generating money for the local population and the country, as riverside communities and other extractive peoples do, has a name: the bioeconomy of sociobiodiversity.

It involves the use of products from nature, but always prioritizing the traditional knowledge of the people who live in the region. This collection by traditional peoples is an opportunity for the conservation of forests and for them to have better living conditions, explains Joice Ferreira, a biologist at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa).

The bioeconomy of Pará generates more than 200 thousand jobs, most of them in the countryside, according to a study carried out by the NGO The Nature Conservancy, in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) and a cosmetics company.

This group includes around 100 riverside families, who sell their harvest to the Association of Extractive and Agrarian Producers of Salvaterra (Apeas).

Every week, 10 tons of seeds arrive, with prices ranging from R$0.70 to R$1.10 per kilo. Apeas sells the raw material to companies that transform the seeds into oils, which are then sold to manufacturers of cosmetics, medicines, food and even clothing.

In the industry, half of the production supplies the national market, the other part goes to Asia, the United States, Canada and several European countries.

If you don't collect...

The tucumã fruit is one of the most sought after. Its collection helps the environment, as there are historical accounts of rivers in the state of Amazonas that were completely closed due to the excess tucumã thrown into them.

When the fruit ferments, it consumes the oxygen in the water and kills all life in that microsystem, explains Luiz Morais, partner at Amazon Oil.

The tucumã has several uses: the pulp is an ingredient in cooking, the black part is used in biomass to obtain fuel and there is the almond, which is the objective of the extractivists' collection.

With information from Globo Rural