Country Name: Brazil
Author: Alice Kenny

The Ecosystem Marketplace learns about the life and goals of Vanderlei de Castro as he looks for a way to link tradition and technology with payments for ecosystem services.



A land of superlatives, Brazil houses the largest contiguous rainforest and is the world's fifth largest nation in the world. It is the premier nation for biodiversity and, unfortunately, its complex ecosystems now rank among the world's most threatened. Complicating the country's wealth and destruction of natural resources, is the gap between its rich and poor, the population's richest one percent hoards more income than the poorest 50 percent combined. Into this morass, this land of haves and have-nots, waded a man of humble beginnings, Vanderlei de Castro.

A mixed-blood son of a cooperative farmer, de Castro established an ambitious enterprise called AGROTEC, the Portuguese acronym for Small Farmers Agro Ecological Technology Center. By pairing traditional knowledge with high-tech practice, he plans to rescue the Brazilian environment upon whose bounty much of the world has come to depend. Simultaneously, AGROTEC offers land, income and a way of life for otherwise impoverished indigenous communities and family farmers.

Starting small, de Castro, 51, began by restoring 125 hectares—one-half square mile—of degraded land in the "Cerrado," the marshy, short-grassed savannahs of Brazil in 1996. Now, just one decade later, he is in the process of preserving a 28,000 hectare reserve—25 times the size of the original land preserved.

Perhaps even more significant are the ecosystem services a restored Cerrado provides. It absorbs carbon that could otherwise seep into the atmosphere causing global warming, offers sanctuary to pollinating bees and filters water while balancing its natural cycle. If AGROTEC finds a way to charge for these services, it could recoup more land and turn a profit, becoming a model for payments for ecosystem services on productive lands everywhere. Many obstacles, however, still stand between de Castro and this long-term goal.

Endangered Great Plains

The threat to Brazil's rain forests is so well documented that it has become almost synonymous with the nation itself. Much less has been written outside Brazil about its equally enormous, essential and exploited Cerrado. These great plains of Brazil span more than 1.2 million miles of land, the size of Alaska and California combined. According to the World Bank, the Cerrado is the world's most biologically diverse tropical savanna as well as one of the world's most threatened regions. It houses 10,000 species of plants, 607 species of birds and 800 species of freshwater fish, according to Conservation International. But more than 90 percent of the Brazilian Cerrado has been either destroyed or degraded. Some 80 percent of the Cerrado's original vegetation is already gone, replaced by monoculture farms of cattle or soy that too often suck nutrients from the soil. When these degraded soils lead to diminishing yields, a process dubbed "suicide economics" shifts into high gear. Nearly 24 million farmers—equal to the entire populations of Sweden plus Ireland plus Denmark plus Norway—have been pushed out of the Cerrado during the past two decades.

Raised on the border of the Cerrado and the rain forest, de Castro witnessed the destruction of the Cerrado and its people. As a young boy, he says he was surrounded by the security of a large extended family and a landscape so rich he could pluck fruit blossoming from plentiful vines when hungry. His parents—first cousins—shared a grandfather of European descent and a grandmother from the Bororo tribe. They practiced traditional, low-impact farming, using what he calls "man and woman power" to raise crops and cut down trees to build their home.

Back then, only five percent of the Cerrado had been converted into farmland, but what de Castro says his family referred to as civilization was rapidly encroaching. Mega farms cultivating cattle or soy replaced family farms and unspoiled land. So at his parents' urging, de Castro went to college to pursue a life outside the Cerrado. But the profession he chose brought him right back home.

He got a job as the cameraman for producer Adrian Cowell in the award-winning series, Decade of Destruction. Broadcast on PBS "Frontline," this documentary chronicled the devastation of the Amazon rain forest from 1980-1990. The movie also documented the life and murder of Chico Mendez. Considered a martyr by many Brazilians, a malcontent by others, Mendez championed the concept of sustainable farming in rain forests. He pushed the government to create extractive reserves, conservation units similar to national parks except that they can be used for sustainable farming and extractive uses such as rubber tapping. This threatened the livelihood of cattle ranchers who generally cut the rain forest, and so—not surprisingly—ranchers and their government supporters objected to Mendez' proposals. He was fined, jailed and ultimately, in December, 1988, murdered.

De Castro, unable to stop the pictures he filmed from looping again and again through his mind, put down his camera to found AGROTEC. AGROTEC offered a development model for the cerrado similar to the one Mendez created for rain forests. He set up camp in Diorama, a small town in Goias, Brazil, where nearly 85 percent of rural properties have been deforested for cattle raising. Cattle outnumber cars by nearly 10,000 to one.

Tradition & Technology

With financial backing from more than a dozen partners including banks, foundations and government agencies, AGROTEC converted 125 hectares of land it acquired into the first agro extractive reserve.

Unlike standard nature reserves, agro extractive reserves combine an unusual mix of economic enhancement and land preservation goals. Specifically, de Castro says four basic steps characterize the agro extractive reserves with which he works. Traditional family farmers who have been pushed off their land and are struggling to survive in the cities are offered the opportunity to return to the Cerrado. AGROTEC then returns monoculture farmland to its original lush diversity, reestablishing native plants and animals while reeducating returned residents on the ancient skills of farming the Cerrado. Land title is rezoned, taking into consideration watershed management issues as well as more typical geographic boundaries. And of particular note to ecosystem service investors, the resulting micro watersheds restore water quality and regulate flow within and outside the reserve.

To enable the restored land to stand up to the economic pressures of successful monoculture farming, AGROTEC weaves the latest farming, scientific and marketing technologies into its otherwise back-to-nature movement. For example, they use traditional knowledge about medicinal plants to grow and develop 40 "green medicines" that treat most common local diseases, processing them in high-tech phytotherapeutical laboratories. The reserve also supports a mosaic of sustainable farming projects. It provides a home to the farmers working there as well as to the vastly diverse plants and mammals that cattle and soy haciendas would root out. Farmers cultivate and market fruits, fish, nuts, meats, teas, spices, vegetable oil and honey.

But unlike lucrative cattle and soy farms, AGROTEC has yet to turn a profit. De Castro blames this on the lengthy bureaucratic process required to receive permits. Similar to all marketed food and medicine, AGROTEC's products must pass through a labyrinthine process to verify their safety and validate their claims. So far, De Castro said, AGROTEC has received permits to sell some medicines but lacks permits to sell most of its products.

Looking to Ecosystem Services

AGROTEC could buy time and earn money if it could successfully market the ecosystem services it currently provides for free. Ironically, the restored Cerrado benefits the large surrounding farms that threaten its existence. The Cerrado absorbs greenhouse gases that a blacktopped area would otherwise allow to flow into the atmosphere. It supports honeybees that pollinate landowners' adjacent fields. And, perhaps most immediately important, the preserved Cerrado protects the water cycle, providing filtration and flood protection upon which thousands of adjacent acres of farms and businesses depend.

But as such a small ecosystem service provider, AGROTEC has had a hard time establishing a market, de Castro says. As with many ecosystem services, its beneficiaries equate the Cerrado's services with the air they breathe, as free God-given benefits. But returning the Cerrado to an unpolluted state that produces these services has been far from free. If it could be marketed as an ecoservice, de Castro's work could offer not only a model of how to establish a productive ecosystem but also of how to market its services for cash.

Forest Trends, an organization that promotes a market-based approach to forest preservation and the parent company of Ecosystem Marketplace, is exploring how to help AGROTEC package its ecosystem services with other small providers including an indigenous tribe in western Brazil, says one of its directors, Beto Borges. "Clearly initiatives such as this should be compensated financially," Borges says. "The agro extractive reserves provide key ecosystem services that benefit the local economy."

Unchecked, self-destructive land use could destroy Brazil's economy and way of life. Meanwhile, successful marketing of ecosystem services from agro extractive reserves could offer a model for restoring this once-rich land's biodiversity and its citizens' livelihood. But bridging this gap remains more goal than reality.

"Is there a place in ecosystem markets for initiatives such as this?" de Castro asks. "There's got to be a way."

Alice Kenny is a regular contributor to the Ecosystem Marketplace. She may be reached atalkenny at aim.com.

First published: December 4, 2006

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