Sustainable Management in Vale do Ribeira
During the debates over the potential benefits and costs that the construction of dams in the Rio Ribeira de Iguape would result in, some defenders of the undertakings affirmed that their construction is the only means of stimulating development in the Vale do Ribeira and of generating employment and income for residents of the region. This is not true. Today there are a series of projects and activities aimed at increasing incomes while promoting sustainable resource management, and they are yielding positive results. One good example of this is tourism, which generates employment in Iguape, Ilha Comprida (on the coast), Iporanga and Apiaí, as well as in the highlands of the Vale. Public investment in parks, roads and signs, show that ecotourism is a solid bet on the parts of state and federal governments for the region.
All of this work shows that it is possible to increase family incomes by preserving nature, stimulating local development and increasing opportunities for a greater part of the population.
Tourism
Passing through the Mar de Dentro, an estuary in Cananéia, to see, photograph, and admire the birds and exuberant vegetation of the area is just one of the touristic options that the Vale do Ribeira has to offer. With the beaches on the Ilha Comprida do Cardoso, the historic cities of Iguape and Cananéia, cultural tourism in quilombola communities, and the most beautiful caves of the country in the Alto Ribeira State Park, there are many alternatives for all ages and preferences. “The touristic potential of the Vale do Ribeira could grow a lot, principally due to the diversity of the options”, says Anna Carolina Oliveira, assistant to the São Paulo Regional State Development Secretary.
Tourism appears to be a firm route to growth after a brief period of stagnation in the region. The presence of foreign tourists who visit the parks in the area for bird-watching increases every year, as affirmed by Vamis dos Santos, secretary of tourism in Iporanga, noting that, “In 2002 we had 48 thousand visitors, which was the highest we’ve had…Our hope is the potential of the region, as just in this municipality we have 300 caves, with only 16 of them being explored and open to visitors”.
The prefecture estimates that one of every five residents of Iporanga makes their living from tourism. Four months ago they opened a shop which sells handicrafts to tourists who come to the region, increasing the amount of work for the 8 female artisans belonging to a group called Jangada who have been making pieces out of bamboo fiber for the past four years. “We have a steady demand from São Paulo as well,” says Roseli dos Santos, one of the members of the group, “and because of that we need more workers in order to keep up with orders”.
Other businesses also benefit from tourism, a good example of which is the sale of orchid and bromeliads. “Our market is basically tourists that pass along the road and stop in our store. Some people buy twenty, thirty plants in one stop”, says Eloi Cerchiari, the owners of an orchid nursery on the edge of BR-101, just above the city of Registro.
More good news came for the region in November of 2006 when the government of the state of São Paulo got a $9 million dollar loan from the Inter-American Development Bank to be invested in tourism-oriented growth in the region as well as preservation of the environment. The contract was signed at the end of last February. According to consultants for the bank the current development of ecotourism in the region, the degree of local organization, the cultural and environmental treasures of the area, and the potential of the industry to improve the socioeconomic situation of the region were the principle factors which led to the loan.
Agro-forestry management
Mr. Olímpio da Silva spent more than 30 years cutting heart of palm from the forests around his house in the Rio Preto neighborhood, a rural part of Sete Barras. It was the first real source of income that he managed to generate for his family. Today, at 71 years old, Mr. Olimpio is in charge of the reforestation of this threatened species in areas around the Carlos Botelho Park, one of the largest reserves in the Vale do Ribeira. He is also the current president of the Rio Preto residents association, which has joined with the Forest Foundation of São Paulo in order to produce and market seedlings and seeds of a variety of trees native to the Atlantic rainforest of the region.
The management of the açaí trade is another of the positive results coming from a project developed by the NGO Amainan Brazil and Kazita, a business that has heart of palm farms that are over 10 years old. The aim is to sustainably harvest the fruits of this tree to make a juice as an alternative to cutting the tree down for the extraction of its core, which is considered a delicacy and referred to as heart of palm, and indeed the harvest of the fruit for juice production has proven to be more profitable than its alternative. The project began in Sete Barras and also has projects in Taiparí, another municipality on the outskirts of the Carlos Botelho Park.
Mr. Olímpio explains that the idea of planting juçara arose out of necessity. “People used to survive through banana cultivation, but as the fruit has dropped in price we saw that it was worth it to turn some of those areas into juçara palms through reforestation. It’s growing really fast”. That was in 1997. From there the business kept growing and now the community works with seedlings from 30 different marketable species, among their Portuguese names are caixeta, ingá, umbaúba, and cedro (cedar). The work consists of collecting the seeds from undisturbed forests and planting them in the organization’s three nurseries in order to grow until they are healthy and large enough to be transplanted. The nurseries of the Rio Preto Association have a stock of 50,000 seedlings, each worth $0.50 cents of a Brazilian real, depending on the species. The money raised from their sales is divided amongst associates and a quantity is kept for the maintenance of the association.
The best business initiative embarked upon by the Rio Preto Association occurred in 2003, when they had a record sale of 36,000 seedlings to a company that builds roads. “Everyone here was able to make improvements to their houses and make their lives better”. However, the opportunities didn’t stop there. “There are also a lot of farmers that have to pay fines for deforestation and come to us to buy seedlings”, says Mr. Olímpio. The leader of the community says that the demand for the seedlings hasn’t stopped increasing. “We don’t have enough people to meet the demand, there are a lot of people looking for seedlings, even from neighboring communities, looking to reforest and sell them,” he affirms.
Aquaculture
The creation of jobs and income from the production and sale of fish, mollusks, and crustaceans is one of the strongest parts of the economy along the coast of the Vale do Ribeira. What’s new is that the caiçara communities are organizing themselves in order to increase production so that they meet not just their own subsistence needs, but also those of the regional and national demand.
The best example of this is the Cananéia Oyster Producers Cooperative which manages to sell some 1,500 dozen mussels per week during the summer months. In this period of intense production each one of the 35 members earns around $640 reais per week. “Our biggest accomplishment was maintaining production during the regeneration period, which lasts from December to February”, says Francisco Mandira, one of the administrators of the cooperative. “In that period production from the estuary is illegal, but it’s also when the demand is at its highest with the influx of tourists coming to the beaches”.
Francisco explains that until the middle of the 1990s the 140 oyster collectors of the region did not have any plan for the sustainable management of the resource. They did not respect the minimum size of oysters for collection (5 centimeters in length), nor the period of the year in which fishing should not be conducted in order for the reproductive cycle to take place, which ensures the health and number of the stocks. The caiçaras still sold the oysters they collected in large quantities at low prices to middle-men who were their only access to the consumer market.
In 1994 the community started to discuss ways to change this situation, and in partnership with the São Paulo Forest Foundation they made their first nursery in the community of Mandira in Cananéia. “It hit the mark, a lot of the oysters ended up bigger and looked better, adding a lot of value to them. After that the other caiçara communities started working with nurseries too”, remembers Francsico Mandira. He tells that in 1997 the group brought together all the collectors from the region and resolved to cut sales to the middle-men and create a cooperative where the collectors themselves would be the owners of the business.
Today the CooperOstra has a beneficiary unit, where the oysters undergo a purifying process in tanks with sterilized water. This new mold of hygiene made it possible for the cooperative to receive a certificate of Federal Inspection Service from the Ministry of Agriculture, which qualifies them to find markets in the country where demand is greater, such as São Paulo. Another sign of success of the cooperative was seen in 2002 during the Rio+10 Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, when they gained international recognition as a well-executed initiative in the field of sustainable development and combating poverty, which came with an award of $30,000 US dollars given by the United Nations Development Program.
The success of the oysters has inspired other aquaculture activities in the estuary. Another series of projects have been started to increase the size of shrimp, produce live bait and fish, and to manage crab and mussels, principally in the communities of Ilha Comprida and Cananéia. The idea of the projects is to achieve constant production of seafood to avoid fluctuations in the salaries of the workers throughout the year, especially during the periods when fishing is banned for the regeneration of stocks. “Traditional fishing is no longer sufficient to feed the families, meaning that the way out of this situation is through the cultivation of some species in captivity”, say Douglas Aguiar, who has a nursery with 4,000 fish (whose local name is robalo) in Ilha Comprida.
Quilombola Communities and Family Agriculture
The quilombola communities in the Vale do Ribeira are looking for economic growth from a variety of activities that give value to the natural resources on their land. Tourism, fishing, organic agriculture, and handicrafts are good examples of sources of income that bring positive results.
Ivaporunduva, in between Eldorado and Iporanga, has had success in the production and commercialization of organic banana and reforestation of the juçara palm. In the past year the community sold 44 tons of bananas to Ceasa de Campinas and is now investing in processing the fruit with the construction of a factory to make a sweet banana paste called banana-passa, a sweet Brazilian treat, and other confections from bananas. Organic production continues being the community’s biggest bet toward reaching a varied market. There are already 32 producers in the community who have been certified. “We are sure that the organic foods market will continue to grow in Brazil, and unlike traditional producers who use agro-chemicals and deforest, we avoid that”, say Setembrino Marinho, coordinator of the project in the community. On the contrary, the other business that is going forward in the quilombo is reforestation, specifically of the juçara palm. In the last four years over 200 hectares of land received 4,000 kilograms of seeds of native species. In the past year the quilombola community of São Pedro also began a reforestation project, planting more than 800 kilos of seeds.
The highland region of the Vale do Ribeira, which includes the municipalities from the other side of the border with the state of Paraná, has also had a marked strengthening of family agriculture. In Cerro Azul, the main city of the region, the Rural Credit Cooperative (Cresol) has received increasingly large volumes of resources from Pronaf, the federal government’s program for rural small credit lending unions. According to João Carlos Hilman, president of Cresol, federal credit resources provided to farmers in the region was less than $70,000 Brazilian reais per year when the organization came to the region in 2002. In 2005, even with the creation of a new cooperative in the neighboring district of Adrianópolis, which took more than a hundred of the partners from the Cerro Azul cooperative, the amount of credit provided by the government increased to nearly $1 million reais. With this capitalization there are resources to help in the financing of new houses in rural areas: in the last year 48 were built and this year another 220 are planned.
In Registro, one of the larger cities in the area, another project seeking to meet the interests of small farmers in the valley is starting. It is aimed at reforming the Family Agriculture Center (Central da Agricultura Familiar), which will optimize the transport and production flow of the more than 1,500 small producers in the region. “This center will be a service provider, and will sell in larger quantities at better prices”, says Ana Rebeschini, director of the Vale do Ribeira Rural Workers Union (Sintravale). She predicts the center will be functioning by the second semester of this year (2006).
