Indigenous Wai Wai seek markets for Brazil nuts without middlemen

SÃO JOÃO DA BALIZA, Brazil — Levi da Silva Kaykûwû smiles as he explains the wealth that Brazil nuts have generated for his community.

“We’ve been able to buy chainsaws, aluminum-made boats and motors,” the 48-year-old Wai Wai Indigenous leader tells Mongabay as he sits in his village by the banks of the Anauá River.

Collecting, cooking, eating and selling the nuts of the Bertholletia excelsa tree is embedded in the culture of the Wai Wai people, who live across the forested interiors of northern Brazil and neighboring Guyana.

Today, Brazil nuts account for the main cash income, as well as the basis of the cuisine and diet, for the 350 families that live in the 406,000-hectare (1-million-acre) Wai Wai Indigenous Territory, which is blessed with an abundance of Brazil nut trees or castanheiras, in Roraima state.

After decades of selling raw Brazil nuts to local middlemen, who would pay the lowest price on the market, the Wai Wai community association, in partnership with various nonprofit organizations, began reaching out to national food companies for better prices with fixed contracts.

In 2021, Wickbold, one of Brazil’s largest bread companies, bought some 100 metric tons of Brazil nuts from the Wai Wai — their entire production that year. Then, in 2022, Wickbold scaled up the partnership and bought 143 metric tons, the company told Mongabay in a statement.

By selling directly to Wickbold, the Wai Wai earned roughly$1.50 per kilogram (about 70 cents a pound) of Brazil nuts, twice as much as the middlemen paid.

Indigenous people separate Brazil nuts for consumption in the village of Anauá. Image by Avener Prado.

This higher income helps the Wai Wai preserve their vast territory, which is five times the size of New York City and covered in lush rainforest canopy.

Middlemen take advantage of the Wai Wai’s relative isolation from urban centers and offer to collect their Brazil nut production at the main villages, sometimes paying for the annual harvest in advance. By doing so, they take away the power of the Indigenous people to negotiate better prices and greatly reduce their margin of profit.

In recent years, the territory has been increasingly targeted by illegal loggers, land grabbers and gold miners, according to documents and testimonies seen and heard by Mongabay.

The bad news was compounded in 2023 when Wickbold ended its agreement with the group, and the Wai Wai were once again forced to sell their Brazil nuts for a lower price to middlemen.

“In 2023, Wickbold did not complete the purchase with them due to the restructuring of the support team that advises the Wai Wai people,” the company told Mongabay in an emailed statement, adding that it was “open to exchanging experiences and resuming business.”

Wickbold has similar Brazil nut purchase agreements with other Indigenous and traditional communities in the Calha Norte region of Pará state, the Terra do Meio conservation area in the Xingu River region of Pará, and the Negro River region of Amazonas state.

Altogether, the company said its agreements have contributed to the conservation of 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) of Amazon forest over eight years.

For experts, the contract problems of the Wai Wai of Roraima are typical of the challenges faced by traditional communities in accessing more lucrative markets for the much-hyped bioeconomy of the Brazilian Amazon. A 2023 study by the World Resources Institute and the New Climate Economy found that the bioeconomy could add $8.3 billion to the Brazilian Amazon’s GDP each year. However, achieving that potential is held back by logistical and legal difficulties.

“The biggest bottleneck is being able to give the quality to the product within the territory, which is a market requirement,” Jakeline Ramos, an expert in rainforest sustainable production and director of production chain development at Brazilian conservation nonprofit Imazon, tells Mongabay. “Otherwise, they are left in the hands of middlemen.”

“That’s why the Wai Wai worked for only two months collecting the Brazil nuts in 2023,” she says. “It wasn’t paying off because middlemen were offering a very low price. So they are trying to invest and empower their community to not depend on this kind of buyer.”

For the Wai Wai in Roraima, the collecting season begins in May and lasts three to four months. During this time, families head into the rainforest to load their boats with sacks of Brazil nuts.

Then a 12-hour boat trip is needed to move their production to a warehouse at their main village of Anauá. After unloading, they head up the river again for a new collection round.

“In the past, we used to carry the nuts in a canoe by rowing, it was very heavy,” says Wai Wai leader Kaykûwû. “Today, each family has its own large boat to carry a lot of nuts and each one receives [money] according to their production.”

“Today, each family has its own large boat to carry a lot of nuts and each one receives [money] according to their production,” says Levi da Silva Kaykûwû, 48, chief of the Anauá village. Image by Avener Prado. Challenging market

Tomás Tamaxi stares up at a towering 40-meter (130-foot) Brazil nut tree.

“A tall Brazil nut tree, like this one, shows that the area is healthy, so we can be sure that we can plant other crops nearby, like banana or cassava, and it will grow too,” he says.

After finishing university in Roraima’s capital, Boa Vista, Tamaxi returned to his village in the Wai Wai Indigenous Territory to join the leaders who organize and intermediate the Brazil nut sales. The elders are preparing him to lead the next generation of Wai Wai people, focusing on industrializing their production in the near future.

“The karaiwá [white people] act only for money, they don’t think about the future,” he says. “There’s no need to cut the forest down like the karaiwá do.”

The turning point for the Wai Wai people to try to sell directly to national food companies came after creating their association of Brazil nut producers in 2018.

With the association, they gathered the families, centralized the production and received certification for sustainable production that companies need to label their products as “environmentally friendly.”

Instead of delivering raw Brazil nuts when selling to middlemen, they wash and clean the nuts and then bag them into 15-kg (33-lb) sacks.

“A tall Brazil nut tree, like this one, shows that the area is healthy, so we can be sure that we can plant other crops nearby, like banana or cassava, and it will grow too,” says Tomás Tamaxi, 40, one of the Wai Wai’s young leaders. Images by Avener Prado.

The main objective right now to enhance their production and sales is to build a larger warehouse to store more Brazil nuts. The Wai Wai built their current wooden storage hut, which can store around 30 metric tons of Brazil nuts, with the help of an NGO five years ago.

“It will fall down within a few years,” Tamaxi says. “We are planning to use next year’s harvest to build a new one made out of concrete, but we need to partner with companies to have enough money to do so.”

The next step that could guarantee better contracts and greater profits would be peeling the nuts, packaging them in smaller retail quantities, and labeling them as being from a preserved Indigenous land, said Imazon’s Ramos, who has been working on socioenvironmental projects for 19 years.

“It’s a challenging market, more rigid,” she says. “You have to certify the origin of the product and then add value with more industrialized processes and certificates of good practice.”

According to Ramos, several Indigenous communities in Roraima and Pará state are already undergoing this training.

Selling directly to big companies requires the Wai Wai people to organize their administration and logistics to deliver the Brazil nuts, which is something they still need to work on.

Titko Min is the space built in São João da Baliza, in the Brazilian state of Roraima, to store Brazil nuts during the harvest season. Image by Avener Prado. Land of Brazil nut trees

Geraldo Panahruwi is the founder of the Anauá village, a settlement of wooden huts spread along the banks of the eponymous river, where 74 Wai Wai families live and where Mongabay was invited late last year.

Today, at 62 years old, he says he can remember when Brazilian government agents contacted his father in the late 1970s about the demarcation of their people’s land.

“In the past, the Wai Wai worked for the white people who collected the Brazil nuts,” he says. “We told them where the trees were so they could collect them.”

When agents from Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs, arrived in the region, “My father realized that the Brazil nut tree, as well as providing food to us, could be a source of income for his generation and those to come,” Panahruwi says. “So he demanded as Indigenous land the region with the most nut trees.”

After decades of selling exclusively to middlemen and expelling non-Indigenous people from the territory, Panahruwi went to Boa Vista in 2007 for a workshop, where he noticed that some companies were looking for products extracted from the rainforest with sustainable handling.

Panahruwi approached Brazilian agencies interested in teaching sustainable practices and held a workshop to generate interest from Wai Wai nut-collecting families.

“Then it started. We sold for the first time to an Ecuadorian company in 2010, but it was a one-time deal and we couldn’t find other buyers. The next year we had to sell it at a lower price to middlemen again,” he says.

Geraldo Panahruwi, the 62-year-old Wai Wai chief, approached Brazilian agencies interested in teaching sustainable practices and held a workshop to generate interest from Wai Wai nut-collecting families. Image by Avener Prado. Playing the long game

Today, collecting Brazil nuts is a decentralized activity for the Wai Wai. Each family has a predefined area to harvest and chooses how long and intense their collection period will be, according to their financial needs.

Leaders like Kaykûwû and Panahruwi work as negotiators with the outside world and offer training on collecting, washing and storing the nuts.

A small percentage of the income from each family’s harvest goes into a common fund, used to improve the village’s infrastructure, such as buying and repairing diesel-fueled power generators and solar panels, or renovating the Anauá community school.

After five years of this system, each Wai Wai family has been able to buy an aluminum boat and outboard motor, a chainsaw for the family farm, and a motorbike to drive the 40 kilometers (25 miles) to the nearest city, São João da Baliza.

“We are focused now on getting stable, uninterrupted electricity so we can try to build a little processing plant for the Brazil nuts in our village,” Kaykûwû says.

Since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2023, there’s been hope of increased investments to benefit Indigenous and other traditional peoples and the bioeconomy, with France pledging to invest 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) during President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to Brazil.

Earlier this year, the Brazilian government launched an official seal for Indigenous products in an effort to stimulate sustainable production from traditional communities.

Meanwhile, the country’s Export and Investment Promotion Agency, ApexBrasil, is trying to increase exports of Brazil nuts to higher-value markets such as the United States and the European Union, the agency told Mongabay in an email.

Bolivia and Peru are Brazil’s main competitors in the Brazil nut production chain, the agency said. In the past, they accounted for almost half of Brazil’s raw nut exports.

Today, ApexBrasil said, with the increase in Brazilian competitiveness and an increasingly robust sector in terms of the supply of healthy and safe nuts, the country has expanded the proportion of its exports that goes to final consumer markets.

“In 2023, 34% of Brazilian exports went to the United States, 10% to China and 8% to Australia. Together, Peru and Bolivia together received 15% of Brazilian sales,” the agency wrote in an email.

While acknowledging the current boom of projects and companies looking for sustainably-harvested products like Brazil nuts to sell to consumers domestically and abroad, the Wai Wai regard their activities, above all, as cultural and collective.

“We are sending our children to universities, and some are about to graduate and come back to help us with the business,” Kaykûwû says while looking at the black waters of the Anauá River.

“My father’s generation secured the land, my generation is trying to create better work for us. Little by little, we are improving our lives. I am optimistic about our future.”

This story was supported by the Rainforest Journalism Fund (RJF) in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

Banner image: “Today, each family has its own large boat to carry a lot of nuts and each one receives [money] according to their production,” says Levi da Silva Kaykûwû, 48, chief of the Anauá village. Image by Avener Prado.

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