The Hearts of Acai Palm Trees
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008The experience with acai of most non-Brazilians has been from eating hearts of palm, a delicacy from the trunk of the acai palm (typically the E. edulis species). Unfortunately, harvesting acai trees for hearts of palm means cutting them down, and trade in hearts of palm has led to widespread deforestation in Para.
The acai palm has been a very profitable source of hearts of palm, and most Euterpe harvesting takes place in the Orinoco Delta region of Venezuela. Habitat destruction and the overexploitation of E. edulis may be the two most important factors threatening biodiversity in Orinoco, Para, and other neighboring regions. In 2002, it was reported that poachers illegally chopped down five to ten thousand palm trees per week in the Itatiaia National Park (in the Mantiqueira mountain range near Rio de Janeiro), in order to sell the valuable hearts of palm.
A growing human population is straining biological resources, economic inequities are favoring overexploitation of local resources, and these social problems are contributing significantly to the extinction of the species Euterpe in several forest fragments, as well as the near-extinction and disappearance of many animal species. Some of these species have been lost as a direct result of hunting by poachers as they harvest E. edulis, while others disappeared as a consequence of decreased food availability or by harmful changes in the structure of the food chain. For these reasons, advocates of environmental preservation strongly discourage the consumption of hearts of palm by North Americans.
Fortunately, acai has multiple stems, and can provide sustained, renewable harvests when harvesting is managed with sustainable, ecologically responsible methods. Harvesting acai fruit does not necessitate cutting the trees at all; in fact, if acai fruit becomes popular worldwide, it may hold the key to saving the acai forests of Brazil. Some companies are trying to use a9ai cultivation and marketing as a vehicle to preserve Amazon rainforests. At the vanguard of this movement is Ryan Black, a surfer/entrepreneur, who developed a sustainable acai-harvesting forest project over the last six years in partnership with the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund. Over twenty thousand people living in the Lower Tocantins river basin have been beneficiaries of this program. Fifteen years ago, the state government installed the Tucurui Hydroelectric Dam with a devastating effect on their fishing income. After years of cooperation between the Federal University of Para and Black’s acai company (called Sambazon), over fifteen hundred families and a local nongovernmental organization called FASE formed a thriving sustainable forest project built around the acai palm tree to extract palm hearts and fruits. While they were working with the hearts of palm, the acai fruit was falling to the ground or being sold haphazardly to middlemen. Each of the four communities had almost zero income until 2001 when “sustainable acai” found its first market. These communities now bring in more than half a million dollars per year through cooperative bank accounts set up with the assistance of Black and his colleagues.
If managed correctly and cooperatively, the boom in North American acai consumption could preserve acai’s future (rather than deplete it with overharvesting) and contribute to the well-being of the local—and too-often-impoverished—communities that cultivate this wonderful tree that can provide healthful benefits to so many people
