Antônio de Oliveira on the patio at his farm where he dries achiote, one of the traditional Amazonian crops that now grow side by side with oil palm. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet /IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
CONCORDIA DE PARÁ/MOJÚ/ACARÁ, Brazil , Nov 20 2013 (IPS)

Thousands of small farming families in Pará, in the Amazon jungle in northeast Brazil, have turned to the African oil palm as a new source of income, through contracts with biofuel companies. Strange bedfellows, which poses cultural and economic challenges.

The small farm of Antônio de Oliveira smells like a mixture of oranges, black pepper and achiote or annatto (Bixa orellana), a shrub whose fruit is harvested for its seeds, which contain a natural dye that has coloured his farm red.

“I didn’t know anything about oil palm…it’s really different to work with, it’s a queer bird, and complicated,” said Oliveira, who signed a contract with the biofuel company Biopalma three years ago to plant African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), known as “dendê” in Brazil.

Biopalma belongs to the Vale mining company, and has 60,000 hectares of oil palm of its own. In addition, it buys the output of small farmers through its Family Agriculture programme.

The company plans to use palm oil to produce biodiesel to run the machinery and vehicles at its mines.

“I wasn’t prepared for dendê. I don’t like to have to count how many plants I have or to make a square neat plot to plant them. I planted them here and there,” the 65-year-old farmer tells IPS, explaining that he used to make a living selling black pepper, oranges and achiote.

Oliveira began to work at the age of 10 “from sunup to sundown” as a day labourer, and says he regrets that he received so little education. “When I write something, my wife tells me a lot of letters are missing,” he says, laughing.

He learned math out of necessity, and uses it to calculate his yield of fruit from the oil palm, for example, which takes five years to begin to fully produce.

Currently, he harvests some 8,000 kilos every two weeks, earning around 120 dollars a ton. But he says that barely covers expenses, because he has to pay four assistants.

But unlike black pepper, which produces one harvest a year, oil palm fruit is harvested every 15 days. So he hopes to soon buy a “really nice” pickup truck, to transport his produce and take his family on trips.

“My dream is to see [the southern city of] Rio Grande do Sul. When it’s warm; I won’t go when it’s cold,” he says with a smile, explaining that he is used to the warm climate of the rainforest.

“Some of the farmers who are associates of the company have problems managing their businesses,” Biopalma technician Charles Vilarino tells IPS. “But Oliveira already works with several products, and in practice he is a small businessman. He has to keep track of how much money is coming in and going out, how much he spends on each harvest.”

The firm has signed up 350 families to produce palm oil fruit, and by 2015 plans to incorporate 1,650 more, on a total of 20,000 hectares.

When they join the oil palm programmes and agree to dedicate up to 10 hectares of land to cultivating the palm fruit, farmers receive credit from the federal government as well as technical assistance and a guarantee that their output will be purchased for 30 years.

But difficulties abound. In the north of the state of Pará many farmers have no means of transport to carry their products to market, and there is no strong tradition of setting up cooperatives to come up with collective solutions to their problems.

“They told me that soon we’ll have to carry the fruit to the [Biopalma] plant [in the municipality of Mojú], and I don’t have a truck yet. What’ll I do?” says a worried Oliveira.

Biopalma acts as an intermediary for institutions like the Brazilian Support Service for Micro and Small Enterprises (SEBRAE) to offer farmers courses in management and cooperatives.

“We can’t force them to organise in cooperatives,” Biopalma’s analyst of communications and social projects Sauer Teles tells IPS. “That has to come from them, our associates. But we brought in SEBRAE because they were interested.”

The Biofuel Watch Centre, created by Repórter Brasil, an investigative reporting NGO that provides journalists with news on environmental and social justice issues, produced a report in June on the incompatibility of the dendê culture with family farming in Pará.

The study says Eco Dendê, a government programme that offers credit to farmers to get involved in palm oil cultivation, “holds out a promising future that the family farmers are dreaming of, but its promises of profits could end up being false.”

“So much has been promised, and so little has been discussed about its impact on the traditional way of life of these rural communities,” says Judge Marcus Barberino, who specialises in labour relations in the countryside, and was quoted by the report.

Belém Bionergia, a joint venture between Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras and Portugal’s Galp Energia, will also promote the planting of dendê for the production of biodiesel.

The company has contracts with 280 families, and plans to expand that number to a total of 600 families.

On the way to an interview with one of the families, IPS came across the farm of a family that is not involved in the new dendê boom.

Of the eight members of the family, only the one-year-old baby was not working when IPS stopped in. The father, Reginaldo Dias, was toasting cassava flour in a wood-fired oven, the grandparents and children were peeling cassava roots, and Dias’s wife was grating cassava.

It is a form of survival, but a cultural ritual as well. The surplus cassava flour that the family won’t consume is sold at the market to buy “other things we need: sugar, beans and rice,” Dias tells IPS.

A few kilometres away lives José Ribamar Silva, involved in Belém Bionergia’s biodiesel programme.

A year and a half ago he planted dendê on 10 hectares of his farm. On the remaining 15 he continues to produce pineapple, black pepper, cassava and beans, along with achiote and other native Amazonian crops.

“There was a time when black pepper brought in a good profit, but not anymore – it’s too much work for too little money, so when the dendê arrived, I decided to join in,” Silva tells IPS.

He says he hopes the oil palm will make it possible for his kids to stay in school, adding that “their future is the most important thing for me.”

“You can’t jump into a ‘green’ model without addressing social questions,” says João Meirelles, director of the Peabirú Institute, which provides advice on social and environmental issues to companies involved in the oil palm sector.

When the big companies come in with their requirements, regulations and contracts with legal jargon, “it can produce a shock in a region with a different social and land tenure context, where there are basic unresolved problems,” he tells IPS.

In Pará, average monthly income is less than 50 dollars per person. Only four percent of small farmers have legal title to their land, and 40 to 50 percent of the local population is illiterate. Farmers continue to use the slash and burn technique to clear the rainforest and prepare the land for planting.

Agricultural techniques “do not change overnight,” Meirelles says. In his view, the expansion of oil palm in the Amazon rainforest, “based on mega-companies with a tradition of excellence, is incompatible to some extent with traditional family farming.”

But these companies, he says, can play “a transformative role,” strengthening the local communities’ connection to society and improving conditions among rural families in Pará.

African palm mixed with native vegetation along a road in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
MOJÚ/TOMÉ-AÇÚ, Pará, Brazil , Nov 13 2013 (IPS)

The green of the oil palm plantations is unbroken along kilometre after kilometre of red soil, devastated in the past by loggers and ranchers. The oil palm, a sign of alarm for some and of hope for others, is here to stay in the Amazon rainforest state of Pará in the extreme north of this country.

The vegetation along the road that sets out from Belém, the state capital, has lost the deep-green exuberance of the rainforest, which has been replaced by “dendê”, as the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) is known in Brazil.

The traffic jams in the city give way to over 150 km of paved and dirt roads, lined by oil palm plantations and the occasional cattle pasture, and interrupted every once in a while by a small town.

According to the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil’s Amazon region lost 111,087 sq km of forest cover between 2004 and 2012, including 44,361 sq km in Pará.

The Agropalma company, which sells palm oil to the food, hygiene and cosmetics industries, set up shop 27 years ago on this land initially cleared to make way for cattle pasture. It now owns more than 39,000 km of dendê in Pará.

More recently it was followed by other companies, interested in biodiesel: Belém Bioenergia (BB), owned by the state-run Petrobras and the private Portuguese firm Galp Energia, and Biopalma, a palm oil producer that was purchased by the Vale mining company.

“It is an economically sustainable, environmentally correct and socially enriching project,” BB’ agribusiness director, Antônio Gonçalves Esmeraldo, told IPS.

According to the executive, BB chooses the land it buys based on agroecological mapping by the Brazilian governmental agricultural research agency, Embrapa, which highlights areas that have already been deforested and degraded by cattle ranchers.

Oil palm employs 10,914 people in this state of nearly eight million people.

An 8,500-hectare estate leased by BB, which employed five people when it was dedicated to cattle-raising, will give work to 850 locals once it has been planted in oil palm, Esmeraldo said.

The company aims to plant oil palm on a total of 60,000 hectares by 2015. It has planted half of that so far, including 6,000 hectares tended by family farmers who will sell the company their output, and the rest of which are leased to large landholders.

Biopalma, for its part, will obtain oil from 60,000 hectares of its own, and from the harvest of another 20,000 hectares farmed by 2,000 small producers.

The aim is biodiesel to mix in a proportion of 20 percent with the gasoil used to run the mining company’s machinery and the locomotives of Vale, César Abreu, the firm’s director of bioenergy, told IPS.

According to Melquíades Santos Filho, Biopalma’s communications manager, dendê helps restore the biological balance of degraded land by mixing with native flora. He said his company has managed to get native species that are nearly extinct, like the jaguar, to reappear in the plantation forests.

In 2012, oil palm covered 140,000 hectares in Pará, and 67 percent of the production went to the food and cosmetics industries and 33 percent to biofuels, according to a study by agronomist D’Alembert Jaccoud.

The private sector projects extending that surface area to 329,000 hectares by 2015 and expanding the portion destined to biofuel to 47 percent, Jaccoud told IPS.

The government of Pará says that by 2022, oil palm plantations for biofuel will cover 700,000 hectares.

The Programme for the Sustainable Production of Palm Oil determines which degraded areas are apt for planting with oil palm. According to Embrapa, some 10.4 million hectares of already deforested and degraded land are available.

Processing the fruit of the oil palm in Biopalma plant in Mojú, a municipality in the northern state of Pará. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

The expansion would make Brazil the world’s third-largest producer of palm oil, after Indonesia and Malaysia, according to the government of Pará.

But the fear is that this country will follow in the footsteps of Indonesia and Malaysia, which today supply 86 percent of the global market thanks to intense deforestation, partly by forest fires that create clouds of smoke that even affect the rest of Southeast Asia.

After Africa, where legal insecurity paves the way for land-grabbing by Chinese and European countries, “the other great frontier is the Amazon rainforest, where Brazil has the biggest stock of land,” Jaccoud said.

The National Biofuel Production Programme is fomenting the planting of oil palm. By law, gasoil vehicles in Brazil must use a mix of five percent biodiesel, and the goal is to reach seven percent. It would be “an obligatory captive market,” Jaccoud said.

The Ministry of Agrarian Development has staked its bets on biofuel, which is obtained from soy, sunflower, castor, canola and oil palm, among other species.

Proponents point out that biodiesel releases fewer greenhouse gases than fossil fuels and that it contributes to diversifying the country’s energy mix.

The government also hopes to reduce imports of gasoil.

And by promoting family farming of oil palm, it is working to generate income and jobs, while stimulating local economies in rural areas.

Jaccoud said that while the government’s programmes are well-intentioned, the necessary controls and oversight are still missing.

He said there is a danger that land ownership will become further concentrated, that consumption of pesticides will grow, and that the areas on the outskirts of large cities will become even poorer and more dangerous as a result of rural migration.

Guilherme Carvalho, an educator with the non-governmental programme FASE Amazônia, is worried that palm oil companies are trying “to force family farmers to invest in this monoculture crop and abandon food crops, which would create food insecurity, a loss of autonomy over their land and dependence on market prices.”

The contracts that Biopalma and BB sign with small farmers establish that they only have to use 10 hectares of their land for oil palm, while the rest remains free for growing food and other traditional crops.

But for now, family farms represent only a small part of the oil palm plantations in Pará.

João Meirelles, director of the Peabirú Institute, said oil palm is “an attempt to restore the jungle” in tropical areas, and is preferable to soy or cattle.

But he appealed to the “social responsibility” of companies, urging them to avoid the pitfalls of the sugar cane industry, where land is concentrated in a few hands and precarious labour conditions prevail among migrant workers.

Biopalma director Márcio Maia dismissed the argument that land ownership is overly concentrated.

“In the Amazon region there are major irregularities in land titling, which scares away important players who are interested in investing in this crop,” he said.