Technical and Institutional Innovation in Agroforestry for Protected Areas Management in the Brazilian Amazon: Opportunities and Limitations

Tropical forest countries are struggling with the partially conflicting policy objectives of socioeconomic development, forest conservation, and safeguarding the livelihoods of local forest-dependent people. We worked with communities in the lower Tapajós region of the central Brazilian Amazon for over 10 years to understand their traditional and present land use practices, the constraints, and decision making processes imposed by their biophysical, socioeconomic, and political environment, and to facilitate development trajectories to improve the livelihoods of forest communities while conserving the forest on the farms and in the larger landscape. The work focused on riverine communities initially in the Tapajós National Forest and then in the Tapajós–Arapiuns Extractive Reserve. These communities have a century-old tradition of planting rubber agroforests which despite their abandonment during the 1990s still widely characterize the vegetation of the river banks, especially in the two protected areas where they are safe from the recent expansion of mechanized rice and soybean agriculture. The project evolved from the capacity-building of communities in techniques to increase the productivity of the rubber agroforests without breaking their low-input and low-risk logic, to the establishment of a community enterprise that allowed reserve inhabitants to reforest their own land with tree species of their choice and sell reforestation (not carbon) credits to local timber companies while retaining the ownership of the trees. By making land use practices economically more viable and ecologically more appropriate for protected areas, the project shows ways to strengthen the system of extractive and sustainable development reserves that protects millions of hectares of Amazon forest with the consent of the communities that inhabit them.