- Copal resin, also known as rosin or jutaicica, historically was a relevant source of income for river and traditional communities in the surroundings of Santarém, in the Brazilian Pará state.
- In the 1980s, however, its use as a varnish was substituted by a petroleum-based solution.
- Researchers say the natural resin could be part of the communities’ sustainable economy again, especially by adding value to Amazon timber products.
As a young man, Djalma Moreira Lima used to walk throughout the rainforest to collect copal resin. He would wander around for hours looking for jatobás, Amazonian trees whose trunks secrete the sticky substance, which turns hard in contact with the air and falls on the forest floor as little rocks. “When we found a tree that had it, whoever was smart enough to look among the leaves found more,” Lima told Mongabay. “We would come back with sacks loaded with 4 or 5 kilos [9-11 pounds] of resin.”
Lima’s Suruacá community is located in the Extractivist Reserve Tapajós-Arapiuns, in the surroundings of Santarém, in the Brazilian state of Pará, an area that was a hub for copal resin production during most of the 20th century. The material, also known as jutaicica or rosin, is expelled by two species of trees every time there is a wound in their trunks — the jatobá (Hymenaea courbaril) secretes a lighter-colored transparent resin, while the jutaí’s (H. parvifolia) resin is more milky and dark.
“I think all the communities used to take rosin,” Lima said. The material collected by river and traditional communities was sent to Santarém, on the shores of the Amazon River, and from there to urban centers in Brazil and abroad. Mixed with oil or solvent, the jatobá’s secretion would be used to varnish wood furniture, pianos and especially carriages.
“The boom in copal varnish came at the end of the 19th century when the middle class began to emerge in the United States and Europe,” Brazilian researcher João José Lopes Corrêa, who studied the resin, told Mongabay. Intrigued by copal’s peak and decline story, he studied the substance for his master’s dissertation at Western Pará Federal University in 2015. In 2022, Corrêa published an article on the same theme alongside other researchers.
Corrêa estimated Brazil’s production of copal resin at around 120 tons a year during the first half of the 20th century, 80% of which came from Pará. Data from Brazil’s exports varied a lot, Corrêa said, but reached around 80 tons in some years. “Brazil never really stood out as an exporter,” he said, mentioning that Europe and the United States would supply most of its resin from Africa.
Part of the product would also remain in Pará to be used to caulk wood boats, recalled João Carlos Dombroski, who came to the Amazon from the South of Brazil in the 1970s to live at the margins of the newly open Trans-Amazonian Highway. “We collected it and brought it to Santarém, where there was a store that bought it a lot,” he told Mongabay.”At that time, if a family wanted to live from this activity it would get it,” said Dombroski, who currently works for Projeto Saúde e Alegria, an NGO in Santarém.
But this relevant source of income for Amazon communities has sharply declined in the second half of the 20th century when the natural resin was substituted by petroleum-based varnishes. Nowadays, the collection of jutaicica is practically extinct, restricted to domestic use in the traditional communities that use it to make fire (it’s flammable) or to waterproof clay pots. “I don’t know anyone who works with it anymore,” Lima said.
Stela Marys, owner of a store selling Amazon products in Santarém, used to buy the resin from local communities every time a client asked for it. In the past three years, however, no one has ordered it. “I don’t even buy it because I don’t have anyone to sell it to,” she told Mongabay.
Although it is unthinkable to return to the production levels of the last century, Corrêa said he believes jutaicica could once again have a role in the forest economy, alongside other products like handicrafts, essential oils and açaí berries. “The forest is megadiverse, with a very wide variety of products. Like all standing forest production, we’re talking about small and varied quantities. But resin could be one more component in a basket of Amazonian products,” he said.
A study by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the New Climate Economy found that boosting the Amazon’s bioeconomy would generate an additional 40 billion reais ($8.3 billion) GDP annually for the Brazilian Amazon. In addition to the new money, the transformation could generate 312,000 additional jobs.
Besides being a sustainable alternative to petroleum-based varnishes, researchers say jutaicica could work as an incentive for keeping the forest standing — around 80% of Amazon vegetal production is associated with timber extraction. “Jatoba’s timber, for instance, is a highly coveted wood for flooring,” Côrrea said.
Jutaicica could even be used to aggregate value in the Amazon timber industry, which sells most of the forest’s noble wood as low-valued, rough-sawn timber. “You could have objects made from Amazonian wood, with a proper design and finished with a local varnish,” Côrrea said, adding that universities should have a key role in helping the communities to reintroduce it into the market as a sustainable product.
Banner image: A jatobá (Hymenaea courbaril) treen in Maui, Hawaii. Image by Forest and Kim Starr via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
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Citation:
Côrrea, J.J.L., Almeida, T. E., Pimentel Santos, M. R., & Giacomin, L. L. (2022). Assigning a value to standing forest: a historical review of the use and characterization of copal resin in the region of Santarém, Central Amazonia. Rodriguésia, 73. Retrieved from https://www.scielo.br/j/rod/a/N8mtx4SwBzf4W7F7M79xdSH/?format=pdf&lang=en
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