RORAIMA STATE, Brazil – Brazil nuts play a crucial role in the culture of the Wai Wai people, who reside in the forested regions of northern Brazil and neighboring Guyana. For the 350 families living in the Wai Wai Indigenous Territory in Brazil’s Roraima state, Brazil nuts are the primary source of cash income and a fundamental part of their diet and cuisine.
Selling Brazil nuts directly to companies has allowed the Wai Wai to achieve significantly higher earnings compared to the lower prices offered by middlemen. However, these direct sales agreements often encounter obstacles, highlighting the challenges Indigenous and traditional communities face in accessing the profitable bioeconomy.
Banner image by Avener Prado.
Mongabay’s Video Team wants to cover questions and topics that matter to YOU. Are there any inspiring people, urgent issues, or local stories that you’d like us to cover? We want to hear from you. Be a part of our reporting process —get in touch with us here!
Indigenous Wai Wai seek markets for Brazil nuts without middlemen
Transcript
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.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 bananas or cassava, and it will grow too.
There’s no need to cut the forest down.
The Wai Wai Indigenous people have relied on the Amazon’s bounty of Brazil nuts for generations.
We see it as our source of income. At the same time, we think we’re preserving nature, right?
Our lives improved a lot selling Brazil nuts.
We now have better facilities, like motorized boats. In the past, we used a canoe with a paddle. It was very heavy.
We recently managed to buy an aluminum canoe.
But a recent contract fell through, forcing the Wai Wai to revert to selling through middlemen, losing half the value of their nuts.
It’s a challenging market, more rigid. You have to certify the origin of the product and then add value with more industrialized processes and certificates of good practice.
The biggest bottleneck is being able to give the quality to the product within the territory, which is a market requirement.
Without this, they risk relying on intermediaries.
The next step that could guarantee better contracts and greater profits would be peeling the nuts, packaging them in small quantities and labeling them as being from a preserved Indigenous land.
We are planning to use next year’s harvest to build a new one [storage hut] made out of concrete, but we need to partner with companies to have enough money to do so.
The surge in projects and companies seeking sustainable products like Brazil nuts bodes well for the Wai Wai people’s future.
We are sending our children to universities, and some are about to graduate and come back to help us with the business.
Credits
