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Ongoing
Buritizando
Organizes buriti production in western Bahia, benefiting 50 agro-extractive families through sustainable buriti management, training, cooperative organization and organic certification.
Location
Location
Community
The project will benefit 50 families of agro-extractivists residing in western Bahia. These are families who currently make a living from agricultural production and extractivism, some with small-scale livestock for personal consumption, with an average annual income of BRL 6,000 to 20,000. However, despite engaging in agricultural production, they do not yet fully exploit the potential of their land. Often due to lack of guidance or necessity, they end up overexploiting species to meet maximum market demand and achieve a minimum financial return.
The realities of the families participating in the project are quite diverse, yet all are classified as family farmers, a defining criterion for participation in the Solidarity Marketing Network. They range from small community organizations (associations or agrarian reform settlements) owning up to 70 hectares of land, to families who currently do not own land or need to lease land from third parties to produce. There are also families who lost all their crops due to extreme climate events in 2021, such as droughts, fires, and floods. Although the average property size is 20 hectares, most families own only 1 to 2 hectares, and their individual production is far from sufficient to meet market demand. Additionally, living in remote areas, they often rely on intermediaries to sell their products, which reduces their financial returns.
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Species
Buriti (Mauritia flexuosa)
A native palm of the Cerrado and the Amazon, also known as miriti, moriche, carangucha, or aguaje. It naturally occurs in permanently flooded areas, known as veredas or wetlands. Every part of the plant can be utilized, and its fruit is among the richest sources of vitamin A in the world.
Before the harvest season, collectors walk through the buritizais (buriti groves) to count and record the number of fruit bunches, giving them an estimate of potential production. At this time, they can also prepare collection paths or trails within the forest, connecting the palms with ripe bunches. This makes harvesting and transporting the fruits easier during the season.
Ripe fruits are collected when they fall from the tree, as cutting the bunches directly from the palm is considered more time-consuming and dangerous. Many collectors also believe that cutting the bunch from the tree reduces the number of fruits produced in the next season.
Activities
Promote community participation through mobilization, organization, and project evaluation meetings
Various meetings will be held to mobilize and organize communities into community groups, as well as planning and project evaluation sessions, ensuring that everyone participates in the process of developing activities.
Train agro-extractive families in the management, use, conservation, and pre-processing of Cerrado species
Workshops will be offered on sustainable management, use, conservation, and pre-processing of buriti, as well as workshops on participatory organic certification—a process evaluated by CEDAC itself—which brings several benefits to the producing families.
Organize the production chain of sociobiodiversity products with agro-extractive families and support their integration into a cooperative
This activity involves a partnership with Coopcerrado, which will organize, together with family farmers, the collection, storage, transport, processing, and commercialization of products during the buriti harvest. The entire process will be monitored by the Community Group supervisors, who will record the quantity produced and collected by each family.
Impact
50
agro-extractive producers trained.
10
communities benefited and participating.
50
properties prepared for participatory organic certification.
Grupo Boticário
One of the world’s largest beauty groups, Grupo Boticário is a Brazilian company present in 50 countries. It owns the brands O Boticário, Eudora, Quem Disse, Berenice?; BeautyBox, Vult, O.u.i, Dr. JONES, Truss and the marketplace Beleza na Web, and also operates with licensed products such as Australian Gold and its B2B division. This interaction between different brands, active ingredients, platforms, a network of franchisees, representatives, distributors, retailers, sellers and suppliers forms Grupo Boticário’s beauty ecosystem, which also offers digital business management solutions for Brazilian retail through its brands Mooz, Casa Magalhães and GAVB. It has more than 15,000 direct employees and over 4,000 points of sale in 1,780 Brazilian cities.
CEDAC
Founded in 2022 with the purpose of advising rural communities of the Cerrado to overcome poverty and social injustice by valuing these communities’ know-how about Territory — Biome — Cerrado. The Solidarity Marketing Network mobilized by CEDAC, whose principles stem from the National Center for Agroecology, enables the development of sustainable practices in the Cerrado, adding value to products aimed at food, medicines, cosmetics and more.
