This has led to an explosion in production, from about 120,000 tonnes in 2000 to nearly 1.7m tonnes last year. Touted for its health benefits, the purple berry has grown in popularity outside its native Amazon and, increasingly, beyond Brazil’s borders, where it is marketed as a superfood. About 95% of Brazil’s açaí production comes from Pará. Like countless other riverside communities in the state of Pará, most of the 150 families in Acará-Açu grow açaí berries for a living. The daughter of a Cacao Guardian, Campos is the driving force behind the agroforestry project, which involves nine families who each own four to five hectares of land. “I have banana, pineapple, yam, aría tubers, cashew, wild sweetsop, orange, cacao, soursop, wild apricot, guava, acerola, papaya, and I have açaí,” says Izabela Campos, as she walks through the wild garden surrounding her wooden house. These include a football club that takes saplings to its games to encourage its opponents to plant, and a group introducing an agroforestry system – the integration of native trees and shrubs with crops – on their smallholdings, which they are reforesting without pesticides. The Cacao Guardians’ work has led to a rethink of the community’s way of life and inspired the creation of other grassroots initiatives that seek to preserve the forest. “We realised was more than just cacao, it’s our territory, our community, our potential,” says Luciene Gemaque, 34, another cousin. Most of their production is bars of 100% cocoa made to order for a client in São Paulo the rest is sold in shops in Belém and at chocolate fairs around Brazil as 20g bars, packaged in dried cacao leaves and named Acaráçu – a brand that now encompasses various local projects. The women work with fermented cacao beans supplied by the business next door, run by Gemaque’s cousin Zeno, who buys the harvested fruit from communities up and down the river. He is planting cocoa on his property to increase biodiversity João Carlos Rodrigues, seen picking açaí berries, works on the agroforestry project.
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