Association for the Preservation and the
Sustainable Use of the Amazon Ecosystems

 

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In spite of all necessary blaming of the forest destroyers we have to acknowledge that sustainable forest use is still insignificant as a motor for development. This is mainly an economic problem.

The extremely low prices paid by the middlemen hardly cover the production costs and the expenses for some complementary food, but not the costs of health and education. Scientific findings highlight the large potential and commercial value of rainforest products, promising an improvement of living conditions through sustainable extractivism and smallholder production. In reality, timber is still the only secure source of income in case of an emergency.

Besides suffering constant disadvantages because of post-feudal patterns of power, the producers face a number of further problems, like illiteracy, lack of capital and the political settings of national and international decisionmakers.

The reasons

When asking for the reasons why sustainable use of the ecosystems in the Amazon could not gain an economic dynamic till now, the experiences with a large number of aid programs an projects allow us to draw two basic conclusions:

• There is no single key problem, which, when solved, would help sustainable management towards an economic breakthrough. Instead, the most diversified problems lie between potential producers and potential consumers. Forest peoples face not just one or two, but dozens of unsolved problems. A smallholder in the Amazon, who frequently is illiterate, normally does not know what to extract or to plant, and how to get seeds or seedlings. In general, he does not get either advise or credits. He knows nothing or not enough about storage, value-adding, conservation, packaging, quality requirements, hygiene or import standards of other countries.
  
• There is no key product from sustainable use of the Amazon, which would serve to break the trend. This has both ecological as well as economical reasons.

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