Valdenes Ferreira de Sousa has a trusted remedy for coughs and throat infections: a blend of honey, lemon juice, and andiroba oil — a natural anti-inflammatory derived from a native Amazonian tree.
This knowledge is her inheritance. It was passed down from her grandmother, a woman who taught her that the rainforest provides medicine, sustenance, and identity.
Ferreira de Sousa's childhood memories often return to her grandmother’s small stand in Santo Antônio do Tauá, a rural municipality in the Brazilian state of Pará, where she sold natural products. Today, as president of the Camtauá cooperative, she continues the family lineage, leading an initiative built on the sustainable extractivism of andiroba, murumuru, tucumã, and açaí.
Led primarily by women, the Camtauá cooperative works to sustainably harvest the land's resources without cutting down trees. Today, their effort involves about 55 cooperative members and 240 extractivist families, protecting 36,000 hectares of standing forest managed as a living, productive asset.
"We are guardians of this forest, of this abundant nature that was placed for us to care for," Ferreira de Sousa affirms, positioning the cooperative's work as a deliberate act of preservation. "The land itself sustains us. All we have to do is take care of it."
Care, in fact, is the bedrock of bioeconomy — a regenerative system that measures nature's value not by what can be taken from it, but by what can be sustainably lived within it.
It differs drastically from the engine that currently drives much of the Amazon's economy: predatory agribusiness and cattle farming.
The Current Engine of Devastation in the Amazon
Satellite images analyzed by MapBiomas show cattle ranching was the main cause of Amazon deforestation from 1985 to 2023, accounting for 90% of the forest loss in this time period.
According to the same report, expansion of agriculture into the Amazon has been nothing short of staggering. The area dedicated to farming within the biome increased by 4,647% — from 154,000 hectares of cropland to 7.3 million hectares. The overwhelming majority of this agricultural footprint is dedicated to temporary crops, with soybeans dominating the landscape and accounting for 80.5% of the total cultivated area. Most of this production is exported to serve as livestock feed, rather than addressing food security within Brazil.
Beyond land clearing, deforestation linked to agribusiness and cattle ranching contributes to environmental and social harm, often associated with land grabbing, illegal fires, and rural violence that affects Indigenous peoples and traditional communities who have lived on these lands for centuries.
The consequences are both local and planetary. The rampant deforestation causes irreparable biodiversity loss. The smoke from intentional fires chokes urban centers, creating public health emergencies. Clearing forest lands transforms the Amazon from a critical carbon sink into a source of massive CO₂ emissions, directly accelerating the global climate crisis. This model is actively dismantling the ecological systems that stabilize the global climate.
Brazil’s deep economic ties to agribusiness are rooted in a colonial past of plantations, land concentration, and export-oriented monoculture — built on the labor of enslaved people.
This history birthed a political class in the country whose power is still derived from land ownership. Today, it is mainly expressed through the Bancada Ruralista, the agribusiness caucus in Brazil's National Congress. Holding around 60% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate, it is the largest and most powerful interest group in Brazil’s Parliament.
The Bancada Ruralista “is not a loose affiliation but a professionalized lobby,” explains Bruno Bassi, research coordinator at NGO De Olho nos Ruralistas. "Their power stems from a structure that unifies various economic sectors. Each sector will have a private institute operating as an external organ outside of Congress to unify their political actions," he explains.
The influence of the ruralistas on policymaking was starkly visible this July, with the approval of the “Devastation Bill,” which aimed to gut Brazil’s environmental licensing system. The new legislation unlocks stalled projects that the agribusiness and cattle ranching sectors have long sought to advance, such as building new roads through forest lands. “It carves a scar through preservation areas. They are opening a path of complete destruction in the last protected zones of the Amazon,” Bassi warns.
At the same time, parts of the agribusiness sector have begun engaging with sustainability initiatives and dialogues on responsible land use. These efforts, while not explored in depth here, indicate that conversations about transformation are also emerging within traditional production models — though integrating them across the full sector remains a major challenge.
A Different Path: Bioeconomy in Action
Back in the forest, Ferreira de Sousa and thousands like her are putting into practice an alternative economic model. And it is backed by data.
Camtauá's cofounder and production coordinator, Gilson Santana, offers a clear comparison between agribusiness and bioeconomy: to produce 400 to 450 liters of soy oil, one hectare of cleared land is needed to plant; the same size hectare of macaúba, a native palm, can produce 4,000 to 5,000 liters of oil, without deforesting the territory. “And the macaúba oil can serve diverse purposes, from cooking and cosmetics to aviation fuel", Santana adds.
Santana's math is supported by World Bank studies, which indicate that the Amazon rainforest can generate an estimated US$535 million per year when preserved — seven times more than exploitation for cattle ranching, mining, and agribusiness.
Experts emphasize that the bioeconomy is not intended to replace agribusiness as a whole, but to diversify Brazil’s economic model. In the Amazon, where large-scale monoculture often leads to forest loss, approaches aligned with the forest’s ecological potential — such as community-based extractivism and non-timber value chains — are considered more appropriate and can, in many cases, prove more profitable.
The bioeconomy’s deep respect for nature’s rhythm is fundamental to its efficiency. “Murumuru and andiroba are harvested from January to July. From August on, açaí production begins,” Santana explains. “If you start following nature’s calendar, it’s possible to produce year-round.”
This diverges radically from industrial agribusiness, which relies on modern irrigation, genetically modified hybrid seeds, and pesticides to control disease, all to guarantee a minimum yield. “That’s not what we want here. We want to establish production where things already grow. There’s no need to clear more land to produce more, especially if we focus on domestic needs,” Santana affirms.
Far from being a rejection of innovation and development, bioeconomy is fostering a uniquely appropriate form of it. Technologies are emerging not to override traditional knowledge, but to support it, alleviating the physically taxing conditions most extractivists face in their daily activities. The prime example is a machine designed by the community itself to crack murumuru nuts. What once took months of manual labor now takes about 30 minutes, a breakthrough that has boosted yields while transforming the health and well-being of workers.
For extractivist families, working with the land is also a powerful source of community empowerment. Ferreira de Sousa embodies that transformation. Her life, as she herself describes it, has been one of “highs and lows.” Before joining the Camtauá cooperative, she narrates, her biggest dream was to have an indoor bathroom in her house so she wouldn’t have to brave the rain each morning to use an outdoor toilet in the yard.
Today, not only has her work in the cooperative helped her raise funds to build that bathroom, but she has also flourished leadership skills there. Now, as Camtauá's president, Ferreira de Sousa helps other women pursue dreams of their own, training them to develop their products and earn their income, ensuring economic autonomy. She’s proof that it’s possible to lead and build a future with the strength of women, from the heart of the forest.
More than selling rainforest products, bioeconomy is a regenerative economic system that values the environment, the workers, generational knowledge, and fair, sustainable supply chains. It’s an economy that doesn't destroy the forest but cultivates it; one that doesn't displace people but empowers them.
In the beginning, I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees. Then, I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon. Now, I realize I am fighting for humanity." —Chico Mendes, an Amazonian extractivist worker and environmental defender, who was killed in 1988 by local land grabbers opposed to his work
Here's How We Can Help
This is where a global platform becomes essential. Through events like Global Citizen NOW: Amazônia, which took place this year in Belém, the capital city of Pará, local leaders like Gilson Santana gain a stage to share their models with the world. Beyond awareness, these events forge connections that lead to concrete action, such as securing patents for grassroots technologies and amplifying calls to protect the lands these communities depend on.
The path forward requires shifting global investment and attention from the economies that damage the Amazon to those that sustain it. It means supporting political initiatives that seek to protect the rainforest and its peoples. And it means listening to the guardians who have known the answer all along.
The future of the Amazon, and our climate, depends on which economy we choose to invest in: one driven by extraction, or one grounded in care. The clock is ticking for this choice to be made.