Buriti oil is good for the skin and to conserve what is left of the cerrado

Anyone who uses buriti-based cosmetics to treat their skin does not know how much work and how many people there are behind vegetable oil. It doesn’t even need to, as long as it continues to pay dearly and contribute to saving the cerrado from complete destruction.

There is a long way and many hands between the paths dotted with the palm tree Mauritia flexuosa and perfumery shelves. In northern Minas Gerais, hundreds of farming families improve their lives by extracting the shiny, flaky fruits that yield an oil rich in carotenoids.

The Cooperativa Grande Sertão alone, from Montes Claros, processes more than a thousand tons of buriti coconuts to obtain 20 tons of oil in a good year. Its biggest buyer is Natura, which absorbs 80% of production.

The cooperative receives between R$70 and R$80 per kilogram of oil, of which 30% (up to R$24/kg) is returned to extractivists, paying taxes and costs such as freight. In addition to cosmetics, the oil is used in the chemical and food industries.

“If we had discovered Grande Sertão before, our children would not have gone away,” says Santa Hélia Lopes da Silva. She and her husband, Anísio Pereira da Silva, known as Nisão, were the champions in the collection and processing of buriti in the last big harvest, in 2016.

The family from the Paracatu community delivered more than 800 kg of shavings to the cooperative, as they say from the dried pulp extracted at great expense from the coconut. R$13.00 for non-members and R$13.50 for cooperative members, a family with this productivity can boost their income with more than R$10,000 in a good year.

It so happens that buritis only produce a large amount of fruit at intervals of four years. During the off-season triennium, collection drops a lot, as feeding the fauna —parakeets, macaws, monkeys— and the farmers themselves takes precedence.

Nobody complains. “From here to there, I did everything with buriti money,” says Valdenice Rodrigues da Silva, pointing to the masonry room and kitchen he added to the little green house where he lives with her husband and daughter, after the abundant collection in 2016.

“My next goal is the roof,” he plans. It will replace asbestos tiles with ceramic ones.

Valdeci is a neighbor of his brother, Carlito, and his sister-in-law, Solange Nunes Barbosa, who earn R$500 a week with buriti. “It takes work, but we appreciate it,” says the woman, complaining only about the pain in her back after hours of peeling the fruit.

In 12 hours of toil, she manages to remove the pulp from 100 kg of buriti, some 2,000 coconuts. At the end, it will have about 5 kg of dried shavings, a reinforcement of R$ 65 for the family budget.

First, let the buriti soak for the reddish brown scales to soften. After drying in the sun, the skin is separated from the bright yellow kernels with your fingers and a knife.

Then separate the pulp from the stone, with a knife or spoon, and put it in the sun to obtain the dry pulp, which is lighter and easier to transport, delivered to Grande Sertão. The raw material now contains a higher oil content, on the order of 50%, against a mere 2% for the whole fruit.

Although it has less than 300 members, the cooperative collects the production of 600 families. The 2020 crop, which should have been a good one, disappointed, and there was still a general retraction of the pandemic. The next harvest should only start in March 2024.

It was common for the local population to cut the palm trees that did not bear fruit, that is, males. But buriti is a dioecious plant, which needs individuals of both genders for pollination to occur. With the extra income offered by the fruit, no one cuts down the tree or lets the cattle feed on the coconuts—only macaws and parrots.

The cerrado where buritis thrive is a sensitive area of ​​biodiversity (“hotspot”, in conservationist jargon). It brings together a wide variety of species, many endemic, to accelerated destruction. Half of the national savannah, which covered 2 million km, has already died², against 20% lost in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, which is twice the size.

The biome is home to both open fields and closed forests. It has adapted to withstand definite dry seasons and rare natural fires, initiated by lightning. It plays an important role in feeding basins in the Midwest and Southeast, but it is under additional pressure from criminal fires.

Famous are the paths immortalized in the work of João Guimarães Rosa. These damp strips, with a more impermeable subsoil, make up the preferred environment of the buritis —where there is buritis, there is water, the sertanejos know.

Paths are a landscape present in most rural properties, which succeed each other along them. With climate change and the expansion of agribusiness (mainly soy and eucalyptus), this natural resource is under stress.

Nisão says that, when he bought 14 alqueires (about 67 hectares), the wetland was just a few dozen meters from the house. Now he has to walk a lot more to reach the path, which continues to dry up. In fact, you can walk along it, among dozens of buritis, without bumping into mud and puddles, as happens in others.

Several palm trees received numbers painted by Ernane Ronie Martins’ team, from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, as part of a study on the behavior of plants (phenology).

Martins was part of the São Francisco project, which, in addition to phenology, aimed to estimate the costs of producing buriti zest in order to set socially fair prices. The study was born out of a partnership between Natura and Grande Sertão.

Nisão attributes the disappearance of water to the approaching cultivation of eucalyptus trees for the production of wood and charcoal, plantations that have already reached 1.5 km from their site. “People say it was the deforestation of the chapada”, says the extractivist. “In the past, the rain was more, it rained twice as much.”

In addition to forestry, the north of Minas receives many soybean crops, as can be seen in the region close to the city called, not by chance, Chapada Gaúcha. The flat immensity is covered with monocultures managed with state-of-the-art machines, right up to the edge where the table’s relief precipitates into crevices.

Santa Hélia and Nisão are not limited to collecting buriti coconuts, they also harvest the most famous fruit of the cerrado. “Another thing that had no value was the pequi,” says the woman. They sell the whole fruit for R$30 a box and manage to get up to R$100 a day, even when the price drops to R$15.

Fruits from the cerrado, such as cagaita and coquinho sour, are the flagships of Grande Sertão, a cooperative created in 2003 with the objective of organizing the production of pulp for sale to school feeding programs. The organization was located next to the Center for Alternative Agriculture, in Montes Claros, where a small factory already operated (35 m).²) for pulping.

Today the factory is 400 m², eight employees and processing that can reach 150 tons of fruit in a year, or 70 to 80 tons of pulp. In addition to cagaita and sour coconut, it processes araçá, native passion fruit, mangaba, jabuticaba, mango, tamarind, caja, guava, pineapple, umbu, acerola and seriguela from three dozen municipalities in northern Minas Gerais.

​Wanderlandia da Silva Rodrigues, 52, manager of the pulp mill, has worked there for 18 years and now has a salary of R$1,400. This did not mean that he abandoned the fields of corn, beans, rice, cassava, onion and garlic. It leaves the service at 4 pm and picks up from the fields sometimes until it gets dark.

He also harvests fruit to sell to Grande Sertão. On the last Friday of November (26), from 5:30 pm to 8:00 pm, she and her husband gathered 257 kg of mangoes, which would earn her R$154.

“Life has improved a lot with the cooperative, everything has changed”, he says. “I bought a piece of furniture I dreamed of, six pack, motorcycle.”

Fruits are settled once a year, in July or August. The manager has already earned R$2,500 extra in a good year, with deliveries of mango, acerola, jabuticaba, sour coconut and cajá.

“Before, I wasted fruit. I lost almost everything, I couldn’t eat.”

Wanderlandia calls the reporter to see the bike, a Honda Bros. Before coming to work by bicycle, which forced her to get up at 4 am. He gained an hour of sleep a day, as he now gets up at 5 am to make coffee and leaves at 6 am for the factory.

_{Journalists Lalo de Almeida and Marcelo Leite traveled at the invitation of the IEB (International Institute of Education in Brazil) and CEPF (Partnership Fund for Critical Ecosystems).}