The effort of the babassu coconut breakers in Maranhão to conquer the international market with a sustainable product of traditional origin counts on technical assistance from Central do Cerrado, a cooperative based in Brasília.
Central do Cerrado is a second-degree cooperative, that is, an association formed by other cooperatives and social organizations – 24 in all, in nine states. It is headquartered in Brasília, with a branch in São Paulo and a box in the Pinheiros market in São Paulo.
The commercialization center aims to provide scale, ensure standardization and increase the added value of products, coordinating producers spread across the second largest Brazilian biome (2 million km2). Taxes, freight, etc. are paid, around 65% of product sales are returned to member cooperatives.
One of its challenges, says coordinator Mayk Arruda, was to organize the baru chain to satisfy the demand of an importer in the United States that needed to fill a 40-foot container (12 m X 2.4 m X 2.6 m). In Brasília, the Central installed gondolas with 40 products from the cerrado in nine Carrefour stores.
At the moment, Central, Coppalj and Assema support the creation of the Free Babaçu Consortium, with the objective of “promoting the sustainable use of babassu forests, through the expansion of the offer of babassu coconut oil with identifiable, measurable and socio-environmental origins. promote the conservation of biodiversity and a fair and equitable distribution of economic gains”.
In 2021, the project received funding of US$ 98,000 (BRL 544 thousand) from WWF Brasil and the Partnership Fund for Critical Ecosystems (CEPF), formed by the French Development Agency, by the NGO Conservation International, the European Union, the Global Environmental Fund (GEF), the Government of Japan and the World Bank.
The Center sees a market opportunity for babassu, in view of the demand from the cosmetics and food sectors for an alternative vegetable oil to palm kernel (palm kernel), the target of social and environmental complaints in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.
In addition, a gluten-free flour is extracted from the babassu mesocarp, which begins to be used in baking – for example, in a brownie recipe by Bela Gil and in a line of cake mixing for Mãe Terra brand signed by her. The same flour is already being used by the industry as vegetable talc, a substitute for a non-renewable mineral resource.
The Babaçu Livre Consortium project had to be resized after the R$ 15 million that had been approved in a 2017 Amazon Fund public notice evaporated. The contract was about to be signed, but it was delayed due to a bureaucratic detail, and then came the Jair Bolsonaro government and the boycott of the fund by then-minister Ricardo Salles.
“Then we don’t hear about it anymore”, laments Mayk Arruda.
Journalists Lalo de Almeida and Marcelo Leite traveled at the invitation of the IEB (International Institute of Education of Brazil) and CEPF (Partnership Fund for Critical Ecosystems).
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