Fashion Sneakers Pushing Sustainable Rubber in Brazil Amazon

Rubber tapper Raimundo Mendes de Barros prepares to leave his home, which is surrounded by rainforest, for an assignment in the Amazonian city of Xapuri, Brazil. She slipped her long, scarred, 77-year-old legs into a pair of sneakers made by French brand Veja.

At first glance, the expensive white detailing urban tennis shoes appear to be set against a muddy tropical forest. But faraway worlds have come together to produce a sole made of Amazonian native rubber.

Veja works with a local cooperative called Cooperacre, which has revived the production of sustainable forest products and improved the lives of hundreds of rubber tapping families. This is a project that, even on a modest scale, provides a real example of sustainable living from forests.

“Veja and Cooperacre are doing important work for those of us living in the jungle. They are making young people come back. They are reviving the hope of working with rubber,” Rogrio Barros, Raimundo’s 24-year-old son, told The Associated Press as he demonstrated how tapping rubber trees in a family forest in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve. Extractive nature reserves in Brazil are government-owned land set aside for people to make a living while forests are maintained.

Rubber was once the center of the Amazon economy. The first boom occurred at the turn of the 20th century. Thousands of people migrate inland from Brazil’s impoverished Northeast to work in the forests, often in slave-like conditions.

The boom ended abruptly in the 1910s when rubber plantations began to produce on a large scale in Asia. But during World War II, Japan cut off supplies, prompting the United States to finance rubber production in the Amazon.

After the war, the Amazon latex trade fell again, even as thousands of families continued to work in poor conditions for the rubber bosses. In the 1970s these relatively wealthy individuals began selling land to southern cattle ranchers, although, in many cases, they did not actually own it, but only made concessions because they were on good terms with government officials.

The sale of this land led to the massive expulsion of rubber tappers from the forest. It was the loss of livelihoods and deforestation to make way for cattle ranches that prompted renowned environmentalist Chico Mendes and his cousin Barros to found and lead the rubber tapping movement. Mendes would be killed for his work in 1988.

After Mendes’ murder, the federal government began creating extractive reserves so the forest couldn’t be sold to make way for livestock. Chico Mendes Reserve is one of them. But the story doesn’t end with the backup. Government efforts to promote latex, including a state-owned condom factory in Xapuri, have failed to generate any reliable revenue.

What sets Veja’s operations apart is that rubber tappers are now paid well above the commodity price for their rubber. By 2022, the Barros family will receive US$4.20 per kilo (2.2 pounds) of rubber tapped from their plantation. Previously, they made a tenth of that amount.

The price paid by the shoe company Veja to these tappers includes bonuses for sustainable harvesting plus recognition of the forest’s conservation value, explains Sebastio Pereira, who is in charge of Veja’s Amazon rubber supply chain. Rubber workers also receive federal and state per kilo allowances.

Veja also gives bonuses to tappers who apply best practices and local cooperatives who buy directly from them. Criteria range from zero deforestation to proper management of rubber trees. Top manufacturers also receive a pair of shoes as a gift.

Veja rubber is produced by about 1,200 families from 22 local cooperatives spread across five Amazonian states: Acre, home to the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserves, Amazonas, Rondonia, Mato Grosso, and Par.

All rubber is sent to the Cooperacre factory in Sena Madureira, in the state of Acre, where the raw product is cut, washed, shredded into small pieces, heated, weighed, packaged, and finally shipped to Veja’s contracted factories in the state. industrial Rio Grande Sul, thousands of miles south, also to the state of Ceara, in Northeastern Brazil.

From there, sneakers were distributed to various parts of the world. Over the last 20 years, Veja has sold more than 8 million pairs in several countries and has stores in Paris, New York and Berlin. The amount of Amazon rubber it buys has soared: from 5,000 kilos (11,023 pounds) in 2005 to 709,500 kilos (1.56 million pounds) in 2021, according to company figures.

However, that hasn’t been a game changer for the forests in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, home to nearly 3,000 families. The illegal advancement of livestock, an old problem, has increased. Deforestation there has tripled in the past four years, amid the policies of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who lost his re-election bid and left office at the end of last year.

Livestock has long replaced rubber as Acre’s main economic activity. Almost half of the state’s rural workforce works on farms, where only 4% live on forest products, mainly Brazil nuts.

According to an economic study by the Federal University of Minas Gerais, 57% of Acre’s economic output comes from livestock. Rubber makes up less than 1%.

Surrounded by cattle pastures and paved highways, the Chico Mendes deforestation entry point has the third highest deforestation rate of any protected nature reserve in Brazil.

Increased livestock pressure on the reserve, which has lost 9% of its original forest cover, has even led Veja to create his own satellite monitoring system.

“Our platform shows certain areas where deforestation is rampant. So we might go there and talk. But we recognize that our role is to offer alternatives and raise awareness,” Pereira told AP in a telephone interview. “We are careful not to cross the line, as public authorities must be the ones to enforce the law.”

According to Roberta Graf, who chairs the Acre branch of the association of federal environmental officers, Veja’s experience is significant because it shows the way to live in extractive reserves in a sustainable way. But achieving that, he argues, requires a concerted effort that includes governments at multiple levels, nonprofits and grassroots organizations.

“Forest people still love rubber tapping. They love to make a living out of latex,” he told the AP in an interview at his home in Rio Branco, the capital of Acre. “There are lots of forest products: copaiba, andiroba (oil vegetable), Brazil nuts, wild cacao and seeds. The ideal is to work with all of them according to what each reserve can offer.”