Brazil's seed collectors fight Amazon deforestation

Restoration projects in Brazil have increased 160% since 2020

Wildfire-fueled deforestation breaks records

Restoring soil with seed is a cost-effective alternative

By Andre Cabette Fabio

Oliveira, a seed collector from Mato Grosso is among the?more that 700 members of the Xingu Seeds Network who are working to recover forests and savannas in this major agricultural state.

After the Brazilian government committed to restore 12,000,000 hectares of natural areas (or 30,000,000 acres) by 2030, as part of its climate goals in the 2015 Paris Agreement, forest restoration is now taking hold. This is thanks to the support of civil society, businesses, and increased funding.

Data from the World Resources Institute revealed that 2024 will be the worst year ever for the global loss of tropical forests. Brazil accounted for 42%, after having lost 2.82 million acres, mainly due to fires.

In the Amazon, wildfires are rarely spontaneous. Most of them are started by land grabbers and farmers.

"One day, I went looking for my seeds and, when I arrived, I was shocked to see that there wasn't a single branch. Oliveira said that everything had been ripped apart while she was working in her garden in Nova Xavantina, a city in central Brazil.

"We feel so sad because we don't know what you are going to do about it." She said this as she placed the seeds into a machine and pulled a lever in order to break their shells.

Alternative to Seed Lining

The Xingu Seeds Network is a group of mostly women who come from rural areas, towns, cities and large Indigenous territories. They fight against biodiversity and tree losses in areas where soybean and grain fields and cattle pastures are expanding.

In 2007, the network of collectors was formed in response to a request from Indigenous communities of the Xingu River Basin to farmers to save the drying streams in the area.

It promotes an alternative method to seedlings called "muvuca" which involves sowing native seeds to give plants that are best adapted to local conditions a chance to flourish.

Muvuca, which does not require irrigation, is cheaper than seedlings.

Xingu Seeds Network, a group of 27 seed-collecting organizations, has helped to replant 10,800 hectares in forests and savannahs.

These initiatives, however, are far from being able to stop the rapid deforestation of the Amazon rainforest and other Brazilian ecosystems.

Bruna 'Dayanna Ferreira is the director of Xingu Seeds Network. She said, "In one month my neighbor alone?cutdown what we had restored over ten years."

CLIMATE CHANGE BUFFER

By restoring natural areas, you can capture carbon and release water vapor, which helps to form clouds, which reflect sunlight and produce rain.

Scientists have stated that this buffers global warming effects and prevents rainforests drying out and reaching tipping point, after which they could become savannah like ecosystems.

Brazil's restoration of forest, savannahs, and other ecosystems by seedlings or seeds has grown by 160% since 2021.

The Brazilian Restoration Observatory, a non-profit organization, reported in December that the area is currently just 204,000 acres, with 19% of it in the Amazon.

According to the observatory, areas undergoing natural regeneration - when nature regenerates without human interference - are much larger, totaling more than 19 million hectares.

Tropical forests require an average of twenty years to recover 80% of their carbon before they were cleared. In a study from 2021, recovering Amazon?forests are destroyed on average after eight years of regrowth.

In November, the government released its National Native Vegetation Recovery Plan, which identified 3.5 millions hectares in forests, savannahs, and other ecosystems that are regrowing on land protected by environmental laws, where they stand a better chance of survival.

Thiago Silva, the forest director of the Environment Ministry, said: "Most restoration occurs through secondary forests (naturally regrowing). We need to monitor and protect these areas."

FOREST INCENTIVES

Ferreira said that, with human-assisted regeneration still gaining momentum, the amount seeds collected by members of the Xingu Seeds Network exceeds the demand for planting.

She said that "our capacity to collect seed is much larger than the demand we receive, and this rule is among all seed-collecting network in Brazil."

Belote explained that even though natural regrowth can be the fastest way to achieve large-scale recovery on a large scale, promoting restoration through a market could help divert incentives from deforestation.

He said: "We must think of large-scale reforestation as a way to earn money... in order to show that it is competitive with deforestation."

Since last year, the government has allocated 274 million reais (50 million dollars) to restore 7,980 acres of Indigenous territory and public land that was allotted to smallholder farmers.

A part of the investment will be used to plant trees to produce food. This includes acai berries, cocoa and acai berries, both native to Amazon.

According to Forests & Finance, this funding pales in contrast to the $207 billion in publicly subsidized credits to agricultural production in Brazil that has driven forest loss over the past decade.

On the way to Nova Xavantina, there are towering silos as well as an air-conditioned storage facility that can hold up to 450,000 bags for soybean planting. This is a powerful symbol of the monoculture dominance in the region.

The nascent market for restoration is already changing the lives of those who work in it.

Oliveira said that her family has built three small homes and bought a car and motorcycle with the money she earned from collecting seeds. She was a housekeeper prior to joining Xingu Seeds Network.

Her depression has been helped by her work in the natural world.

(source: Reuters)