BAR
Kunkuni cupulate
Lenir Trevisan
REPRESENTATIVE PERSON
COMMUNITY/LOCATION
Chicano Colony - Santa Barbara - Pará
"The agroforestry system guarantees us food sovereignty. We organize our own food".
LINK WITH THE EARTH
"When I came to Colônia Chicano I focused on solidarity practices, which caught my attention, and I started to study the factors that make people help each other so much. I ended up staying in the region and we bought a place that already had some cupuaçu trees. I cleaned them, removed the witches' brooms, dried the dead branches, fertilized them with chicken manure and put dead leaves on top. It was watered down in the summer and they were saved. Now they are producing and very well, they have recovered and are full of leaves. Beautiful! All the almonds from here I dry and go to make the cupulate, a product from here on the farm".
“The first cupulate that César made was after visiting AMABELA , in Belterra. He looked at the work of the women there, how they did it, reformulated the recipe and the cupulate was delicious. The cupuaçu cupulate from here is also very good, because the cupuaçu here has a sweet that you can even eat the fruit. It has less acidity than other cupuaçus. It makes a wonderful cupulate, very good!”.
RELATIONSHIP WITH MENDES
CONTRIBUTION / TRANSFORMATION
“We are trying to form here in Santa Bárbara, together with other communities, an agroforestry pole. We need little land, we make a small garden, but with a lot of plants. We study the life cycle of plants, the succession, and also the extracts, according to what we are most interested in being planted. It is a very intelligent crop, with high productive potential and high employability. Cocoa comes in too. Community leaders come here to see the chocolate experience and now they are coming to see the forest experience and to be inspired by our work.”
“The threat of monoculture. People still cut it down to make cocoa plantations. If they cut down and made agroforestry, it would not be a threat, it would be rich, but they cut down to plant cocoa, only cocoa, and even clonal, which is a problem. This cocoa will last 8 years and then it has to regenerate everything, while a cocoa planted from seedlings, from seeds, lasts many, many years. The concept of profitability is preached and the environmental issue is not discussed much. We have to intensify this debate.”
CONCERN/THREAT
dream/future
“I'm living my dream now and I'm already helping to make that dream the dream of other people too. I am coordinating an agroforestry course. And I really wanted to verticalize production. I say that cocoa is a very generous and fair plant, because, even in the conventional system, many families can live on cocoa. It's a fair market because it generates income for a lot of people. And another thing, it is a tree that needs shading, that requires a reforestation of the land. The more trees, the better.”