Community leader wins international environmental award
A community leader in Pará was awarded one of the most important international environmental awards in the world for her critical role in a community-led sustainable timber project supported by the PCAB. Just before Christmas, Maria Margarida Ribeiro da Silva, from the Extractive Reserve Verde para Sempre, in Pará State, arrived in Germany to receive the Wangari Maathai Forest Champions Award, named after the late Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmentalist.
Marcos Terena, a Brazilian Indigenous leader, presented the $20,000 award to her during the Global Landscapes Forum in Bonn, a conference on sustainable land use.
Margarida, as she is known at home, lives in an area characterized by rural violence, where loggers and land grabbers are rife. She has been campaigning for sustainable use and community-certified logging management for over a decade. In a statement, she shared her hopes that the award “will help to guarantee the continuity of support for the Amazon communities in their work to protect the forests for future generations”.
Under the PCAB, the NGOs Instituto Internacional de Educação do Brasil (IEB) and Instituto Florestal Tropical (IFT) have been working with six community associations in Verde para Sempre to strengthen community-certified timber production, helping to establish two new cooperatives and to strengthen a third. The cooperatives are focused on timber sales, and plan to work with non-timber forest products in the future. The Reserve has 1.3 million hectares and is one of the biggest in the Amazon.
One of the successes of the initiative has been the negotiation of fair, transparent contracts for joint timber sales by Verde para Sempre cooperatives and associations. Despite a lack of interest from many prospective buyers, cooperatives persevered, and eventually sparked the interest of Belém Florestal, a company looking for Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified timber, produced by the Arimum community cooperative, where Margarida lives. When it learned of similar timber (non-certified, but produced with the same best practices as Arimum) offered by five other communities, and with help from partners under the PCAB, the company negotiated contracts with those communities as well, and advanced funds to all six communities to facilitate the start of operations.
Verde para Sempre is the first reserve in the region to carry out sustainable and certified logging successfully. A forest engineer who lives in the community oversees the work and is responsible for the licenses. During the 2017 harvest, Belém Florestal bought R$ 2.5 million (USD$833k) worth of sustainable wood from the communities. The money is shared among the 305 families and the 112 timber managers. The biggest portion of it is saved to buy the heavy and expensive equipment needed for the operation, which for now is being rented and represents 60% of the costs.