We plant autochtonous trees

In March 2021, we signed an agreement with the Huni Kuĩ da Praia do Carapanã indigenous people, located in Tarauacá, in the state of Acre. Their territory contains a 61,000 hectare reserve in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. Guardianes de Vida helped them in planting indigenous Amazonian trees on their land in exchange for meeting their basic needs.

From the start of planting in April 2021 until September 2022, 11,900 trees have been planted.

The current agreement is to plant 700 trees per month to reach a total of 8,400 trees per year. Summer months are not favourable for planting, so operations are paused and the tree numbers not planted over the summer are added to other months’ quotas.

Project phases

In an initial phase, indigenous trees were planted to make up for the food shortages experienced by the indigenous people.

• 3,500 native palms: mainly açaí, buriti, abacabaq and açaí solteiro.
• 2,100 fruit trees: Banana trees, cooking banana, cocoa, cupuazu, jabuticaba, birimba, guava, mango, gayo mango, ingá, peanut and olive are some of them.

In a second phase we are focusing more on noble trees from the Amazon rainforest. We have planted 8,700 carapanauba, embauba, mulateiro, castanheiro, chacrona, jagube, etc.

The agreement reached with the indigenous people is that, in exchange for them reforesting their forest, we will take care of their basic needs. The main need at present is building a school. To facilitate reforestation, we built two nurseries to prepare the seedlings for reforestation. In this way, the indigenous people themselves took charge of planting from the beginning.