The new bioeconomy in the Amazon: opportunities and challenges for a healthy standing forest and flowing rivers

Abstract

In the past twenty years, the bioeconomy has been increasingly recognized for its potential to create value and its contribution to sustainable development. Although most of the world’s biodiversity is located in tropical regions, the main players generating scientific and technological literature on the bioeconomy are situated far from tropical forests. The chapter’s fundamental starting point is the recognition that the Amazon’s ecosystems have been occupied by people who have accumulated a deep knowledge about them, interacting and decisively contributing to its maintenance for thousands of years. It is critical to understand, highlight, and demonstrate the strategic role that Amazonian ecosystems and local people can and should play in the global emergence of the bioeconomy. Evidence is accumulating on the enormous potential to produce a range of products and improve the well-being of people from these forests. This strategic role is not straightforward because of the natural attributes of their ecosystems: a sustainable pathway to the bioeconomy has yet to be built, and should go through several fundamental elements, including: a) Recognition that, by ethical principles, strengthening the forest economy should support the improvement of local livelihoods; b) Institutional signaling against illegality and deforestation; c) Improvement in the quality of information about different products and their value chains; and d) Provoking the emergence of dynamic markets as alternatives to the incomplete, socially unfair, and imperfect markets that dominate the forest economy today. This chapter paves the way for a new vision of a healthy, standing forest and flowing river bioeconomy. First, it presents the bioeconomy as a recent field with no unified definition in international literature. After this, it describes how the bioeconomy of forest sociobiodiversity in the Amazon is still very limited. The low economic efficiency of current ways of using the forest is discussed, and the current economic exploitation of forest socio-biodiversity in three basic sectors are presented: timber, non-timber products, and fishing. Then, the following services related to the bioeconomy are presented: synergies with forest restoration, tourism, and payment for ecosystem services. Finally, it discusses the transition needed for healthy, standing forests and flowing rivers to become a vector for the prosperity of populations and solutions for global socio-environmental challenges.