another crop of the rainforest is the coal berry.find out what acai berries are like?, and how they are used.......................
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Answer:
- For more than 30 years, Raimundo Julião da Costa has eked out a living by selling a dazzling array of wild tropical fruits that grow naturally on his land in the lush floodplains of the Amazon rainforest.
His biggest seller has always been Açaí (pronounced ah-sigh-EE) - a dark purple berry rich in nutrients that sprouts atop the millions of palm trees lining the riverbanks in the Brazilian jungle. But like thousands of other poor farmers, until recently Mr. da Costa found himself at the mercy of middlemen who have had a strong hold on the local fruit market for generations.
That started to change two years ago, when a few environmentally conscious surfers from a small California company called Sambazon offered to buy Mr. da Costa's Açaí harvest at a 25 percent premium over the market price. The only catch - he had to designate a piece of his land as an ecological reserve and carefully manage the rest of his terrain to protect the biodiversity of the rainforest.
"It's worth the extra effort," said Mr. da Costa, 74, who is better known by his nickname, Seu EdiquÃnio. "I used to sell my fruit on the edge of the river to the middlemen, but they always pay the lowest price possible," he said. "Now I have a lot more security because I know what price I'm going to get ahead of time."
Mr. da Costa's American buyers may be relative newcomers, but they are already helping change the face of the tropical fruit trade in this part of the Brazilian Amazon. Because Sambazon offers guaranteed contracts, hundreds of peasant families are able, for the first time, to lock in a price for the bulk of their crop before the harvest. And as their sales become more lucrative, people have an incentive to preserve their habitat instead of abandoning it in search of work in nearby cities like Belém, where many former river dwellers live in poverty in crime-ridden shantytowns.
"The idea is to show the locals that it can pay off to become stewards of the forest," said Ryan Black, chief executive and a founder of Sambazon in San Clemente, Calif.
While those may sound like the words of a seasoned environmental advocate, it was Mr. Black's nose for business that drew him into the conservationist movement. He and a friend, Ed Nichols, came up with the idea for importing tropical fruit after tasting Açaí during a surfing trip to northeastern Brazil in 1999. A few months later, they founded Sambazon, short for Saving and Managing the Brazilian Amazon.
Rich in antioxidants and amino acids, Açaí is thought to be one of the most nutritional fruits of the Amazon basin. So Mr. Black and Mr. Nichols first went after the health-conscious, processing the fruit into packs of frozen pulp mixed with guaraná, another berry from the Amazon that contains natural stimulants. Then they started distributing it to juice bars and fitness clubs throughout Southern California, where Açaí smoothies soon began supplanting wheatgrass protein shakes as the drink of choice among athletes and body builders.
Sambazon Açaí is now carried by thousands of juice bars and grocery stores across the country, including such retail chains as the Whole Foods Market, Wild Oats and Trader Joe's. Chefs are also beginning to experiment with the fruit, whose taste has been likened to blueberry with a hint of chocolate. The Blue Door restaurant at the Delano Hotel in Miami Beach serves it with dinner entrees like veal tenderloin.
In most Brazilian cities, Açaí is also a recent phenomenon, even though it has been a staple for indigenous communities in the Amazon for centuries. Now, in most parts of the country Açaí is typically served as an ice-cold slush in a bowl, topped with granola and sliced bananas.
"When I came to Brazil in 1996, you could only find Açaí in half a dozen places," said Travis Baumgardner, a 29-year-old Texan who runs Sambazon's Brazilian subsidiary in Rio de Janeiro and regularly visits the Amazon to monitor the harvest. "Now you can get it at over 5,000 juice bars in Rio alone. It has an air of nutrition and coolness that people love."
Answer:
Explanation: The acai berry has been around for thousands of years and not until the 1990's was it introduced to the western world. The acai berry was found to possess tremendous health properties. The acai berry was first used by the tribes of the Amazon jungle as a cure for various ailments. It is estimated that the indigenous tribes people routinely use up to 2,000 of the 3,000 known rainforest fruits for medicinal purposes.