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If all goes according to plan, in a few weeks people will be sipping a shake that Marcelo Salazar has been developing for three years, made from the Amazon jungle’s cornucopia.

His company Mazo Mana Forest Food has partnered with communities that live from the forest and gather the Brazil nuts, cocoa beans, acai, mushrooms, fruits and other ingredients that go into the drinks. They have received some backing from a business incubator based in Manaus that focuses on sustainable forest businesses, to counter an economy based on logging and ranching.

“To turn the game around, I think it takes a new generation of ventures that combine different business models,” Salazar said.

Some hope sustainable ventures like this will be part of a new “bioeconomy,” a buzzword at the Amazon Summit in Belem in early August, where policymakers voiced eagerness to protect the rainforest and provide a livelihood for tens of millions of rainforest residents.

But beyond general support for the notion, there was little consensus about what exactly a bioeconomy should look like. Salazar attended and spoke on a panel organized by Brazil’s environment ministry titled “The challenge of building an Amazon bioeconomy.”

The idea is not new. It is the latest term for sustainable livelihood, or sustainable development or the green economy. Small to mid-size examples of it exist across the Amazon.

Besides the Brazil nuts and acai harvesters, people are making chocolate from native cocoa. A sustainable fishery for one of the world’s largest freshwater fish has given river communities an alternative to logging. Production of sneakers for fashionable Parisians has restored hope for a community of rubber tappers who labored on the verge of obsolescence with the advent of synthetic rubber.

“The challenge is scale,” Para state Gov. Helder Barbalho said in an interview on the sidelines of the summit. His state is believed to be the only one in Brazil that has an actual bioeconomy plan. Para is Brazil’s top producer of acai, yet its economy is far more dependent on iron ore exports to China. So much land in Para has been converted to pasture for an estimated 27 million cattle that it emits more greenhouse gases than any Amazon country besides Brazil.

But when it comes to larger sustainable enterprises, there are few success stories. The brightest example has been cosmetics company Natura, which two decades ago launched a product line using ingredients from traditional Amazon communities and family farms.

Developing these relationships took patience and research, said Priscila Matta, sustainability senior manager at Natura.

When the company started, local people were felling ucuuba trees to make brooms. They tripled their income by leaving the trees standing and selling the seeds to Natura. That is just one among dozens of Natura’s bioingredients, helping the company contribute to the conservation of more than 2 million hectares (about 7,700 square miles) of forest.

About 8% of what Natura spent on raw inputs last year went for Amazon bioingredients. They come from 41 communities – home to 9,120 families – who in 2022 received about $9 million, some of it direct payments to keep the forest standing.

The bioeconomy pitch can also veer toward pie-in-the-sky. Speaking to reporters at the Amazon Summit, Brazil’s planning and budget minister Simone Tebet said that driving a vibrant economy while keeping the forest standing “is our dream, but dreams exist to be realized.”

“Banks are interested,” Tebet said. “Imagine big industries without smokestacks, industries for the good, taking root in Amazon states … learning from the Indigenous people from whom everything comes.”

Para state’s bioeconomy plan strikes a similarly utopian tone: “The Amazon Forest is like an enormous library of knowledge and wisdom that has yet to be discovered,” it reads.

The plan gets into specifics, naming 43 forest-compatible products that could be exported, including acai, cocoa, cassava, pepper, fish species and essential oils for cosmetics.

Para has started building a complex to serve as a bioeconomy incubator to house researchers and start-ups, scheduled for completion before the state capital of Belem hosts the 2025 global climate conference. Para’s public bank, Banpara, has launched a subsidized lending program for small farmers who want to develop agroforestry.

“We can balance the scenario of a living forest and people being cared for, being seen,” Barbalho said in the interview.

Neighboring Amazonas state is developing a bioeconomy plan with the financial support of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The federal government is also starting to move beyond mere words. This month, Brazil’s economy minister, Fernando Haddad, announced an Ecological Transformation Plan. It proposes using a climate fund to back sustainability projects and setting up rules for Brazil’s carbon market.

But some earlier efforts reveal pitfalls.

A state condom factory in the Amazon city of Xapuri that opened in 2008 during President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s previous term was supposed to provide a market for hundreds of rubber-tapper families living in the region where the late environmental leader Chico Mendes was killed. The factory closed 10 years later, after federal subsidies came to an end. Locals resorted to cattle ranching and today the region ranks high for deforestation.

Cocoa beans are another cautionary tale. The trees can be a way to let forest grow back where it has been cut down but its appeal in places like the Ivory Coast and Ghana has meant massive deforestation to make way for the more lucrative trees.

Salazar, the CEO of Mazo Mana, the forest shake company, views his enterprise as both social-minded and market-savvy. It reserves nearly 10% equity for its partner community associations and, to the extent possible, production takes place locally to add value and develop expertise.

Salazar thinks the sustainable companies that succeed and grow big will be those with a mission to solve the Amazon’s problems, and they will drive a transformation toward an economy that recognizes the value of the forest.
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Record-breaking temperatures, reduced rainfall and changes in the natural climate are set to damage Thailand’s economy and increase poverty, experts say.

Thailand is suffering from droughts caused by the El Niño weather event, which is drying up land for the growth of key crops in the country’s farmlands.

Rainfall in Thailand has been below average this year, with a 25% reduction nationwide up until July, according to the Thai Meteorological Department. It has forced the government to advise some farmers to switch to other crops that use less water if planting has not already begun.

“It was less rain in central Thailand for the past couple of months.

As [the World Meteorological Organization] said that July was the hottest July in history. But the hottest month of the year [for Thailand] is April,” said Chaowat Siwapornchai, a meteorologist in Bangkok.

“As a long-term trend, we continue facing rising temperatures combined this year with El Niño], which is developing the situation we are facing,” he added.

The La Niña phenomenon is the natural cooling of the water in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. It occurs every few years yet affects weather changes worldwide. The El Niño pattern does the opposite, developing warm water, that brings drier weather and reduces rainfall, contributing to extreme hot weather in the Asia region. Extreme heat has also been common this year in India, China, Laos, Pakistan and Vietnam.

In a report published last month, the World Meteorological Organization said that El Niño conditions have developed in the Pacific for the first time in seven years, adding that there is a 90% probability El Niño will continue until the end of 2023. The report says there is almost a certainty the next five years will be the warmest on record, with one of the five years in that period being the warmest ever recorded.

But for Thailand, the Southeast Asian country has already experienced record-breaking temperatures earlier this year.

In April, the city of Tak recorded a highest-ever temperature of about 45.5 degrees Celsius. The same month saw Thailand’s heat index – which determines what the temperature feels like because of humidity – measure at a record 53.9 Celsius in the Chonburi province and the popular tourist island of Phuket.

The scorching temperatures also have forced Thai households to use more electricity, such as in air conditioning homes, causing power consumption to soar to record levels in April and May.

And last week, in the Korat area, water levels in the Lam Takhong Dam dropped to the point that a historic part of Thailand reappeared. The Thai-America Road, built and used during the Vietnam War and used by the U.S Air Force as a route to its base in Udon Thani, has re-emerged. The road is usually submerged under the dam waters, which have dropped to less than half of capacity, the Khaosod English newspaper reported.

Kiatanantha Lounkaew, an economic lecturer at the Thammasat University in Bangkok, says the droughts from El Niño will harm the economic livelihood of the Thai people.

“The key crops that could be affected are rice, corn, and sugar cane. The household incomes of those who cultivate these crops are low. Thus, this effect could result in persistent poverty. Impoverished households will not have sufficient resources to mitigate the effects of the drought,” he told VOA via email.

Data shows about 40% of Thai farmers live below the poverty line.

“Since these produce items are the main staple for Thai people and are used to feed farm animals, rising prices would be felt throughout the economy. As shown by past empirical evidence, there is a clear correlation between drought spells and inflation, especially food inflation. Those with low incomes will be more vulnerable to the effects, as about 50% to 70% of their monthly earnings are spent on food.”

Agriculture accounts for up to 9% of Thailand’s GDP. The country is the world’s second-largest rice exporter, and the third largest exporter of raw sugar. The industry employs about a third of Thailand’s labor force, including millions of farmers.

Following an economic decline during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thailand, Southeast Asia’s second largest economy, has seen a rebound and 3.5% GDP growth was forecast for 2023.

Earlier in August, the Bank of Thailand’s policy committee warned the economy could shrink because of weather concerns and political uncertainty, Reuters reported.

Kiatanantha says the droughts could hamper Thailand’s agricultural competitiveness.

“In the long run, it will affect the competitiveness of Thailand’s agricultural sector. Agricultural households facing volatile income will find it hard to remain competitive, as doing so requires further investment to improve their yield and the quality of their produce.

“Additionally, such a prospect would ‘push’ people who are able to do so into other economic sectors. Changing the workforce composition will exert further downward pressure on the agricultural sector, ensuring regional and sectoral inequality,” Kiatanantha said.
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U.S. trade has shifted away from China due to policies enacted by the Biden and Trump administrations, but U.S. reliance on China-linked supply chains has not necessarily been reduced and consumers have faced higher costs, according to new research presented Saturday at a Federal Reserve economic symposium.

Despite deglobalization fears after the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, overall trade “has held steady at just under 60% of world (gross domestic product) rather than gone into freefall,” Laura Alfaro, an economist at Harvard Business School, and Davin Chor, an associate professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, concluded in their paper, which was presented at the annual gathering of central bankers and economists in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

But U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, recently enacted industrial policies, and the pandemic, do seem to have touched off a “‘great reallocation’ in supply chain activity: Direct US sourcing from China has decreased,” from 21.6% of U.S. imports as of 2016 to 16.5% last year, Alfaro and Chor wrote.

What’s less certain is what that means, with the authors saying the shift from China is raising prices for consumers without clearly providing offsetting benefits in the form of, for example, improved manufacturing efficiency in the U.S.

It is not even certain that the decline in China’s U.S. import share represents a true delinking, they said.

Vietnam and Mexico, for example, appear to have captured much of the reallocated trade, the authors said, based on an analysis of goods import and export patterns, while an increase in U.S. purchases of less processed goods from abroad was “indicative of some reshoring of production stages.”

And among companies, they said, “concerns are being voiced over the wisdom of sprawling supply chains that can expose firms and countries to the risk of disruptions,” from events like the pandemic or severe weather, or policy shocks like tariffs.

Yet in the background, the researchers noted that China had “stepped up” its trade and investment activity with Vietnam and Mexico, as well as other countries.

“The U.S. could well remain indirectly connected to China through its trade and global value chain links with these third-party countries,” they argued.

Prices for goods from some countries, moreover, were beginning to rise.

“The recent policy restrictions to shift sourcing patterns or even to encourage substitution toward domestic inputs are poised to add to wage and cost pressures in the U.S.,” the research found, a pointed conclusion as the Fed tries to lower inflation by slowing the U.S. economy. 
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A crowd of what appeared to be several hundred protesters in the southern Druze city of Suwaida, Syria, chanted slogans targeting the Syrian government Saturday on the seventh day of a growing movement calling for economic and political reform.

An economic crisis across Syria has hit the general population hard, making daily life extremely difficult and sparking protests that seemingly are causing ripples to several other parts of the country.

Activists in Suwaida said they are not trying to overthrow the government but to prompt leaders to try harder to improve the economic situation, citing the deteriorating exchange rate of the Syrian pound, the lifting of fuel subsidies, and price hikes on bread and other food.

One protest leader, Marwan Hamzeh, told Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV that the government has “not appeared to make any use of its security forces to crack down on the latest protests,” adding that it’s “unclear why.” Some observers, however, say the government is concerned about provoking a wave of violence like that which sparked the much larger protest movements of 2011.

Although Arab media broadcast video of protesters in several parts of the country calling for the “fall of the regime,” Joshua Landis, who heads the Middle East Studies department at the University of Oklahoma, told VOA that “most of the protesters are calling for more government activity in the economic life of the country, rather than a collapse of the government.”

“It’s an odd situation because the Syrians who are demonstrating all want more government services, not less,” Landis said. “They want more electricity, they want subsidies, they want better schooling, they want the currency to be stabilized. They are desperate. They want higher salaries.”

Landis noted that Druze leaders criticized the protesters that burned down their province’s town hall in a previous protest movement last December, telling them they were “destroying the infrastructure needed to run their province rather than harming the government.”

Activist Hamzeh said that “90% of all government offices that collect revenue for land sales, vehicle registration and other taxes have been closed during the week of protests,” and that “most people have stopped paying their taxes to the government.”

One middle-aged protester, looking tired but enthusiastic, told Druze social media it is “time for the government to clean up its act and govern fairly, rather than favoring certain sectors of the population.”

He said that protesters were calling for freedom, justice, dignity and humanity, in addition to demanding the law be applied fairly to everyone.

The Saudi-owned Asharq al Awsat newspaper reported Friday that the protest movement has “spread to the Bedouin tribes in the south of Syria” from their initial communal origin among the Druze in Suwaida, “making them more of a national movement.”

Several Kurdish leaders, including Ilham Ahmed, have expressed support, insisting that “peaceful protests are the correct path to achieve democratic change.”

The Arab League normalized ties with the Syrian government in May, but those ties remain shaky. Investment in Syrian infrastructure has been slow to materialize, partly because of ongoing U.S. economic sanctions on the Assad government.
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