Seeds for Tomorrow: Local Management Plan Supports Indigenous Communities in Sustainable Natural Resource Management (Portuguese)

An English summary of this report is below. The original report, published in Portuguese in Folha de S.Paulo, follows.

Um só Planeta goes to the heart of Roraima to learn about a Plan for Territorial and Environmental Management -- an instrument elaborated collectively and that takes into consideration the demands and potentials of each community.

"I think this one here, a single stem, yielded two liters of flour," says Maria Izabel Jorge, of the Wapichana people, traditional leader of the Novo Paraíso community, while holding a yuca root that she has just pulled out of the ground. The singsong tone of her speech reveals that Portuguese is not her mother tongue.

In the manival, as the cassava field is called, there is almost no way to hide from the scorching midday sun. With temperatures of over 30ºC, it is hard to believe that it is winter.

Contrary to what the completely blue sky seems to indicate, it is the rainy season. For the community of Novo Paraíso, this means planting time. Especially the cassava to make flour, the main product of the community and the flagship of its PGTA, the Plan for Territorial and Environmental Management. Flour should guarantee the conditions for the execution of other plans -- planting coconut, mango and medicinal herbs, as well as sustainable fish and cattle breeding.

The PGTAs emerged as an initiative of the Indigenous Council of Roraima (CIR) in the early 2000s, initially focused on monitoring and participatory ethnomapping of communities that were fighting for the guarantee of their territories.

Since 2008, with the emblematic demarcations of the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Territory (IT), its focus has been to elaborate strategies to manage these territories through the sustainable management of the natural resources of each community. Each PGTA, which is collectively elaborated, documented, and recognized at an assembly, takes into consideration both the demands and the potentials of the community.