- Copal resin, also known as rosin or jutaisica, was historically an important source of income for the riverine areas and traditional communities around Santarém, Pará state, Brazil.
- However, in the 1980s its use as a varnish was replaced by petroleum-based solutions.
- The researchers say that by adding value to wood products, especially in the Amazon, natural resins could once again become part of local communities’ sustainable economies.
As a young man, Jalma Moreira Lima would roam the rainforest collecting copal resin. He would walk for hours looking for jatoba, an Amazonian tree that secretes a sticky substance from its trunk. When exposed to air, the substance hardens and falls to the forest floor as pebbles. “When we found a tree with this substance, some clever person would search among the leaves and find more,” Lima told Mongabay. “We would come back with sacks weighing four or five kilograms each. [9-11 pounds] Of resin.”
The Suruaca community of Lima is located in the Tapajós Arapiúns Extractive Reserve, near Santarém in the Brazilian state of Pará, which was a centre for the production of copal resin for much of the 20th century. Also known as Jatoba or rosin, the substance is excreted by two types of trees whenever their trunks are wounded.Hymenaea Curbaril) secretes a lighter colored transparent resin, while theH. parvifolia) The resin is more milky and blackish in color.
“I think every community harvested rosin in the past,” Lima says. Riverine and traditional communities harvested the material and sent it to Santarém, on the Amazon, and from there to urban areas in Brazil and abroad. Jatoba secretions were mixed with oils and solvents and used to varnish wooden furniture, pianos, and especially horse-drawn carriages.
“The boom of copal varnish came at the end of the 19th century, when the middle class began to emerge in the United States and Europe,” João José Lopes Correa, a Brazilian researcher who has studied the resin, told Mongabay. Intrigued by the story of copal’s rise and fall, he studied the substance for his master’s thesis at the Federal University of Pará in 2015. In 2022, Correa and other researchers published an article on the same topic.
Correa estimates that in the first half of the 20th century, Brazil’s copal resin production was about 120 tons per year, 80 percent of which came from the state of Pará. Brazil’s export volumes fluctuated widely but in some years reached about 80 tons, Correa said. “Brazil has never stood out as an exporter,” he said, noting that Europe and the United States sourced most of their resin from Africa.
João Carlos Domborski, who migrated to the Amazon from southern Brazil in the 1970s and lived around the newly opened Trans-Amazonian Highway, recalls that some of it was left behind in Pará state to be used as caulking material for wooden boats. “We collected it and brought it to Santarém, where there were stores that bought it in bulk,” he told Mongabay. “At that time, if any family wanted to make a living from this activity, they could get it,” says Domborski, who now works for Projeto Saúde e Alegria, an NGO in Santarém.
But the tree, an important source of income for Amazonian communities, declined sharply in the second half of the 20th century, when its natural resin was replaced by petroleum-based varnishes. Today, the tree is virtually extinct, confined to domestic use in traditional communities, where it is used to make fire (it’s flammable) or to waterproof clay pots. “I don’t know anyone who works with wood anymore,” Lima says.
Stella Marie, owner of a shop selling Amazon products in Santarém, used to buy resin from the local community whenever customers asked her to, but for the past three years, no one has placed an order. “We’re not even buying it because there’s no one to sell to,” she told Mongabay.
While a return to 20th-century production levels is unlikely, Correa believes Jutaisica could once again play a role in the forest economy, alongside other products such as handicrafts, essential oils and acai berries. “The forest is diverse and has a huge variety of products. As with other forest production, we’re just talking about small and varied quantities. But the resin could become another component of the Amazon’s product suite,” Correa said.
A study by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the New Climate Economy estimated that revitalizing the Amazon’s bioeconomy could boost the region’s GDP by 40 billion reals ($8.3 billion) per year. In addition to new funding, the transformation could create 312,000 new jobs.
The researchers say Jatoba could not only be a sustainable alternative to petroleum-based varnishes, but also act as an incentive for forest conservation. Around 80 percent of the plant production in the Amazon is linked to timber extraction. “Jatoba wood, for example, is a very popular wood for flooring,” Correa said.
Juta deer could also be used to add value to the Amazon’s timber industry, which sells most of the forest’s premium timber as low-value rough sawn timber. “You can make things from Amazonian wood, with the right design and finished with local varnish,” Correa said, adding that universities should play a key role in helping local communities reintroduce Juta deer into the market as a sustainable product.
Banner image: Jatoba (Hymenaea courbaril) tree on the island of Maui, Hawaii. Image by Forest and Kim Starr, available via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
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Quote:
Côrrea, JJL, Almeida, TE, Pimentel Santos, MR, & Giacomin, LL (2022). Adding value to forest stands: a historical review of the uses and properties of copal resin in the Santarém region of central Amazon. Rodriguesia73. Retrieved from https://www.scielo.br/j/rod/a/N8mtx4SwBzf4W7F7M79xdSH/?format=pdf&lang=en
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