Matchachin: Dynamic agroforestry in the Amazon rainforest

In this lecture, a development aid project will be presented, in which a sustainable value chain in the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador is being developed. Because the problem is the following, there are only a few income opportunities in the Amazon, these are the mining of gold, the marketing of rainforest wood and tourism. Tourism has been declining since the Corona Pandemic and gold mining and the timber industry are destroying the rainforest and thus negatively affecting the climate. An alternative here is dynamic agroforestry, which focuses on Guayusa tea leaves. Guayusa - an ancient cultivated plant of the indigenous language group living there, the Kichwa, was already cultivated in the Amazon 1500 years ago. The leaves of the Guayusa tree are the most caffeinated tea leaves in the world. In forest gardens, which the Kichwa themselves call "Chakra", the indigenous people have been cultivating other useful and medicinal plants in addition to the Guayusa trees for generations, in a kind of permaculture, without negative consequences for flora and fauna. As part of the project, we are testing the possibility of using these forest gardens economically in order to build up a sustainable income opportunity and food security for the Kichwa indigenous people. In a time window of 3 years, we will organic-certify 50 forest gardens and train 50 indigenous smallholder families to become organic farmers. In the forest gardens, various useful plants are produced in various test series, economically viable, organically and sustainably. The focus here is on the Guayusa crop. For this purpose, a wide variety of useful plants are tried out, such as corn, peanuts, vanilla - as well as medicinal plants of the indigenous people such as Chanca piedra, Sangre de Grado.