ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the logging industry in Eastern Amazonia faced diminishing stocks of timber in the immediate vicinity of sawmills, loggers began seeking timber from ever-increasing distances. The penetration of logging roads into remote areas caused contact between two formerly distinct worlds: the timber industry and isolated rural communities. Tempted by quick cash, many villagers quickly sold large tracts of timber for meagre sums. Consecutive episodes of timber extraction, however, left communities with ever-diminishing stocks of game, fruit and fibre resources. In the wake of rapid impoverishment of their resource base, families along the Capim River basin in Para, Brazil, and representatives of the Rural Workers’ Union of Paragominas began to question the costs and benefits of logging and to consider whether there might be forest management alternatives to logging in which forest products other than timber could be marketed. Lacking sufficient technical knowledge of forestry, they began searching for scientific collaborators to inventory their forests and determine if non-timber forest products might offer greater promise than timber.
