Açaí berries are prized in the Western world for their health benefits. But can this ‘superfood’ also support the health of the Amazonian ecosystems where it is grown?
The wooden canoe travels down the river to the chugging sound of a small motor. To the untrained eye, the surrounding rainforest is just a mosaic of greens glowing bright in the early morning sunlight.
Once the locals start pointing out and naming specific plants, a more detailed picture emerges of this part of the Brazilian Amazon. There is the buriti palm with its rust-colored fruit, the Brazil nut castanheira rising above the canopy, and the heart-shaped aninga, a common marsh plant that protects the riverbanks against erosion.
But the native species considered most valuable is a spindly palm with thin droopy leaves and bunches of dark berries gathered beneath its crown – the açaí tree, pronounced ah-ssa-ee. Its perfectly round fruit produce a purple pulp best known in the Western world as the key ingredient in açaí bowls, a ‘superfood’ dish embraced by an increasingly health-conscious consumer.
Here in Mupi, a village in the Amazon Delta named after the river running through it, açaí has always been a food staple. It’s eaten pure, blended with water into a smooth cream and served chilled at every meal, topped with crunchy manioc flour. It tastes earthy and bitter, nothing like the sweetened fruit bowls ubiquitous to brunch menus from California to Copenhagen.
On the Mupi river, where the setting is idyllic and children and adults alike enjoy spending their free time.
Since its advent as a trendy snack abroad, the dark purple berry has become an important source of livelihood in this region. And now, there are high hopes that these berries can also help protect the forests where they are grown.
Some thirty million people live in the Amazon. Opportunities can be scarce and too often work comes from industries that harm the rainforest: illegal gold mining, poaching, ranching. These all threaten the native biodiversity, with scientists warning that we are dangerously close to a tipping point where the forest will start emitting more carbon than it absorbs.
“We need the forest for our bread and butter. We protect the forest, and she gives us what we need to survive.”
Angela Icleia dos Reis Castro
Part of the solution could be to create more economic value in activities that conserve a healthy forest. Enough value to sustain the community. This idea of using renewable, nature-based resources that address inequality and financial instability while protecting the environment is called the bioeconomy – and açaí is a prime candidate for it.
“We need the forest for our bread and butter. We protect the forest, and she gives us what we need to survive,” says Angela Icleia dos Reis Castro while traveling down the river for a morning of açaí picking in August, at the beginning of the harvest season.
Most Mupi locals own a few hectares of açaí forest along the riverbank, from which they extract a living working with neighbors and family. “It’s fun! We work while having a laugh,” says Luan dos Reis Castro, one of Angela’s sons, as he prepares to scale a tree to reach the precious fruit clustered under the palm fronds several meters above the ground.
Luan dos Reis Castro helps his mother with açaí picking during harvest season.
He has been climbing the trees since childhood.
Now aged 18, Luan has been climbing açaí palms since he was 10. His mother used to pick açaí too when she was younger, but now she prefers to leave this physical, sometimes dangerous job to the young men.
Instead she works stripping the berries from the branches by hand and picking out the bad ones. “This is a form of therapy,” she says, as berries drop into the basket with a soft patter and the buzz of cicadas fills the forest. “We enjoy the silence, the sound of the birds. It’s peaceful.”
After a few hours, the harvesters have seven 14-kilo baskets filled to the brim with blueberry-sized açaí. They leave the baskets on a wooden jetty by the river, where they’ll get picked up by a middleman who sells the fruit on to factories in nearby cities. There, the berries are processed into a pulp and frozen before being shipped off to traders in Brazil and around the world.
Brazil produced 1.7 million tons of açaí last year, of which more than 90% came from Pará state in the eastern Amazon, the state also home to the village of Mupi.
Most of the production remains in the Amazon, sold at a bustling riverside market in the port city of Belém, where buyers come to inspect the berries at dawn while middlemen weave through the crowd, balancing baskets of açaí on their heads.
Another part goes south to the domestic market, where city-dwellers in Rio and São Paulo eat açaí as a sorbet on the beach or a post-workout snack.
The rest – about 10%, although accurate data is hard to come by – is exported, primarily to the US and Europe. This amount has grown rapidly ever since açaí first caught the attention of the international surfing community in the early 2000s. At the time, national production was around 150,000 tons and exports were non-existent.
Açaí has become so popular because of its nutritional value: it’s rich in minerals like manganese and copper, it’s high in fiber, helps lower cholesterol and is above all a powerful antioxidant.
“My grandfather died aged 106. My grandmother was nearly 100. It hasn’t been proven, but people say it’s thanks to açaí”
Luan dos Reis Castro
Açaí palms grow primarily in the floodplains of the Amazon Delta, a marshy area where rivers and trees meet. The regular pulse of the water combined with the organic waste of the forest floor creates a natural fertilizer for these trees, which grow in clumps of three or four skinny trunks. Native stingless bees pollinate them and birds deposit seeds in their feces. It’s a virtuous cycle created by nature.
But as demand for the dark purple berry exploded, the ecosystem began to suffer from human intervention. Locals started ‘managing’ their açaí forests, which meant removing other tree species and planting as much açaí as possible. This turned patches of the Amazon into monocultures of açaí, a phenomenon scientists have termed ‘açaízation’.
This not only harms the rainforest, but also the harvests. Without the shade from taller trees, the nutrients from other species, and the wildlife attracted by a diverse ecosystem, the açaí palms suffered and became less productive.
“When you pick açaí from an area with taller trees, it has a different color. The pulp is different. It’s richer, brighter”
José Maria de Carvalho Souza
In Mupi, harvesters have backtracked, reintroducing biodiversity in their açaí areas and adopting a careful management system – essentially helping the forest, rather than imposing upon it. They aim to have 25 açaí clusters in every 25-sq-meter patch, with a variety of other species including tall trees for their shade and leguminous plants that help fix nitrogen in the soil.
“We realized we’d been making mistakes and that we needed to change things quickly to recover our forest,” says community leader José Maria de Carvalho Souza, sitting on the deck of the riverside house he built thanks to his açaí income. “When you pick açaí from an area with taller trees, it has a different color. The pulp is different. It’s richer, brighter.”
This shift to more sustainable practices has taken place with help from a French company, Nossa, which supplies frozen açaí pulp and sorbets to supermarkets and restaurateurs across Europe.
Binois founded Nossa in 2012 after studying the açaí supply chain during his masters degree. “I liked the idea of something that preserves the forest and helps people on the one hand, and is a business opportunity on the other,” he says, explaining that more sustainable açaí translates into higher income for the harvesters.
Customers abroad are happy to pay a premium for an organic, fair-trade product and this can help encourage a more sustainable açaí production which is not found so much on the domestic market, he says. “This shows the power of the consumer”.
Nossa holds its suppliers in Brazil to strict socio-environmental standards, which isn’t always easy in an industry that functions informally. “We realized that to enact real change, we needed to work with harvesters individually,” says Solène Guillot. As an agronomist and Nossa’s sustainability manager, she works on the ground with the Amazon communities.
That’s what they’ve done in Mupi, helping over a dozen individual harvesters gain organic certification.
Boat is the quickest way to reach many places around here. Sometimes it’s the only way.
Açaí produced in the floodplains is naturally chemicals-free, but organic certification comes with further requirements, including the absence of monoculture, a ban on child labor, and product traceability. Harvesters must take forest management courses and pay for an independent audit.
But certified organic açaí is still a minority of overall production. And as companies like Nossa seek to grow and increase their sales, can the açaí industry truly be sustainable in the long run?
Guillot pauses to think. Both she and Binois admit that organic certification doesn’t go far enough in guaranteeing a fully just and sustainable product. But it puts into motion a positive process, where harvesters formalize their adoption of better practices and receive fairer payment for their work.
It also gives these Amazonian communities a viable economic alternative to clearing trees for cattle ranching, for example, which is the cause of 90% of deforestation in the Amazon and has devastated the south of Pará.
“The definition of bioeconomy is to give value to products that keep the forest standing, that preserve traditional knowledge and allow local communities to keep their way of life and their environment,” says Guillot. “That’s what we’re doing.”
Nossa tries to go the extra mile, paying producers 5% above market price and encouraging açaí cooperatives to diversify their activities, to reduce dependence on the seasonal harvest and avoid monocultures.
In October 2025, Nossa began buying certified organic açaí harvested in Mupi. Locals are proud of that, seeing it as recognition for their work. There is hope that it will create opportunities and keep young people in the community.
Already, changes can be felt. The tree coverage is denser and the air cooler in the açaí areas that have been reforested. Inspired by what they’ve learned, some locals are taking up other activities like bee-keeping and trialling manioc plantations using agroforestry techniques – planting a variety of edible species together – rather than traditional slash-and-burn.
For Souza, it’s about protecting the forest they depend upon, but also preserving a culture and way of life. “Our goal is to keep this going, to be able to stand together and remain on our land.”
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