We already have over 180 producers recorded. We rely on visitors like you to add more. Help us by adding more producers on the map by clicking here. Across the Amazon basin, indigenous peoples have produced and harvested myriad native products for millennia – from globally recognized commodities like cacao and Brazil nuts to countless lesser-known and emerging products like acai, camu camu, guayusa and sacha inchi.

Sustainable farming and wild collection of these products can make a big difference in the incomes of local communities and contribute to maintaining the over 2.4 million square kilometers of Amazon rainforest they control.

But despite growing interest from markets in sustainable sourcing of these sorts of products, it’s often difficult for indigenous producer organizations to connect with buyers, investors, funders and other potential partners.

Putting Amazon Indigenous Producers on the Map creates an open-access database to help facilitate better connections for indigenous producers, with input and data provided by indigenous organizations and collaborators from around the world.

Go to our interactive map to help highlight indigenous producers

This project is a joint effort of Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA) the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), EcoDecisión, Canopy Bridge and Forest Trends.

 

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The Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA) the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), EcoDecisión, Canopy Bridge and Forest Trends have joined together to develop a publicly accessible on-line database to help improve access to markets and finance for Amazonian indigenous peoples. This indigenous catalogue and map of community enterprises for sustainable natural products from forests and farms will make it easier for buyers, funders and other allies to find indigenous partners to work with.

Across the Amazon, indigenous communities have long engaged in extraction of non-timber forest products as well as cultivation of traditional crops, both for their own consumption and for sale. This vast array of products includes well-known commodities like cacao, coffee, Brazil nuts, and palm hearts as well as many less well-known products, from sacha inchi to camu camu. Responsible trade in these products can make a significant contribution to indigenous communities working to conserve their forests and generate alternative sources of income, as well as aligning with the growing body of corporate commitments to deforestation-free sourcing.

These products and community enterprises face multiple challenges in getting to market — technical, commercial and organizational. Overcoming these obstacles requires a combination of finance, technical assistance and commercial relationships. But even for partners interested in working closely with local and indigenous producers for sustainable sourcing of specialty products, these can be hard to find. Companies have difficulty trying to identify and evaluate partners for investment and sources of supply because community enterprises are often small-scale, dispersed and relatively inexperienced in using internet and other tools to enhance their visibility.

To respond to the needs of buyers seeking supply, of investors and donors looking to provide finance, and of communities aiming to enhance the visibility and demand for their products, the Putting Amazon Indigenous Producers on the Map project is identifying and cataloging an array of indigenous products and producers in the Amazon who are engaging with broader national and international markets (or are seeking to do so). The database and interactive map includes information about:

  • The characteristics and contact information for producer organizations
  • A listing of products (linked to the on-line platform CanopyBridge.com)
  • A summary characterization of producers’ capacity and experience
  • A description of how enterprises contribute to conservation objectives.

This inventory of indigenous producer organizations is being developed through direct contact with Amazon indigenous producers, with input from Amazon indigenous organizations belonging to COICA, from development partners across the region and from a unique crowd-sourced mapping tool.

The first phase of Putting Amazon Indigenous Producers on the Map includes data collection through August 2015, with database information to be available on a searchable, map-based platform on line as well as through detailed profiles of producers on the CanopyBridge.com platform.

Putting Amazon Indigenous Producers on the Map is being developed with the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of a five-year program, called Accelerating Inclusion and Mitigating Emissions (AIME), involving a partnership of nine environmental and indigenous organizations, led by Forest Trends. The partners in the AIME program support empowerment of forest-dependent communities to more fully contribute to and directly benefit from climate change mitigation efforts. AIME helps:

  • Build capacity of indigenous peoples and other forest-based communities to improve the governance of their territories and forests, while supporting the design of natural-resource utilization activities that are compatible with reducing deforestation and aligned with the “Planes de Vida” (Life Plans) of indigenous people
  • Key jurisdictions across Latin America to expand processes and build institutional/policy frameworks to be more in­clusive of the rights and views of such communities, and
  • Private-sector actors to better understand and value partnerships with indigenous and traditional communities.