My Amazon Acai Adventure

I met Raul on the beach while on summer recess from the University of Florida. We were surfing the large break on the south shore of Luis Correia, Brazil where the Atlantic waves run uninterrupted all the way from the West African coast. Raul was a biology student at Universidade de Brasília and he invited me to tag along with his class research group who were going deep into the Amazon to study Acai production. I had heard of Dr. Talbot's studies at U of F and I had been drinking Acai at the fruit stands on the beach but the idea of going into the Amazon jungle with people who knew what they were doing was enough to convince me to sign on. Raul promised me we would be back in two weeks; plenty of time to catch more good surf before I returned to school in Florida.

We traveled along BR316, the coastal highway (dirt road) through the "sertao," a dry inland expanse and occasional farm land to the city of Belem at the mouth of the Amazon River. Raul explained his family lived in Belem and pointed out the major sites with pride and a big smile. The city is big by Brazil standards with 3 million people. It looked pretty clean until we got to the waterfront. The banks of the river were littered with every kind of trash and junk until in some places you could not make out the shore for all of the litter.

Amazon River at Belem

Raul explained Belem catches everything anyone throws into the river. He said there was trash floating here that was thrown in all the way up in the Peruvian Andes; it all makes its way to Belem. I found broken wood, torn cloth, piles of old plastic, rotten plants and occasional bloated carcasses.  The smell was awful. Raul just shrugged and joked,"want to go swimming?"

We joined the group at the municipal docks next to Mercado Ver-o-Peso, Belems giant market were over 90,000 tons of Acai are sold each year. We threw our gear in with theirs and had to wait for the river boat that would take us upriver. Raul suggested we leave our stuff under the watchful eye of his cousin Armando while he gave us a tour of his uncle's Acai factory.

We found it upriver on a busy road called Passagem do Carmo. The building was built low and squat and crammed between ramshackle buildings and high fences. Barking dogs and buzzing flies competed with the roar of machinery coming from inside the steel corrugated walls. A narrow drive, squeezed between cars and trucks parked wherever they could fit, led to double steel doors next to an overflowing dumpster. The doors were locked so we made our way around the back. The rear of the building opened onto an old greasy dock that hung at an angle into the river. Boats, some loaded with baskets of blue Acai berries were tied up at the pier and others were tethered to nearby wood poles jammed into the river bottom.  All the boats were sitting on the mud bottom waiting for the tide to lift them. More baskets of Acai berries were piled on the dock and smelled over ripe. The sun was fierce. I had to get in the shade.  The inside of the building was dark and hot. Men laid around on burlap sacks and someone was in a corner cleaning a fish. Raul said they were waiting for the tide to lift the boats so they could unload them more easily, about 4 hours from now. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry in the overwhelming damp heat. So far my impression of Belem's waterfront was squalor and trash and stink and heat.

Raul's uncle came out of his office and greeted us warmly and offered us a plate of fruit. He showed us large blue plastic vats filled with Acai berries. An old pump in the corner was pumping water thru a plastic pipe that spilled over each tub. The water swirled thru the berries and overflowed the rim carrying twigs, leaves, dirt and rotten fruit which all sluiced along a gutter in the floor and made its way back to the river. The water in the pump was coming from a pipe that ran along the dock and into the river.

Raul's uncle explained that the intake pipe was 60 feet from the dock and had three layers of metal screen wrapped around the end so only "clean" water washed over the berries. He showed us how once rinsed the berries were loaded by conveyor into a dump truck to be delivered across town to the refrigeration processor. It seemed his business consisted of buying the Acai berries from the Ribeirinhos (river people) washing the fruit and reselling it to a processor. He said by tomorrow these berries would be in frozen blocks in a giant warehouse near the highway.

Belem Waterfront

When we got back to the municipal dock our boat was waiting and Raul's cousin had loaded all our gear. We chugged upriver against the current and the tide but the captain was in a rush so it was full throttle and some close calls passing all manner of river craft in the harbor until we got out on the open river and headed South past Barcarena. We hung close to shore and watched the passing jungle and occasional riverfront huts until we veered further out from shore against the main current of the river. Raul said we were approaching the Alunorte's pier and the boat needed to go far out in the river to get around it. Alunorte is the name of the world's largest aluminum smelting plant and it is located right in the middle of Para State where most of Brazil's Acai is grown. There on the shore, in the middle of the jungle I could see a giant industrial complex with mountains of raw red powder in pyramid shaped piles. Smoke stacks billowed grey/black smoke and buildings clustered together all connected with a jumbled network of pipes and catwalks.  

Alunorte Aluminum Smelter

Raul explained that Alunorte was built by a Japanese company to make aluminum. It got all its power from the new Trucurí River Dam, the fifth largest hydroelectric dam in the world.

Paragominas Mine

Alunorte got half its raw bauxite from a slurry pipe that ran 150 miles thru the jungle from the mines in Paragominas and the other half arrived by ship to this very dock in the middle of the Amazon river.

Trucuri Dam

He said Alunorte was so big that it produced 20% of all the aluminum used in Japan each year. He also said the plant is 25 miles from Belem and when the wind is right the smoke covers Belem in a haze that gets everyone coughing for days. The rest of the time it leaves dust on all the jungle trees until the rain washes it off. I asked him what is in the smoke and dust but he didn't know.

As our boat made its way around Alunorte's pier our captain started yelling to his crew in Portuguese. A military patrol boat was running at us in full throttle from a small dock on shore. Men dressed in black uniforms where holding rifles and starring at us as the boat came along side. Our captain got a stern warning for navigating too close to the Alunorte Pier and nobody on either boat looked too happy about it.

Hours later we made our way down a narrow tributary to Igarape-miri, a small town overwhelmed with the business of collecting and shipping Acai berries. We would stay here tonight and visit the local harvesters and Acai plantations tomorrow. Raul told me about his family that night and the struggle of the local Caboclos people who feel the Government in Brazilia is trying to wipe out their heritage through cultural cleansing.

Caboclos are descendents of European rubber harvesters who were brought in by the old rubber barons to collect natural rubber before the invention of synthetic rubber. When the market collapsed for natural rubber these Europeans were stranded here with no way of getting back home. They eventually married the native Indians and their offspring now occupy most of the river front dwellings and villages along the Amazon and its tributaries.

Commonly called Ribeirinhos, or river dwellers, they are the ones harvesting the Acai and running the small river craft and all other manner of small commerce on the river.

Ribeirinhos’ Dwelling bathroom & laundry in foreground

They feel neglected by the Government and not sufficiently recognized or appreciated. They don't like the new Tucurui dam, they don't like the new aluminum smelting plant at Alunorte and they don't like the fact that most of them cannot afford to eat Acai anymore because the export demand has driven prices of prepared Acai beyond their reach. Raul told me he had many relatives living in this area who harvested Acai. But many more who were bitten by the gold bug and left for Apui upriver. Apui is the latest wildcat gold mine or "garimpo."

Illegal Gold Mining

Raul said he tried his luck there last summer. It was a hellish place of shattered trees and mud, black plastic hovels and sooty smoke. Everyone had one thing on their mind, find the gold. All around are newly dug pits, trash, malaria, human waste and tales of striking it rich. Raul said he had enough chemistry in school to know how dangerous the mercury was that the miners used to separate the gold from the tailings.

Fish Kill from Gold Mine Mercury

All that mercury was mixing with other pollutants and washing back into the river where it taints everything all the way back to Belem.
 
Outside Igarape-miri we stopped at an Acai plantation where the natural forest had been burned away and cleared and planted with Acai trees. They were the only plants growing. The Acai trees grew in clusters. Raul explained that the palm grows slowly the first two years then shoots up quickly. The berries first appear when the palm is about 6 feet tall. It produces fruit twice a year with multiple clusters of fruiting berries, each cluster having 700-900 Acai berries. The Acai tree soon suckers more Acai trees from its base until the entire plant has as many as 8-10 Acai trees all producing fruit. The growers cut the tall Acai palms out as they get too tall to harvest. Cutting out the taller stems seems to increase fruit production on the lower ones. He said it is a romantic myth that the native Indians climb tall Acai Trees to harvest the fruit. That only happens when Ribeirinhos retrieve Acai berries from wild palms. The serious large scale producers keep their palms at manageable heights. The cut down Acai tree is not wasted as the bud is cut open and 10-20 lbs of "Heart-of-Palm" is retrieved from the buds center. This is very popular in salads and gourmet recipes.

Acai in Latas sitting all day in the sun

Raul said the Acai harvesters work quickly to gather the Acai berries because the quality of the fruit and its health benefits deteriorate quickly, usually in as little as 24 hours. Each Ribeirinho collects as many as 100 bundles of Acai berries a day. The Acai berries are loaded here into traditional baskets called a "lata", each weighing about 10 pounds.  The latas are loaded onto a boat and two days later are sold in Belem.

Raul said the small producers along the river will sell their Acai berries to a middleman with a boat who travels up and down the river stopping at one hut or village then another picking up Acai berries until his boat is full then traveling downriver to Belem. That Acai can take as long as 4 days to reach the market. I asked him about the loss of health benefits after 24 hours and he shrugged his shoulders and said "it gets mixed in with the rest for export."  Raul said the Acai processors mix all the Acai, good and not-so-good, into large tubs and add 6 times as much water, then freeze the pulp into huge blocks that travel by refrigerated shipping container to the packagers in the United States, Canada and Europe. There it is thawed repackaged into retail packages and frozen again. I asked if it is still nutritionally viable after all that. He said, "I'd rather have fresh."

Raul took me to a small building that had a kitchen where a women was preparing some Acai juice for the Ribeirinho's mid-day lunch. The process was very different from what I had seen in Belem. First she rinsed the berries in clean water and removed any dirt, leaves and insects. Then she blanched the berries by rinsing them quickly in boiling water. The berries were allowed to cool. Then she covered the berries with cool water in a bowl that had something in the bottom that looked like a cheese grated. She used her gloved hands to rub the berries against the grater releasing the skin and flesh from around the seed. The bowl was quickly filled with a thick purple creamy liquid along with the skin and seeds. This was all squeezed thru a bag strainer that looked like a pastry bag. All the thick juice was strained into a new bowl leaving the seeds and skin inside the strainer bag.

This fresh Acai was very different from what I had tasted back home in Juice Bars or even the Acai served from fruit stands on the beach at Luis Correia. Richer, smoother, more creamy with a undertaste of buttery chocolate and a sharp sweetness like ripe blueberries.

I asked Raul why the woman had to blanche the Acai berries and he explained that Brazil has many diseases and the Acai berries are very often contaminated on their surface with Chagas disease. It is a pathogen parasite that is transmitted by the feces of rats and other small animals but mostly by possums. If you ingest Chagas you have the disease for life; there is no cure. Chagas destroys human cells and eventually will destroy your heart. The possums love Acai berries and will sit on top of a neglected lata all day just eating and pooping. Raul said the poop has the parasite in it and if it is not washed off the surface of the Acai berry, it would end up mixed into the juice. He said the Acai exported to the U.S. is pasteurized to remove Chagas but the pasteurization also diminishes the nutritional potency of the Acai.

To be continued…
Note: Despite researchers finding cadmium, mercury, lead, cyanide, heavy metals, hepatitis, e coli and numerous other pathogens in the Amazon River,  Acai processors continue to use this water for processing Acai pulp for export. Further studies are required to determine if these toxic materials are removed by freeze drying Acai pulp.