The herb that sustains

WHEN ENVIRONMENTALISTS look over the Alto Parana region, where the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet, their general evaluation is one of great concern: With the exception of a few parks and private reserves, the region's Interior Atlantic Forest, home to great biodiversity, is being steadily cleared away for money-earning cattle, soybean, and dark green fields of yerba mate bushes.

Since long before the Europeans' arrival, people have hiked the forests and harvested leaves of wild-growing yerba mate trees, which today are transformed into a staple of the region's culture. Called terere in Paraguay, where it is served cold, and mate in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, where it is drunk hot, the yerba mate tea is passed around in ornamented mugs and facilitates innumerable conversations in Guarani, Spanish, and Portuguese.

For many years, the yerba mate industry provided some protection for the region's biodiversity, since the wild-growing trees gave native forests value. However, during the early 1990s the value of yerba mate leaves rose so high that campesinos cut the trees down to strip them bare, and in the years since the leaves' domestic value has plummeted so far that few consider it worth their time to seek out the few remaining wild trees. At the same time, a huge expansion in intensively cultivated yerba mate plantations has increased the pressure to cut down the remaining forests, so that in just a few decades the yerba mate industry has changed from a protector to a curse for native forests.

Now, two entrepreneurs are using a new version of the old wild-grown yerba mate to give economic value back to the native forest--or at least to a part of it.

In 1990 Francisco Rivas, one of the few private landowners in the Alto Parana holding undisturbed rain forest, decided to try planting yerba mate. He hoped that its production could provide work for members of an indigenous Ava Chirpa community who lived nearby. Previously, the estancia had harvested and sold wild-growing palm hearts, raised cattle on a deforested area, and attracted tourists to a swimming area, activities that still continue. But the yerba mate appeared promising from the start.

Five years later, Buenos Aires native Alex Pryor, a food science student studying in San Luis Obispo, California, visited Rivas's property. Pryor had heard customers in the California restaurant where he worked lamenting the lack of an alternative to tea and coffee. Pryor returned to school with over four hundred pounds of yerba mate leaves. Then he toured local organic food stores and coffee shops introducing his new product.

"It took a lot of store demos and education materials to inform Americans, most of whom had never heard of yerba mate," Pryor recalls. Nevertheless, it eventually caught on in the San Luis Obispo stores.

In 1996, Rivas's plantation received organic certification, and the next year he exported over 35,000 pounds of yerba mate leaves to the United States under the brand name Guayaki, named after the Ache Guayaki indigenous people who live in the region. Last year, the plantation produced about 220,000 pounds, and Pryor plans production growth of 20 percent per year for the next several years.

Pryor says that one of the advantages of shade-grown yerba mate is that under a rain-forest canopy the mate trees grow more slowly and produce larger, moister, sweeter leaves. However, there are other advantages as well. For example, habitat is provided for birds, which consume insect pests, and the shade protects the soil.

The planting style is not the only nonconventional part of Guayaki's production process. The leaves are also dried using a traditional barbecue method and then aged for two years--processes that most other yerba mate producers accelerate, says Pryor.

However, the Guayaki process is far from impact free. In order to plant the mate bushes, all the rain forest, with the exception of the tallest canopy trees, is chopped down. This preserves habitat for some animals--primarily birds--but eliminates it for numerous rodents, reptiles, amphibians, and insects that live on or near the forest floor. To reduce this impact, Pryor works with a botanist who identifies particularly rare or environmentally valuable trees to be preserved.

Landowner Rivas has more than 12,350 acres of nearly pristine rain forest, and Pryor promises that once the Guayaki plantation expands from its current 250 acres to 500, its local growth will halt and the company will seek another location. But, Pryor points out, the income from the yerba mate plantation helps make it economically possible for Rivas to preserve forest on the rest of his property, which otherwise might be cleared for cattle.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Organization of American States
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning