Paricá
PARICA
The Amazon region occupies almost 40% of the Brazilian territory. It houses the largest tropical forest on the planet with thousands of plant and animal species. Its subsoil hides treasures of rare minerals and springs that form a gigantic reserve of fresh water. Despite all this wealth, the exploitation of Amazonian resources is largely done in a primitive and predatory way. This is the case with logging.
Every year, around three million trees are cut down in the Amazon. Timber feeds a market of more than R$4 billion, but only a small part of the extraction is carried out with authorization from environmental agencies and follows management rules. Much of the wood still leaves illegally, leaving behind the open path for fire that precedes the planting of grass used to raise beef cattle.
But it is possible to plant trees for the production of wood. Cultivated forests replace predatory extraction and can also be used to recover the immense area of degraded pastures in the Amazon. For over 20 years, Embrapa researchers have been collecting seeds and producing seedlings of noble species. The success of these projects, however, comes up against the time it takes to harvest the first trees.
Most start the production of wood for cutting only after 15 years of age, but one species starts to stand out due to its rapid growth.
It is Paricá, the most cultivated native forest species in the country. It can be cut at the age of five. Its wood is used in civil construction and in the manufacture of furniture. So far, 60 million trees have been planted, distributed in several farms in the municipalities of Paragominas and Dom Eliseu, in the northeast region of Pará.
Reforestation creates jobs and also helps maintain what is left of native forest, as forest engineer Alessandro Lechimoski explains. “With the use of reforestation paricá, each hectare used in the industry does not use 30 to 35 hectares of native forest. This is a huge environmental gain.”
According to Arthur Netto, forestry consultant InvestAgro, producers, who previously had large areas planted with paricá, are reducing their areas due to the lack of research and genetic improvement. “Producers reported that some plantations carried out in Paragominas and Dom Eliseu have shown mortality at two years of life, even when analyzing edaphoclimatic conditions in the region. There is no research that shows the reason for mortality“, he laments.
All of Dom Eliseu’s paricá production is directed to the manufacture of plywood, and many factories are already beginning to cease their activities.
The paricá is related to the guapuruvu, a tree from the Atlantic forest. Its scientific name is: schizolobium amazonicum. It is a tree of the legume family that captures nitrogen from the air and fixes it in the soil.
In the native forest, flowering takes place during the dry season and attracts dozens of insects. The tree is full of yellow flowers that leave a delicate and sweet scent in the air.
Its pods serve as food for the macaws, which are mainly responsible for dispersing its seeds in the forest. Monkeys and sloths feed on its fine leaves and also drop the mature seeds to the ground. It is possible to see dozens of seedlings that appear in the clearings left by the fall of other trees.
