Cars From Coconuts

The northern Brazilian state of Pará, set in the largest contiguous tropical rainforest in the world, is four times the size of Germany but has a tiny fraction of that industrialized country's economic activity. That's why defenders of the rainforest say it's important to build a sustainable economy in Brazil's rural areas, where a quarter of the country's 167 million people live.

It starts with coconuts. There's a well-established market for coconut milk and meat in Pará state, but coconut shells traditionally have been discarded or burned, adding to the pall of smoke already hanging over rainforest land cleared for subsistence agriculture. In a small way, that situation is changing as the unlikely partnership between a tiny Brazilian nonprofit group and one of the world's biggest auto giants, DaimlerChrysler, is getting those coconut shells out of the waste stream.

In the small community of Praia Grande on idyllic Marajó Island off Brazil's northern coast, 10 workers are employed by the modest, low-tech factory that processes the coconut fiber, turning it into headrests and seat padding for Mercedes cars and trucks. There are eight facilities like the one on Marajó Island, and together they keep 900 farm families at work gathering the coconut husks.

The coconut project began in 1991, with the creation of Program Pobreze e Meio Ambiente na Amazônia (POEMA), which uses sustainable agriculture to protect the rainforest from short-term subsistence farming.

The German connection was established early on. Willi Hoss, a former Green Party member of the German Parliament and an unofficial ambassador for the Federal University of Pará, approached the Brazilian subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler (then Daimler-Benz) for financial and technical support. A German-born sociology professor at the university, Dr. Thomas Mitschein, became POEMA's director in 1992, and he launched the coconut project as well as a series of clean water and sustainable agriculture projects around Pará state. "We saw that 11 percent of the Brazilian rainforest had become altered or degraded, and our challenge was to come up with ways to rebuild those altered areas while also creating livelihoods for the people here," says Mitschein. "It was a big challenge. But the development model then being followed was a scenario for destruction."

According to Enrique Vascos, who heads the Praia Grande smallholder association, coconut yields have more than doubled since the farmers began planting a variety of soil-enriching field crops (including limes, bananas and a variety of palms) to supplement what had been a coconut monoculture. In addition, says Vascos, a POEMA-sponsored wind- and solar-operated clean water system has eliminated the parasites that used to plague the children of the community.

The initial coconut operation is decidedly low-tech. The husks are soaked in water to loosen the fibers, then hand-fed into a grinder powered by a small electric motor. The fibers are twisted into ropes and sprayed with natural latex, which increases their elasticity. DaimlerChrysler helped pay for a $3.5 million semi-automated plant in Ananindeua that creates the headrests, sun visors, interior panels and other parts made from the fiber base for Brazilian-made Mercedes cars and trucks. By the end of 2001, the plant will be able to manufacture 30 metric tons of coconut products per month; it's enough work to provide income for more than 5,000 people.

DaimlerChrysler is now simply a customer of POEMATEC, the for-profit arm of POEMA, which is also in negotiations to become a supplier to Honda and Volkswagen. The Brazil operation mirrors a similar program in South Africa, where DaimlerChrysler is working with local farm workers to process sisal leaves, which are combined with recycled cotton to make material for use in rear parcel shelves for Mercedes-Benz C-Class cars.