Emater encourages cocoa production chain in São Domingos do Capim
Partnership with the City Hall includes land reform settlers, and one of the targeted markets is the Amazon chocolate market
With the support of the local office of the Technical Assistance and Rural Extension Company of the State of Pará (Emater), land reform settlers in São Domingos do Capim, in northeastern Pará, are starting to plant cocoa, aiming to commercialize the pulp and the beans. One of the targeted markets is the Amazon chocolate market.
The pilot initiative led by the Municipal Secretary of Agriculture (Semagri) involves 40 families from the federal settlement Terra Nova: residents of the communities Águas Brancas, Aparecida, and Taperaçu who traditionally work with açaí extraction and cassava cultivation. Nearby villages, such as Boa Viagem, Patrimônio, and São Bento, are also included.
The plan is for Emater to oversee the establishment of community nurseries in the region for the multiplication of seedlings, starting with 40,000 seeds that are to be donated to the City Hall by the Executive Commission of the Cocoa Crop Plan (Ceplac).
“The opportunity is to commercially structure a profitable production chain, with an expanding market and a sustainability bias. One of the guidelines reinforced by Emater is for cocoa to be part of agroforestry systems (SAFs) with açaí and Brazil nut trees, for example,” explains Nara Cíntia Batista, the head of the local Emater office in São Domingos do Capim.
In September, the Emater office in the municipality and the regional Emater office in São Miguel do Guamá, a related jurisdiction, have been providing training to interested parties, based on scheduled demands: last Friday (19), a workshop in the Aparecida community focused on seedling production with practical demonstrations on a property. In the upcoming period from September 29 to October 5, City Hall technicians will participate in training on the preparation of the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), at a location to be defined.
For the Municipal Secretary of Agriculture of São Domingos do Capim, Silvandro de Jesus Neves, the partnership with Emater is “powerful”: “When the secretary consolidated the proposal to boost the cocoa production chain, one of our first thoughts was to call Emater to be involved, because Emater brings experts, a highly specialized team, and is also a fostering agent, in the sense of continuous scientific updating and rural credit intermediation,” he considers.
New Business - Set in the productive landscape of Sítio Kairós, in the Águas Brancas community, at km 16 of the PA-225 highway, and coordinated with the settlement association, the recent Workshop on Cocoa Seedling Production also benefited from the know-how of the Emater office team in the municipality of Capitão-Poço and representatives from the Agricultural Defense Agency (Adepará).
In the total area there, there are 900 cocoa trees, in addition to more than three thousand açaí trees, 500 acerola trees, and 50 guava trees. “I have been working with cocoa for four years, but always by intuition, from my own head. And it has been very successful: selling, my profit is 50%, and the plants are beautiful, vigorous, and disease-free. It’s a pleasure just to see. When the training opportunity came, it excited me because, by learning the details, progressive pruning, spacing, management, and the right types of bags for storage, it’s just a matter of time before I increase my profit to 100%,” estimates Vicente Oliveira Neves, the owner of the place and the brands Açaí Premium and Natural Polpas.
Text: Aline Miranda (Emater)
