The future of the Amazon – and of the human species – depends on a radical reconsideration of what has value and what does not. In Yanomami territory, on the border with Venezuela, for example, some 20,000 garimpeiros, illegal gold miners, have destroyed more than 3,000 hectares of tropical forest in recent years, contaminated rivers with mercury and caused a humanitarian crisis – thousands of cases of malnutrition and malaria. , as well as various cases of murders and rapes – in indigenous towns.
Although the Lula government has deployed the Federal Police and the environmental protection institution Ibama in recent months to expel the garimpeiros from the Yanomami lands, it will not be easy as the international price of gold continues to break records as it approaches $2,000 per ounce. Yanomami leaders are already denouncing the return of garimpeiros to the Apiaú and Couto Magalhães rivers.
Noemi Ishikawa, a researcher specializing in mycology at the National Institute for Research in the Amazon (INPA) in Manaus, has another idea of value. “You have to devalue gold and revalue biodiversity, in my case, fungi”, she says.
“It is impossible to know how many different kinds of fungus there are in the Amazon,” he explains. “It is estimated that there may be three million species of mushrooms in the entire world, but science only knows 5%. The Amazon is the main focus of the search for the remaining 95%”, he explains, showing a group of mushrooms of various shapes and crimson, turquoise blue and orange-yellow colours. "Here at INPA we have 26,000 samples and we discover more in each field work."
At a time of environmental crisis in which new sources of protein are sought, mushrooms are worth far more than gold by any human standard. Mushrooms are used to make new foods as well as treatments for physical and, in the case of hallucinogenic mushrooms, mental illnesses.
If one takes into account that the international business of fungiculture, whose value exceeds 50,000 million dollars, the logical thing would be that, instead of the destructive search for gold, the search for new species of fungi should be encouraged. "If there are people who want to pay so much for gold, why doesn't the same thing happen with mushrooms?" asks Ishikawa, a Brazilian of Japanese origin.
To prove that all that glitters in the Amazon is not gold, it is enough to accompany Ishikawa and his indigenous collaborators on a night walk through the jungle in search of new kinds of mushrooms. “There are several kinds that are luminous and glow in the dark,” he says.
Before the arrival of the garimpeiros, the Yanomami had taken the first steps towards the sustainable use of mushrooms. Packages of 15 kinds of dried mushrooms selected by members of the Yanomami Hutukara association had been put up for sale at the Pinheiros Municipal Market in Sao Paulo, in collaboration with the Mae Tierra (Mother Earth) solidarity brand.
Due to the serious humanitarian crisis caused by the pandemic, the negligence of the government of Jair Bolsonaro and the invasion of the garimpeiros, this initiative has been interrupted.
INPA is preparing another project to facilitate the cultivation of mushrooms in peasant communities in the Amazon: "We have a laboratory to produce the inoculum seed and create a network of family farmers who would acquire the seeds (bottles containing mycelia) for edible species," says Ruby Vargas –Ishikawa's collaborator at INPA–. "We place these inoculated seeds in the trunks so that the farmer can produce."
But Ishikawa warns against fostering a market economy for Amazonian mushrooms. "Right now, rather than talking about mushroom production on a larger scale, it's better to talk about charging for indigenous knowledge."
The Yanomami and other ethnic groups are increasingly aware of the enormous value of their collective memory. “Now we are beginning to understand what non-indigenous people call knowledge, says Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami intellectual and author of the book Heaven Falls. “We want to show our knowledge about mushrooms to non-indigenous people. If we don't talk about mushrooms, they will say that we are ignorant, ”he ironized in the preface to a book about Yanomami mushrooms.
The best channel for the transmission of this ancient know-how is through mycotourism, (travels specialized in the search for mushrooms). “Of all the alternatives that I see to improve life and create income for the indigenous and ribeirinhos (non-indigenous peoples on the banks of the rivers), mycotourism is the best”, explains Ishikawa. One model is Spain where mycotourism generates 30 million euros per year.
The INPA team provides consulting services for companies or other entities that want to establish mico-tourism activities in the Amazon. “It is experiential tourism that allows you to get to know the Amazon from below, stepping on the ground and talking with the native peoples about their knowledge about mushrooms,” says Ishikawa.
At the moment, you can participate in mycotourism trips at Fazenda Bacuri, a company in the eastern Amazon that manufactures food with Amazonian raw materials. Anavilhanas Jungle Lodge, two hours from Manaus by road, is another option.
For tourists who want to dedicate more time to micotourism, in the town of Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira–more than 800 kilometers away from Manaus, in the western Amazon, reachable only by river or plane–the experts of a group of towns, like the pirapuia, baré, arapaço and tucano, they organize walks in the jungle to collect edible mushrooms that form an essential part of their diet and indigenous gastronomy.
These peoples of the western Amazon, like the Yanomami further east, usually harvest the mushrooms during the rainy season after clearing the undergrowth to plant cassava, beans and other ancient crops that supplement the fruits of hunting and gathering. The most typical way of preparing them is grilled, sometimes with bananas wrapped in leaves.
To try the new Amazonian cuisine in a more gourmet version, the mico tourist can try the yanomami mushroom soup prepared by chef Débora Shornik at the Caxiri restaurant in Manaus, in front of the Teatro Amazonas, the famous high school in the Amazonian capital, built on the years of the rubber boom, when other massacres of the native peoples of the western Amazon occurred.
The most direct threat to the growth of microtourism is violence and illegal gold mining controlled by organized crime. "There is an amazing hypocrisy," says Ishikawa. “You have multinational jewelers like Cartier that are funding conservation and indigenous support projects here with a lot of publicity and marketing, and at the same time selling jewelry probably made from illegal gold.”
