The Brazilian nut is particularly well known in the Brazilian state of Pará, where it is called castanha-do-Pará (nut from Pará) and is cultivated as one of the main nuts sold in the world. You may not have thought about it, but Brazil nuts are actually very important, adding tens of millions to South American economies every year. Walnuts from Brazil are the most economically important non-timber forest product in the Amazon Basin. 1 Mainly an export product, since the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany consume an annual average of 21,000 metric tons.
2.As mentioned, commercial cultivation has proven to be a futile effort. However, growing walnuts from Brazil is not out of the question. Keep reading to find out how to grow Brazil nuts. Because of this, although attempts have been made to plant trees in Brazil, natural cultivation has proven to be more reliable.
Pickers harvest walnuts from Brazil during the wet season (January-March), when most of the tree fruits have fallen to the forest floor. To reduce this temptation, the Kaxarari want to make the nut business lucrative, build a small processing factory, buy a truck and sell directly to retailers. Growing your own Brazil nuts will require a bit of patience, and while difficult, it's a rewarding endeavor. At first glance, the Brazilian nut looks like little more than an oversized, expensive nut that is overlooked in the supermarket.
The prices of nuts in Brazil fluctuate and, when they are scarce, they rise far above what cooperatives can afford. Both rural and Brazilian Bolivians rely on collecting and selling nuts from Brazil as their primary source of income. Despite its name, the biggest exporter of nuts in Brazil is actually Bolivia, where the nut is called Brazil nut. Edivaldo Kaxarari, a schoolteacher, buys and sells nuts from Brazil to supplement his income, increasing each can by 5 reais.
Brazil's walnut trees (Bertholletia excelsa) are the only species in the monotypic genus Bertholletia, named after the French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet. If you take them from the bag of shelled blended nuts mentioned above, you won't be able to spread them. However, despite their popularity, many of us are clueless about the fact that almost all of Brazil's nuts come from rainforests and are harvested by hand by harvesters who live in the woods. As Manuel Guariguata, CIFOR's principal scientist on ecology and management of tropical forests, told me from his office in Peru, “Brazil's walnut is the only internationally traded nut that comes from nature, making it very unique.” Brazil nuts have never been successfully cultivated on a large scale on farms and, in nature, they depend on the conservation of the forest that surrounds them.
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