Edgar Montenegro started Bogotá-based açaí company Amapuri so that rural Colombian families wouldn’t face the income insecurity and fear his family experienced when he was a child.
When Montenegro was 12, his father, a timber worker in Colombia’s Putumayo rainforest, could no longer make ends meet harvesting trees. The family had to borrow money to meet their needs between harvests, but they didn’t earn enough each season to cover their costs.
“There was nothing left. We were back to zero,” Montenegro tells ImpactAlpha.
His parents, like thousands of other families, resorted to work in the coca industry. His mother feared her children would become guerrillas or as drug traffickers.
With Amapuri, he’s proving that farmers and their families can earn a good and stable living from the land without resorting to illegal or exploitative industries that are rampant in South America’s rainforests.
Nearly one in three people in Colombia are smallholder farmers who largely depend on agriculture and agroforestry for their livelihoods. Açaí, a native fruit in Putumayo, is lucrative to harvest, thanks to its global superfood status.
Amanpuri encourages farmers into açaí production by giving them something they rarely get from other crops: long-term income security. The company provides seeds and technical assistance to get them started and signs a 15-year purchase contact with each farmer. With that, farmers get an income buffer during the three to four years it takes for the trees to bear fruit, and predictable income thereafter.
“When that fruit starts producing, you receive the money sitting down,” said Dolores Huesaquillo, a 67-year-old farmer and now supplier to Amanpuri, after spending more than two years in prison for coca cultivation. “It’s safe. You can take your product to market without fear.”
The company works with more than 2,000 farmer families who collectively cultivate 3,200 acres of acai trees, most of which will hit peak production in the next one to three years. It recently raised $500,000 from Fondo de Reciprocidad and Beneficial Returns to expand its farmer network.
Resilient food systems
Building scalable social enterprises in food and agriculture is always a challenge. More than $1.1 trillion is needed annually to climate-proof the global food system by 2030. The sector receives just $95 billion, or 7%, in climate financing annually, according to the Climate Policy Initiative.
“There is no path to climate resilience or nature restoration in Latin America without transforming agrifood systems. But transforming systems requires more than good intentions and guaranteed purchase contracts,” says Maria Ruiz of Climate Policy Initiative’s ClimateShot Investor Coalition, which supported Amapuri in its fundraising efforts.
Montenegro’s work is harder because it works with people in a conflict zone.
“If we don’t create legal livelihoods,” he says, “new armed groups will keep forming. Peace is built with opportunities.”
The region where Montenegro grew up still has a heavy cartel presence. He hopes that Amapuri will give the children living there today more hope about the opportunities. “From a region that once produced drug kingpins, we are now producing entrepreneurs.”
