Earlier this year in Belem, Brazil, the National Advisor on Gender for the National Federation of Social and Educational Assistance, Maria das Graças Costa, called on CIFOR to promote greater awareness of forest issues among women.

"Forest communities, particularly women, need the science that you offer. Without it, they will continue to lose their forest. They need to be empowered with information," Costa said.

CIFOR responded by cosponsoring a seminar in March called Women and Natural Resources in Amazonia that looked at the role of forests in the lives of families and how women can play an active role in forest management decisions. Attended by 100 women from rural areas, as well as decision makers, NGOs, and researchers the seminar was one of CIFOR key events in Brazil for 2004.

An important component of the seminar was the launch of the documentary, Women of the Forest, by New York cinematographer, Trilby MacDonald. Women of the Forests is particularly significant for the way it brings home to the urban viewer just how brutally Amazonian forest communities are affected by deforestation and how some of them are starting to fight back.

The film is based largely on a project that began with the International Center for Research on Women and which has continued with CIFOR through the support of the Overbrook Foundation and the International Research and Development Center (IDRC).

One of the organizers of the Women and Natural Resources in Amazonia, CIFOR ecologist Patricia Shanley, spoke of the research that the film depicts.

"Women are the caretakers of their family's health and nutrition. They can be disproportionately affected by logging and timber sales because they lose access to critical sources of food and medicine," Shanley said.

CIFOR researcher Gabriel Medina said the film conveys a sense of hope "by showing how women in various communities are exerting their influence over the fate of their forest resources."

"This fitted very well with seminar's emphasis on the importance of biodiversity to women, how community associations are responding to conflicting land uses and how women can gain access to social programs to influence public policy," Medina said.

One of the seminar's key presentations was made by three women from communities along the Capim River who presented long-term data showing how fruit consumption had declined following numerous logging activities. The research, assisted by CIFOR, also shows how logging has increased the distance local people must travel to collect fibers and hunt game.

According to participant Dona Ana, from one Capim River community where successive timber logging and sales have degraded the forest, "women were not consulted about the timber sales. My sons no longer bring me forest fruit. We have no fiber to construct brooms nor cash to buy them. If I had been present, the sale would never have happened."

The groups represented at the seminar came from a wide geographic area throughout Amazonia and will provide an excellent network for disseminating Shanley and Medina's co-edited volume, Fruit Trees and Useful Plants in the Lives of Amazonians. Due for release in November this year, the book synthesizes hard-to-find data on ecology, markets and management regarding over 20 widely used and valued tree and palm species. Over 100 Brazilian and international scientists contributed to the volume, along with scores of farmers and forest residents throughout the region.

One of the key features of Fruit Trees and Useful Plants in the Lives of Amazonians is the way it can be used by the semi-literate rural residents of Amazonia - the very people who will determine the future of the local forests.

Through the use of clever illustrations, amply distributed on each page, economics and ecology are rendered easy to read by both non-literate and non-Portuguese readers.

The "Fruit book," as it is commonly known in Brazil, together with Women of the Forest could provide two complementary tools for empowering and training forest-reliant communities in managing forests to conserve biodiversity.

According to Shanley, some of the most memorable speakers at the seminar came from the logging frontier city of Porto de Moz, where small holders are working to create a 1.3 million extractive reserve. Up to 120,000 people could derive livelihood opportunities from the reserve, including fishing, hunting, subsistence agriculture and the harvest sale of forest products.

As part of this effort, the women's association of Porto de Moz has been looking for a forester to help them manage cipo-titica (Heteropsis spp.), a fiber the women harvest from the forest for making crafts and furniture. After a year-long search they still had not found a forester. According to Maria Creuza, the leader of the association "there are no foresters who understand anything about cipo-titica. They only know about extracting timber."

The women decided to pool their shared knowledge, conduct a forest inventory of the fiber resource and to develop their own sustainable management plan. In doing so, they discovered the only synthesis of scientific know-how on cipo-titica was in the "Fruit Trees and Useful Plants" manual.

As a result, CIFOR scientists have been invited to work with the Women's Association and the Sustainable Development Committee to help local communities in the proposed extractive reserve to conserve biodiversity through the sustainable use of forest products other than timber. This is a win for all concerned: for the forests and their biodiversity, for local women and their communities, and for CIFOR.