- Indigenous territories located in different Brazilian biomes — the Amazon, the Cerrado and the Atlantic Forest — are hosting beekeeping projects aimed at both generating an income and restoring local ecosystems.
- The community projects show how these efforts, associated with agroecological food production, can improve quality of life, especially in the face of climate change impacts.
- The movement began four years ago with a crowdfunding campaign to establish beekeeping in the Amazon, and today includes 53 traditional communities involved in native beekeeping across the country.
Ana Rosa de Lima is a Brazilian materials engineer living in Germany. She had no idea that a 2019 crowdfunding campaign for a beekeeping project in the Indigenous Kayapó village of Mojkàràkô village, in the Brazilian Amazon, would inspire a community-based native beekeeping movement. Four years later, the project that began in Pará state has expanded to all biomes across the country, and is now a network of solutions designed and managed by communities themselves.
Today, the Meli Network Brazil brings together 53 communities — Indigenous, Quilombola (descendants of formerly enslaved Afro-Brazilians), extractivist (communities making a living from the sustainable extraction of natural resources), and campesino — who combine beekeeping with forest recovery to generate an income, reverse environmental degradation caused by encroachers, and strengthen food security through agroforestry.
Ten community projects resulting from this movement were selected by the Pollinating Regeneration program. Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the initiative was submitted by the socioenvironmental organization Meli Bees, created by Lima in Germany in 2020 in response to growing demand for incentives for beekeeping after an experience with the Kayapó. Around $50,000 will be allocated directly to selected community efforts.
Besides international fundraising, which enabled them to support microprojects in Brazil, Lima says a growing WhatsApp group worked to spread the seeds for the Meli Network.
