Forest Products and Handicrafts

Visit our new gallery of photos of the Amazon Guitar Strap. It contains images of 19 different snake pattern guitar straps including the anaconda, boa constrictor, cascabel (tropical rattlesnake), naca naca (coral snake), and other creative designs. The gallery also features shots of the Bora native artisans who made these straps with chambira palm fiber and natural plant dyes and some of the musicians who bought them. Please contact us if you would like to buy one of these beautiful and functional crafts.

The rest of this section is under construction. It will present information about the ecology, harvest, and marketing of a wide range of forest products that are important to traditional communities in the Amazon. These include plant products such as fruits, fibers, resins, oils, leaves and bark. People use these products for food, shelter, medicine, tools, and hundreds of other purposes in their daily lives and to sell. Forest people derive a major part of their protein needs from hunting and fishing. Animal products are also used to make some handicrafts and other common objects. Since communities face many challenges to profitably sell forest products in a raw or slightly processed form, the Center will focus particular attention on supporting the marketing of high value-added products such as handicrafts. This strategy will provide communities one potential way to increase their income with minimal impact on forest ecology.