Context: A Forest Under Pressure

The Lower Tocantins region of Pará, in the eastern Amazon, is a landscape of extraordinary ecological richness and deep social complexity. Its communities have harvested açaí, managed forest products, and farmed diverse crops for generations. Smallholder farmers grow vegetables, fruits, and peppers alongside areas of palm fruit production, and traditional communities have long relied on the conserved forest for their livelihoods and identity.

But the region is also a landscape under pressure. Large palm oil companies operate extensive monoculture plantations, extracting value from the territory while offering smallholder farmers low prices, logistical dependency, and little meaningful partnership. Some smaller farmers have become integrated into these supply chains, receiving inputs and logistical support, but in arrangements that are extractive rather than equitable. 

Meanwhile, a well-established cooperative founded by Japanese immigrants, Mixed Agricultural Cooperative of Tomé-Açu (CAMTA), has built a successful model around fruits and peppers and, through a partnership with Natura, the Brazilian cosmetics company, has introduced some agroforestry practices into the region, yet it remains closed to new members, leaving many farming families without access to these organized market channels.

But these represent islands of innovation in a landscape still largely defined by monoculture, dependency, and untapped potential. The smallholder farmers of the Lower Tocantins are familiar with agroforestry; many have heard of its benefits. What they have lacked is the practical knowledge, technical support, and market connections to make the transition.

Projeto Amana was conceived to change that, not by importing a new model from outside, but by orchestrating the resources, relationships, and capacities that already exist within the territory.

The Initiative: Rooted in the Territory

Projeto Amana operates in the Lower Tocantins with a philosophy that sets it apart from many external interventions: rather than building a new organization and hiring a team to deliver services, it works to identify, convene, and align actors already present in the territory. Marcelo Cwerner, who coordinates Amana through MCW Consultoria, describes this as orchestration, fostering local partnerships, co-designing solutions based on what organizations are already doing, and creating coalitions that can sustain themselves beyond Amana’s direct involvement.

The core of the work is supporting smallholder farmers to diversify their production systems through agroforestry, integrating short-cycle food crops with palm fruit and non-timber forest products (NTFPs) such as açaí. The goal is not simply to change what farmers grow, but to build genuine resilience: more diverse income streams, healthier soils, greater food sovereignty, and stronger connections to markets that value what they produce. Drought, identified as the region’s most pressing climate challenge, is a particular focus of the adaptation strategy embedded in the agroforestry model.

Critically, Amana connects this transition to structured markets. Brazil’s National School Feeding Program (PNAE) requires that 45% of public school food be sourced from family farmers, creating a reliable, publicly governed demand for the kinds of food Amana’s farmer network can produce. School meal procurement serves as both a market anchor and a legitimizing signal, demonstrating that agroecological production can meet formal quality and volume requirements. Over time, Amana also envisions pathways for farmers to supply larger companies in the food system, either by producing palm fruit under better terms or by developing their own processing capacity.

The model is deliberately designed to be replicable. Amana is not building infrastructure that only works in one municipality. Its methodology, technical mapping of territories, supply chains, and local organizations, combined with a structured strengthening program for cooperatives and farmer groups, is intended to be transferable to other forest landscapes across the Amazon and beyond.

A Partnership From the Beginning

The relationship between Amana and TIFS reflects a different model of partnership, one rooted not in arm’s-length consultation, but in early-stage co-creation and systems design.

The connection traces back to a convening hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation at the Bellagio Center in July 2024, where the foundations of what would become Projeto Amana were first articulated. Rex Raimond and Murray Gray from TIFS were part of those early conversations, contributing to the design of the initiative before it had taken formal shape. 

From the outset, TIFS contributed not only to the articulation of the vision but to the structuring of the initiative itself, helping surface and navigate key early-stage questions: how to position Amana within fragmented markets, how to align its model with the realities of capital flows, and how to translate a deeply place-based vision into a structure that could engage philanthropic and institutional partners.

This influence was particularly evident in the development of Amana’s proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, where TIFS helped make the initiative legible and compelling to funders, bridging the gap between local innovation and institutional expectations. Marcelo suggests this support may have been decisive in securing the initiative’s foundational funding.

Beyond this foundational moment, TIFS has continued to provide strategic coaching, helping Marcelo work through questions about risk assessment and mitigation measures, financial sustainability planning, and narrative and positioning that needed answering as the initiative took shape, and offering the kind of consistent, committed attention that gave him confidence to move forward.

“I consider TIFS a co-founder of Amana. They were there with us on the first day, when there was nothing. The support has been unlike anything else I have experienced in my career.”

— Marcelo Cwerner, Projeto Amana

For Marcelo, what made the TIFS partnership feel genuinely different was not any single form of support but the quality of presence. Having co-founders alongside him, rather than advisors at a distance, shifted what felt possible.

Working in Contested Territory

Amana’s early implementation revealed the political complexity of working in a landscape where powerful economic interests have a stake in the status quo. When Amana first sought to engage with one of the municipalities it had identified for its work, it encountered significant resistance. Local political ideologies tend to favor large companies operating in the territory, and there are implicit pressures to consolidate smallholder land into larger properties and to push farming families toward the cities. Unable to say this openly, the municipality was simply unresponsive to Amana’s articulation.

Rather than forcing the engagement, Amana shifted its focus to a neighboring municipality, São Domingos do Caapim, where the conditions for collaboration were more favorable. This pragmatic flexibility, working with what is genuinely ready rather than what is theoretically desirable, is consistent with the broader orchestration philosophy at the heart of the initiative.

The social dimension of the work also presents its own inherent challenges. Building trust with smallholder farming communities requires time, listening, and a genuine openness to co-designing activities around what farmers actually want rather than what an external initiative believes they need. Marcelo describes this not as an unexpected obstacle but as the expected nature of the work, a baseline condition that comes with operating in complex social territories.

“This gathering showed us that family farmers are not alone. We came together to learn, share knowledge, and understand that the food we grow has value — not only for our families but also for the children, schools, and the entire community. Without spaces like this, many of us would never know that these opportunities and public programs exist for us.”

— Acará community reflection

Progress to Date

Projeto Amana is at an early but meaningful stage of implementation. Key milestones to date include:

• Technical mapping of territories, supply chains, infrastructure, markets, and local organizations is complete, providing the foundation for Amana’s farmer-centered strengthening program.
• Amana has convened municipalities and smallholder farmers in articulation gatherings, bringing local governments and farming communities into the same room to build social cohesion around family farming and begin forming the basis of territorial governance. These gatherings united close to 400 people in 4 editions, 60% of which were family farmers and community leaders.
• An inaugural cohort of 83 smallholder farmers and community leaders was taken to a national institute for agroecology and a couple of more advanced cooperatives, where they witnessed bioinput manufacturing and other regenerative practices firsthand, as well as inspirational management and governance models. Participants saw the possibility of producing their own organic fertilizer from organic matter, reducing dependence on costly chemical inputs. By visiting larger-scale cooperatives, they were able to gain a deep understanding of the development trajectory that is possible for them as well.
• A series of follow-up workshops, totaling 120 hours of training, will begin in July 2026 to translate that learning into practice, supporting farmers to implement what they observed and build capability within their own communities.
• Annual municipal gatherings for family farming have been planned as a recurring forum where smallholder farmers, cooperatives, and local governments meet to discuss public policy, equipment access, and federal support. These forums are designed to continue independently of Amana over time.
• Amana operates under fiscal sponsorship from the Welight Institute, with local implementation coordinated through COAMA (the Cooperative of Specialized Technical Work in Agriculture and Environment of the Amazon).

The initiative currently relies on philanthropic funding and is not yet ready for commercial investment. Marcelo is clear-eyed about this: the role of philanthropy at this stage is to build the foundational capacities, cooperatives that understand how to operate in formal markets, farmers equipped with agroecological skills, and supply chains that can meet public procurement standards, so that investment can eventually follow. In his framing, philanthropy prepares the pipeline.

The Financing Challenge: Philanthropy in a Moment of Contraction

Amana’s financing situation reflects a broader tension in the regenerative food systems landscape. The initiative is doing exactly the kind of foundational work that is needed before commercial capital can flow, yet philanthropic funding globally is in a period of contraction and shifting away from sustained, long-term funding commitments. Finding funders who understand the value of patient, early-stage support is among the most pressing challenges Amana currently faces.

The initiative also navigates the complexities of operating under a fiscal sponsor, which provides important credibility and administrative infrastructure but may limit its access to certain government funding streams that require a more established organizational track record. To overcome this barrier, Projeto Amana is developing a partnership with PPA (Plataforma Parceiros pela Amazônia), a well-established non-profit dedicated to territorial development, to access funding from international cooperation and co-deploy activities on the ground.

Marcelo is direct about what he wants funders and potential partners to understand: nothing is large-scale until it has first been small-scale. Betting on the beginning, on the unglamorous foundational work of building cooperatives, training farmers, and creating market connections, is what makes later scale possible. Initiatives that look modest from the outside are often laying the groundwork for something far larger.

Looking ahead, Amana envisions a pathway toward greater financial sustainability that moves beyond philanthropy over time. Potential revenue streams include carbon credits derived from agroforestry and the biochar potential of palm oil byproducts, as well as direct participation in market revenues as cooperatives strengthen their capacity to operate commercially. In addition, the implementation of agroforestry will likely entail structuring a blended finance vehicle to provide financing to cooperatives and businesses; this would involve Projeto Amana’s direct involvement and thus the possibility of service provision. The goal is for Amana itself to evolve from a philanthropy-dependent initiative into a collaborative partner that helps cooperatives access finance and markets, sustaining its work through a diversified model.

Lessons for the Field

Orchestration is a model, not a gap-filler

One of Amana’s most distinctive contributions is its explicit commitment to working with what already exists in a territory rather than importing solutions from outside. By mapping local organizations, identifying existing capacities and challenges, and building coalitions among actors already present, Amana avoids the common pitfall of creating dependence on an external initiative. This approach is harder to fund and harder to explain than building a new organization, but it is more likely to produce durable change. The methodology is designed to be transferable to other forest landscapes, as well as to fisheries and other bioeconomy contexts.

Trust is not an obstacle — it is the work

Marcelo is explicit that building trust with smallholder farming communities is not a preliminary stage before the real work begins. It is the work. Coming in slowly, listening carefully, and genuinely opening the design of activities to reflect what communities want and need is both an ethical commitment and a practical necessity. Initiatives that shortcut this process tend to find that farmers disengage or that interventions fail to take root.

Structured markets are a powerful lever for a regenerative transition

Amana’s use of Brazil’s school meal program as a market anchor illustrates a broader principle: public procurement can be one of the most effective tools for driving regenerative transitions, because it provides predictable demand, fair pricing, and institutional legitimacy all at once. Connecting agroecological farmers to school meal programs not only generates income; it also validates their production model and creates a foundation on which other market relationships can be built.

Philanthropy needs to understand its moment in the sequence

The most important financing insight from Amana’s experience may be the simplest: philanthropic capital belongs at the beginning, not the end, of a regenerative initiative’s development. It is not a fallback for initiatives that have failed to attract investment; it is the necessary precondition for investment to become possible at all. Funders, investors, and ecosystem builders who want to see regenerative food systems scale need to be willing to support the unglamorous foundational work that enables that scaling.

About the Regenerative Catalysts Program

TIFS’ Regenerative Catalysts Program partners with leading place-based regenerative initiatives to strengthen their financial frameworks, investment readiness, and market connections. The program is designed to help promising initiatives bridge the Missing Middle, moving from proof of concept toward durable, system-level change. To learn more or explore collaboration, contact Rex Raimond at rraimond@tifsinitiative.org.