To replace your Viagra pills or to help the Amazon farmers...

The cargo is acai (pronounced ah-sigh-EE), the unassuming fruit of a jungle palm that has gone from Amazonian staple to global wonder-berry: a much-hyped ingredient in smoothies, sorbets, nutrition bars and countless trendy treats from L.A.  to Tokyo.

 

Acai's cachet derives not only from the berry's antioxidant traits and supposed Viagra-like powers of vitality, but from its green pedigree: It has been acclaimed as a renewable resource that provides a sustainable livelihood for tens of thousands of subsistence harvesters without damaging the expanses of the Amazon.

 

Because of acai, the jungle is more valuable standing than felled. With acai a global sensation, however, some fear the berry's runaway success may spell trouble for the rain forest — a prospect that dismays even the Southern California brothers who are credited with launching the craze in the U.S. International conglomerates are elbowing their way into the acai trade, while traditional cultivators are intensifying production at the expense of other trees.

 

Conservationists worry that acai could succumb to the destructive agribusiness model: clear-cut lands, sprawling plantations and liberal application of pesticides and fertilizer.

 

"There's a kind of `green deforestation' to plant acai," says Alfredo Homma, agronomist with the Brazilian Company for Agricultural Research, a publicly funded institute. "They don't bring down all the trees and leave the area deforested. They bring down diverse forests and replace them with one single culture — acai."

 

" In the stifling Amazon delta, acai is less a hip superfood than a poor man's staple: Downtown Belem even features an acai drive-in.  Many people here eat acai every day, typically as an accompaniment to river fish or sprinkled with toasted cassava, a tuber. Fresh acai, served at room temperature, is a tart, earthier version of the frozen, pasteurized and inevitably sweetened incarnation marketed abroad.  "It makes you grow," says Vital Vieira, who owns one of the many retail storefronts where acai berries are shelled, separating the large, inedible seed from the prized pulp and purple skin.