This new project has potential to have a significant impact on the local community as it will address issues of poverty, malnutrition and environmental degradation and generate resources and opportunities for welfare in the region.
We are supporting the CREES Foundation GROW project aimed at boosting local incomes, improving child and adult health so that activity is diverted away from environmentally damaging sources of income. Family biogardens and community plots and agroforestry will be developed over three years, the project will benefit 34 local smallholders and their families.

Official statistics show that children in the area suffer from malnutrition rates up to 60%. Poor soil quality on the floodplains of the river Madre de Dios means that very little can be grown sustainably and almost all food has to be imported at great cost along unreliable and dangerous roads. There is a boom and bust cycle of employment locally so earning a reliable income is difficult.
Additionally the Manu Biosphere is rich in diversity and working at the heart of the communities living here, enables the CREES Foundation to investigate first-hand the changes and problems being caused by the increasing destruction of the Amazonian rainforests and to genuinely understand local needs and the connection with international pressure.

The project GROW builds on a pilot project that has proved really successful and will develop family biogardens and community plots to locally cultivate fruit and vegetables for child and adult nutrition and will sell surplus produce to generate incomes for local smallholders.
GROW will also develop and promote agroforestry, planting banana trees with soft along with hard woods on deforested land, re-enriching it and enabling the farmers to sell the bananas short-term, then soft wood after 15 years and hard wood after 40 years.

Project Update – August 2011

The Manu Biosphere reserve is an area of high deprivation. Over 50,000 people in the region live on less than 75 pence a day.

16 biogardens have been created in the first 12 months, not an easy task as the weather conditions have been really difficult.  The total amount generated from each garden has been $1499, which shows a substantial increase on the average annual increase for the region of $390.