The herb that sustains.

• Author: Ceaser, Mike
• Position: Americas ??Ojo! - Brief Article

WHEN ENVIRONMENTALISTS look over the Alto Parana region, where the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet, their general evaluation is one of great concern: With the exception of a few parks and private reserves, the region's Interior Atlantic Forest, home to great biodiversity, is being steadily cleared away for money-earning cattle, soybean, and dark green fields of yerba mate bushes.

Since long before the Europeans' arrival, people have hiked the forests and harvested leaves of wild-growing yerba mate trees, which today are transformed into a staple of the region's culture. Called terere in Paraguay, where it is served cold, and mate in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, where it is drunk hot, the yerba mate tea is passed around in ornamented mugs and facilitates innumerable conversations in Guarani, Spanish, and Portuguese.

For many years, the yerba mate industry provided some protection for the region's biodiversity, since the wild-growing trees gave native forests value. However, during the early 1990s the value of yerba mate leaves rose so high that campesinos cut the trees down to strip them bare, and in the years since the leaves' domestic value has plummeted so far that few consider it worth their time to seek out the few remaining wild trees. At the same time, a huge expansion in intensively cultivated yerba mate plantations has increased the pressure to cut down the remaining forests, so that in just a few decades the yerba mate industry has changed from a protector to a curse for native forests.

Now, two entrepreneurs are using a new version of the old wild-grown yerba mate to give economic value back to the native forest--or at least to a part of it.

In 1990 Francisco Rivas, one of the few private landowners in the Alto Parana holding undisturbed rain forest, decided to try planting yerba mate. He hoped that its production could provide work for members of an indigenous Ava Chirpa community who lived nearby. Previously, the estancia had harvested and sold wild-growing palm hearts, raised cattle on a deforested area, and attracted tourists to a swimming area, activities that still continue. But the yerba mate appeared promising from the start.

Five years later, Buenos Aires native Alex Pryor, a food science student studying in San Luis Obispo, California, visited Rivas's property. Pryor had heard customers in the California restaurant where he worked lamenting the lack of an alternative to tea and coffee. Pryor returned...