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CARAJÁS, Brazil — Jefferson Sousa could have been eking out a living at the expense of the Amazon forest, working on a cattle ranch like his father.

“It was all I knew, it was what kept our family alive,” he said.

But now Sousa, who is in his mid-30s, spends his days cultivating jaborandi, a once-endangered shrub used in glaucoma medication and one of the Amazon’s most promising new sustainable industries.

In Brazil’s long-running battle between industries that exploit the rainforest’s riches and environmentalists trying to protect it, a middle way is emerging that fuses business interests to the Amazon’s survival and makes its 400 billion trees worth more money alive than dead.

The idea is to cultivate different sorts of industries—the so-called bioeconomy—to lure the Amazon’s 40 million inhabitants away from activities such as logging and mining. The forest becomes so valuable, the theory goes, that there is no economic sense in cutting it down.

The effort comes as the Amazon nears a tipping point when climate scientists say swaths of the forest will turn into savanna with catastrophic effects for global warming.

Some of Brazil’s biggest companies are involved, including the huge mining company, Vale, which runs Sousa’s nursery. As the owner of Carajás, the world’s largest iron-ore mine dug into the middle of the Amazon jungle, the company isn’t a natural beacon in the fight against the mass extraction of natural resources

As part of its pledge to regenerate mined areas and support local communities, however, the company has become one of Brazil’s biggest private-sector investors in the Amazon’s burgeoning green economy.

Here in the Brazilian state of Pará, an expanse of jungle almost twice the size of Texas that has seen some of the Amazon’s highest rates of deforestation over the past decade, politicians are turning to the bioeconomy to ensure its protection.

The new agenda is a shift from cattle ranching, which in the Amazon was the primary use of 90% of deforested land between 1985 and 2023, according to a study this month by MapBiomas, a nonprofit land-use research group.

“If you improve people’s living conditions, they are more likely to help monitor the forest,” said Claudomiro Gomes, mayor of Altamira, the state’s largest municipality. “It’s the best way, the only way to preserve the forest,” said Gomes, who is on a mission to turn the gritty, crime-ridden city into the world’s biggest producer of high-end chocolate.

Pará is Brazil’s biggest grower of cacao, which grows in the shade of native trees, and has long exported much of what it produces. But in a bid to squeeze more value—and jobs—out of the crop, the state last month hosted Latin America’s biggest chocolate festival, drawing some 800 producers from across the region.

Government organizations, private philanthropies and bilateral donors such as the U.S. Agency for International Development have poured money into sustainable agriculture and fishing, alongside activities such as the harvest of indigenous remedies and the use of seed oils for everything from lipstick to bioplastics. Other examples include nature-based tourism—from bird-watching to luxury cruises down the Amazon—to lure high-paying visitors to the forest with minimum impact.

In Belém, some 60 miles upriver from the Atlantic Ocean on the Pará River, dozens of scientists working in Vale’s research laboratory carry out genetic studies of the flora and fauna of the forest surrounding Carajás. They alternately get excited about the possibilities held by the Amazon and despair over the other potentially valuable and yet unknown species being lost with every new square mile of forest razed.

“It’s a battle against time,” said Cecílio Caldeira, an agronomist at the lab who has been researching the jaborandi shrub. “We’re losing species faster than we can discover them.”

Used by indigenous tribes to treat fever and snake bites, jaborandi leaves are the only known natural source of pilocarpine, an important component used in eyedrops for glaucoma for decades. In addition, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved pilocarpine last year for use against presbyopia, or near-vision loss, opening up more of the global eyedrops market that, according to Zion Market Research, is forecast to be worth $23 billion by 2030.

After attempts to grow jaborandi outside the Amazon produced plants with low concentrations of pilocarpine, Caldeira and his team set about sequencing its genome to understand how it produces the compound. Vale also has bought up disused cattle ranches near Carajás for experimental plantations of the shrub.

Centroflora, a São Paulo-based company that extracts some two-thirds of the pilocarpine for pharmaceutical companies, said it now counts on some 30,000 people to collect the leaves in the forest but expects that to grow with the FDA’s approval for presbyopia.

To get more companies involved, the Inter-American Development Bank along with some 20 development banks from South America have agreed to lend up to $20 billion to bioeconomy businesses in the Amazon by 2030 as part of the so-called Green Coalition launched last year. By 2030, the global bioeconomy market is expected to reach $7.7 trillion, according to a report in June by the bank.

Environmentalists warn, however, that developing new industries is no panacea. Their implementation relies on progress in other areas, namely laborious and politically fraught efforts by the government to determine who actually owns swaths of the Amazon.

The push for bioeconomies isn’t without its own risks, say its critics. Too small, and the alternative industries fail to compete with logging and mining. Too big, and the new activities can bring more people into the forest and inadvertently accelerate its destruction, said Ricardo Hausmann, a former minister of planning in Venezuela and professor at Harvard Kennedy School.

Creating new industries in the forest means building more roads, extending the power grid, building schools and health clinics, all of which makes the surrounding land more valuable and susceptible to illegal logging, said Hausmann. “Suddenly you’ve brought economic activity to an area of nature that you supposedly wanted to protect.”

Time is running out. Taking office in January last year, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised to end deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon by 2030, launching an all-out attack on illegal loggers and miners in a bid to slow global warming.

Under da Silva, Brazil’s environmental-protection agency, Ibama, carried out more than 600 combat operations in indigenous lands across the Amazon last year, handing out twice as many fines as it did under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

The results were immediate. Brazil lost some 4,400 square miles of primary forest last year, a 36% reduction from 2022—the lowest level of deforestation since 2015. The decline represented the largest annual decrease for any country in the world, according to Global Forest Watch, a platform developed by researchers at the University of Maryland with Brazilian government data.

Vale’s scientists have also been studying ways to produce more, and better-tasting cacao, by improving pollination of the trees and fermentation of its seeds. They also have been genetically mapping the pirarucu, a valuable river fish, to make fishing more sustainable, advising fishermen on how much they can catch in certain areas without wiping out local populations.

Other bioeconomies have flourished across the Amazon, including sustainable timber, the production of biofuels from material such as palm husks, and the fast-growing market for açai, an Amazonian berry packed with antioxidants now widely popular in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Production of the berry reached 1.9 million tons in 2022, a near-50% increase since 2016, according to government figures.

State governments also have encouraged farmers to adopt agroforestry, the plantation of crops such as cacao and banana trees alongside native Amazonian trees in scorched wastelands that were once soybean plantations or cattle ranches. The native trees provide shade for the crops, but also help improve soil quality and retain water, encouraging the regeneration of deforested lands while providing a source of income, agronomists say.

The efforts are already paying off. Pará shipped some 74,000 tons of cacao to the country’s processing plants last year, a near-30% increase from the previous year, according to the Brazilian association for cacao processors.

But for Joel Luis Guerra, a banana and cacao producer some 30 miles deep into the jungle south of Altamira, that is still a distant dream.

After a recent drought left part of his 20-hectare plot (roughly 50 acres) unfit for planting, Guerra said he was preparing to clear another 5 hectares of the forest to make way for his next banana crop. While given the right by the government to settle in the area in 2006, Guerra still doesn’t have a deed to the land, meaning he can’t get a loan to buy fertilizer to reuse the land he already cleared.

“I get it, if we cut down all of this, the world stops breathing,” he said, pointing to the pristine forest surrounding his farm, part of which he is soon to raze. “But what can we do?”