In the Brazilian Amazon, the increasing rate of deforestation has prompted the international research community to look for solutions that reconcile conservation and development. Since the late 1980s, researchers throughout the world have explored the role that extraction of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) could have to the well-being of forest dwellers as well as to the environment. This thesis explores the role that NTFPs play in the lives of rural communities in a dynamically changing timber frontier region along the Capim River in the eastern Amazonian state of Pará. As the timber industry advances throughout the Amazon basin, communities located along logging frontiers are increasingly approached to sell the rights to their timber. Such communities consider several aspects to assess the value of forest products. Besides socio-economic and ecological values (real value), there is relative value, which strongly influence the way resources are used. This relative value is based on representations regarding the importance of forest products and on the context in which these representations are formed. To explore this theme, the thesis begins with a historical reconstruction of a caboclo community focusing on forest resource use and dynamics during the last hundred years. For the households within the study communities, timber always represented a natural heritage that could be spent over time. It was the principal product with market value and, during initial timber sales, extraction did not significantly reduce access to other forest products. Therefore, timber resources represented an inheritance with exchange value and little conflicting use. Four socioeconomic factors were identified which influenced communities to sell timber despite the losses in NTFPs that they began to experience over time: 1) paternalistic relationships among buyers and caboclos; 2) difficulties in common property resource management; 3) quick cash gained from timber sales guaranteed access to market products and; 4) expanding market involvement required increased cash to meet increasing needs. To understand the value which communities grant to forest products in their decision-making it is fundamental to identify the real alternatives that NTFPs represent to households and to compare this with other land use options.
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