An Appetite for Aguaje: Harnessing Sustainability for Social, Economic, and Environmental Transformation in the Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

The aguaje (Mauritia flexuosa) is one of the most significant palm species in the Amazon. Every part of the palm is utilised by Amazonian residents, and widespread commercialisation of the fruit in the Peruvian Amazon has rendered it an important part of economic life in this region. Unlike other areas in the Amazon where the aguaje grows, in the Peruvian Amazon, the aguaje reigns supreme as a foodstuff and as a key marker of Amazonian identity. The fruit is commercialised in a dizzying array of forms and consumed with voracity by local residents, as measured by the tonnage. The fruit is also at the centre of numerous mythologies, including that the fruit enhances women's curves and libido, tempers the effects of menopause, and can turn straight men gay if they consume too much of it.

Based on 24 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon and other cities throughout Peru, this thesis examines how in recent years the aguaje has emerged as a contender for the global superfood market by tracing its transformations along the commodity chain. In particular, this thesis traces how multiple efforts to commercialise the aguaje for external markets, in Lima and internationally, are couched in the language of sustainability and environmental conservation, and which rely upon a narrow perspective of the Amazon as natural, wild, and fixed in time. In turn, these projects promulgate wide-ranging social, economic, and environmental transformations that radically reshape people, place, and palm. These processes of translation have only become even more accelerated in the post-Covid-19 context, especially in a nation which experienced some of the highest Covid-19 mortality rates in the world. As this thesis demonstrates, 'sustainability' in an age of planetary climate crisis may not only accentuate existing social and economic inequalities but create new forms of marginality.

Amazonian residents overwhelmingly prefer their aguaje 'duro duro', a local expression literally translated as 'hard hard'. Throughout this thesis, instead of presupposing agency of the fruit, this idiomatic expression is utilised to capture the difficult, stubborn, and salacious sociomateriality of the aguaje, and which characterise the turbulent attempts to commercialise the aguaje thus far. The thesis this examines how, in interactions with different actors, such as harvesters, street vendors, government officials, entrepreneurs, multinational corporations, as well as conservationists, aguaje commercialisation undergoes different pathways as customary uses and meanings are stripped away and the fruit reshaped into an object of capitalist desire and planetary salvation. As an emerging commodity for the multi-billion-dollar global superfood market, tracing the aguaje's transformation is thus also an exercise in understanding how markets are made. Show more