In the first quarter of 2026, I had the honor of co-leading a South/South experiential learning journey into the heart of the Brazilian Amazon.
Inspired by the work of the Pan Amazonian Bioeconomy Network, we set out to understand what it truly takes to activate forest economies that are community-led and community-focused. This network stands as a tireless champion for the visibility of the social bioeconomy.
They shine the light on work that does not just support livelihoods, but reshapes how, and what, the world values. This learning journey changed all of us in more ways than I can share here. We witnessed, firsthand, the genius and wisdom of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, providing crucial services at great personal risk like forest monitoring, ecotourism, fire management, and stewardship that the world quietly depends on and rarely acknowledges.
They are the frontline defenders of the planet’s most critical ecosystems and yet so seldom acknowledged and compensated. Frontline communities carry out this work to sustain their own lives, livelihoods, identities, and cultures, and in doing so, they also safeguard the ecosystem services the entire world relies on, and yet these services mostly go uncompensated. The people doing the most to protect our shared future are being asked to do it for free.
This is a failure of global ecological governance and exactly the “power shift” we must work hard to deliver. Then there was the production of bioproducts. We met communities working with various bioeconomy products: copaiba, andiroba, tucuma Palm to name just a few, crafting products of extraordinary beauty, never in excess, never rushed. They harvest only what nature offers.
These boutique treasures are also at the heart of the Community-Led Forest Economy (CLFE) Movement. We were not alone on this journey. We walked alongside Marcelo Behar, COP30’s Special Envoy for Bioeconomy, whose vision continues to carry this agenda onto the global stage. We sat and learned from Carina Pimenta, Brazil’s National Secretary for Bioeconomy, and with the Deputy Secretary for Bioeconomy at Pará State’s Secretariat for the Environment, Climate, and Sustainability whose leadership brought forth the Bioeconomy Park in Belem, Brazil. These are leaders shaping policy from within the very forest they serve. I was floored. Not simply because of the titles they hold, but because of what their presence signalled. That at every level, federal, state, global, Brazil has chosen to place its most capable minds in service of this vision.
On Tuesday, July 7th, we celebrate World Bioproduct Day to raise awareness of the wide variety of bioproducts that are already part of our everyday lives, highlight their contribution to a more sustainable future and underline the role of leadership and policy.
Bioproducts are products derived wholly or partly from renewable biological resources that range from food, wood products, paper, and textiles to pharmaceuticals, personal care products, renewable fuels, and advanced biomaterials, including products made from side streams and waste. But this year, let us remember the deeper truth that a bioproduct is never just a product.
It is a commitment to the communities who nurture it and to the forest that yields it. In some cultural traditions, there is a word for “just enough”. We must be guided by the wisdom of “enough”. We must ask not only what is made, but who it serves, what it costs nature, and whether it heals more than it takes. A bioproduct that erodes community, hurts nature, or accelerates the climate crisis is a betrayal of the social bioeconomy. True bioproducts honour and replenish the source rather than extract from it. Anything less should be questioned.
And so the task before us is not only to celebrate and learn from what IPLCs have already achieved but rather to build the policy architecture worthy of their example. With Africa home to the youngest, fastest-growing workforce on Earth, millions of young people arrive at the doors of the labour market each year, only to find those doors narrowing.
Brazil’s social bioeconomy did not flourish by accident. It was cultivated, deliberately and patiently, through sustained and progressive policymaking that opened space for dialogue, unlocked investment, and built the local and regional support systems that allow forest economies to grow. This is the lesson policymakers must carry forward. That forests do not need saving from development.
They need policy that recognizes them as the foundation of it. National and local governments hold the pen on this future. Every incentive structured, every market opened, every dialogue sustained is an act of conservation and nation-building. Where governments invest in bioeconomy policy and infrastructure, communities will innovate. This World Bioproduct Day challenges every policymaker, every minister, every planner to retire the false choice between conservation and development. Intact forests and meaningful employment are not competing priorities. They are in fact the same priority, seen clearly.
Bioproducts are proof that protecting forests can be an economic strategy as much as an environmental one, and that a standing tree can employ a community more sustainably than a felled one ever could. To govern well in this century is to govern for both people and planet. The social bioeconomy shows us this is policy done right. Let this be the charge we carry forward: invest boldly, legislate courageously, and build the enabling conditions where communities, forests, and economies do not merely coexist but they thrive together. Happy Bioproduct Day!
Ms Mathai is the MD for Africa & Global Partnerships at the World Resources Institute and Chair of Wangari Maathai Foundation
