Hélio Ferreira Conde lives in the northwestern Brazilian state of Acre, around 60 kilometres from the municipality of Xapuri. His land is accessible only by car, followed by another smaller car (to contend with narrow, sandy roads), a boat and a final car. Each morning, Ferreira Conde leaves his house before 5am and heads into the shade of the Amazon rainforest, less than 100 metres from his door. Long lines of leafcutter ants wind their way through the well-trodden paths between the trees, while emperor tamarin monkeys scale a canopy dotted with Brazil nuts. Pumas, jaguars and cobras lurk within the brush vines. This diverse wildlife is dependent on a dense, intact forest and Ferreira Conde is at the front line of preserving it.
Six days a week, Ferreira Conde works as a seringueiro, or rubber tapper. He walks the winding rubber tree trails on his land, carefully cutting shallow diagonal channels across the bark and collecting the latex released — milky sap that becomes rubber when processed. It’s a slow and methodical process, designed to ensure that the rubber trees — which locals call “mothers of the forest” — stay productive for future generations. Each tree is split into an even number of harvesting sections (or ‘flags’) depending on its size, with alternate flags left to rest while the others are extracted. Ferreira Conde cuts just one channel per visit into each flag and extracts only from May to August and October to December. In between, the trees rest and regenerate, while Ferreira Conde harvests other products such as nuts and açaí, ensuring year-round income.
Some of the trees on Ferreira Conde’s land, which he inherited from his father, bear the marks of over-extraction — faint diagonal scars that sit high on the trunks. Older generations, he explains, would score deep channels in the bark of the trees to maximise yield when prices per kilogram were low, exposing them to disease. They would also fail to leave enough time for the scored bark to dry, fall off and reveal the regenerated surface below, before tapping again. Low rubber prices and damaged, unproductive trees leave seringueiros susceptible to the lure of more lucrative and destructive activities, such as cattle ranching (the leading cause of Amazon deforestation), mining, logging and the construction of roads. But when I visited Ferreira Conde’s land in late May, he was confident that he needn’t push his trees beyond their natural limits, or (even worse) cut them down.
The reason for this confidence? As part of its wider commitment to driving conservation, French footwear brand Veja is willing to pay a hefty premium to the seringueiros who keep the forest standing.
“The dynamics of most companies is to pay a low price and sell higher. We’re not in this game,” says Veja co-founder Sébastien Kopp, who launched the brand alongside François-Ghislain Morillion in 2004. “Wild rubber [sourced from native trees in the Amazon forest, as opposed to ‘natural rubber’, which comes from plantations around the world] is a unique product. It’s unique because of the trees, because of the location, and because of the people. It is not a high price; we pay what we think it’s worth.”
Having grappled with the exploitative history of rubber tapping and trialled various financial models to find the ones that best incentivise forest preservation, Veja has landed on a price around 3.5 times the market rate (on average). The brand says it is able to pay this premium because it does not pay for advertising. Though it monitors commodity prices, it does not use them to set its own prices, so the actual rates of increase vary. In May, producers like Ferreira Conde received BRL 15 ($2.70) per kilo. That’s fourfold the approximate market rate of BRL 3.50 ($0.63) per kilo in recent years, and just over twice as much as the high of BRL 6.65 ($1.19) in early 2025.
The results on the ground are tangible. Research by Partnership for Forests (P4F), a British programme that ran from 2015 until 2024 to provide funding and technical assistance to deliver deforestation-free commodities, found that between 2018 and 2021, sales and premium payments from Veja increased small holder income by an average of 71 per cent. According to Veja, this has translated into 86 per cent of the producer families within the brand’s supplier network being classified as low risk for deforestation, meaning they stay within the legal limits according to regional and national forest management criteria. For the small proportion who remain at high risk, the drivers are diverse, from external pressures from cattle ranchers to a lack of understanding of the limits they are required to abide by. Veja verifies progress with an internal monitoring system, using satellite data to track deforestation rates.
The line between paying premiums and guaranteeing forest preservation hasn’t always been so defined, however. Now two decades into its wild rubber sourcing strategy, Veja has been forced to adapt along the way. The footwear brand is also aware that it cannot solely incentivise the Amazon’s preservation writ large, and is looking at ways to bring others on board.
Finding the right incentives
When Veja set up its Amazonian rubber supply chain in 2004, the local industry and culture was defined by its complex and exploitative history.
After stolen seeds were used to establish plantations in British colonies in the late 19th century — undermining Brazil’s monopoly — its domestic rubber industry steadily declined, and seringueiros began to sell off or burn land for cattle pastures. This tension between preservation and perceived progress still runs high. “Some demagogues want to get into our forest and decimate it for livestock,” says Raimundo Mendes de Barros, VP of the Rural Workers’ Union of Xapuri, and a seasoned seringueiro. He is the cousin of renowned seringueiro, trade union leader and activist Chico Mendes, who was assassinated in his home in 1988, having fought to preserve the forest and uphold extractivist rights and traditions. “You’ll knock down trees and there will come a time when you have no water. Your animals will have no pasture to eat. Why so much greed to cut down forests to raise cattle?”
Veja had to learn that forest restoration is about more than just planting and preserving trees, there are deep cultural impacts to reckon with.
At first, Veja tried purchasing rubber from the factory that tappers send their rubber to, paying an additional bonus, but the quality wasn’t particularly high and the system wasn’t transparent, says Kopp. The brand later introduced Payments for Social and Environmental Services (PSES), paying more to rubber tappers that cared for the forest and community. But rates of deforestation remained high, and land that was earmarked to be passed through generations was parcelled up and sold off. The brand had to address the cultural dissonance within the seringueiro communities.
In 2019, to more accurately implement and track its ecological goals, Veja began work with P4F. The organisation supported Veja in scaling operations by onboarding new cooperatives, setting up inclusive and collaborative governance structures, providing training for best practice tapping methods, and increasing gender awareness around the relevance of women in the rubber supply chain — all underpinned by engagement with producing communities to ensure the future was steered by traditional values.
P4F also helped to co-create a protocol with community stakeholders, which makes additional funds available if certain sustainability criteria known as the “four cares” are met. At the time of writing, this equated to a further PSES of BRL 3 ($0.57). The criteria include maintaining high-quality rubber, staying up to date on best practices, joining the cooperative and complying with governance, and preserving the forest. Every six months, tappers and cooperative members visit deforested areas to identify the source of deforestation, and every year stakeholders come together to discuss prices, quantities sold and PSES.
Cooperation and community buy-in is central to the success of the programme. Currently 65 per cent of Veja’s producer families hit all four cares, but the brand expects this to reach 80 as more join cooperatives, which is often the final hurdle, as many are relatively new. Producers now receive further bonuses for certification (Veja’s rubber became certified by Fair for Life in 2019) and fair trade. This means that even producers who don’t meet all four cares can be incentivised via other avenues.
The internal monitoring system, which was set up as part of the work with P4F, was the final piece of the puzzle. Families inside the Acre conservation area have the right to cut two hectares of forest per year. Those who exceed the limit are given three years to transition to low-risk status. Those who do not comply within the time frame are released from the Veja supply chain. “Our dream is that high-risk families stop deforestation. We believe that rewarding people is better than punishment,” says Sebastião dos Santos Pereira, the brand’s wild rubber supply chain coordinator, who grew up in the forest as the son of a seringueiro. “But if deforestation continues, the producers don’t fit our supplier profile.”
Unlocking drivers for growth
Many brands state their intentions to pay suppliers more, but the evidence of progress is often scant. Veja, however, is making demonstrable strides. As it fine tunes its sourcing strategy and adds further financial incentives to the pot, it’s also working on increasing the volume of wild rubber in its shoes in order to purchase more annually. Most of its lifestyle shoes now top out at about 40 per cent Amazonian rubber in the soles, mixed with silica as well as recycled and synthetic rubber. Though widely praised for its social and environmental strategies, its materials mix is one area where Veja draws some criticism.
“One of the unseen problems with synthetic rubbers is, although they have high abrasion resistance, they do shed microplastics into the environment as they get worn down,” says footwear designer Helen Kirkum. Veja says that at present, higher concentrations of wild rubber have issues with melting when they hit hot pavements. David Solk, co-founder of newly launched “circular” sneaker brand Solk, which utilises 100 per cent natural rubber soles, posits that the material is more than suitable for everyday wear.
To increase performance qualities, Veja says it is supporting producers in transitioning from ‘biscuit’ rubber (which is coagulated in the collection bowl and has more impurities) to ‘block’ rubber (which is sieved, coagulated and pressed separately, producing a higher quality product). The brand is willing to pay BRL 2 ($0.36) more per kilogram of block. So far, it has transitioned from 70 per cent of cooperatives making biscuit to a 50-50 split.
How do the traditional communities react to an outside brand dictating their practice? “Change always brings shock,” says Mendes de Barros. “However, I am absolutely certain this transition will go smoothly because it improves the price. Veja was such an important find because from there our rubber started to gain value.”
For the members of the Xapuri tapping community, financial incentives aren’t the only reason to be receptive to change. The impacts of the climate crisis are laid at their feet. When we meet outside the Igreja Santa Luzia church on a sweltering hot and humid day in late May (historically temperatures would be dropping and the air would be fresh), Mendes de Barros just had to dig a six-foot well, because the water source he has relied upon for the last 45 years has dried up. “The climate system has changed to a temperature, which, some days, is difficult to resist. Our grandparents had certainty when the rain would start — we no longer have that,” he says.
That’s another reason why incentivising landowners against deforestation is so important. The Amazon is a globally significant carbon sink — storing more atmosphere-warming carbon than it emits — but if deforestation continues, it could flip from a carbon sink to a carbon source, say researchers from US non-profit Amazon Conservation. This would drive further climate impacts from extreme heat to drought, which in turn impact the productivity of rubber trees, placing further financial and social pressures on frontline communities.
In 2007, Veja purchased 5.5 tonnes of Amazonian rubber from 40 producing families. By 2024 — millions of pairs of sneakers later — Veja says it had the buying power to purchase 800 tonnes of the raw material from its network of over 2,500 families. Its capacity to invest in the material tracks against its growth. Between 2018 and 2019, its sales grew from $38 million to $78.5 million, while its rubber purchase volume grew from 69,694 to 327,279 kilograms. Between 2019 and 2020, sales revenue grew a further 52.8 per cent, and the amount of Amazonian rubber it bought increased by nearly 110 per cent.
Though the growth is significant and many families supply rubber to Veja exclusively, it wants to bring others on board to reduce the reliance of rubber tappers on a single brand and industry. To facilitate this, Veja helps cooperatives contact other companies and negotiate fair and progressive contracts. Some cooperatives within Veja’s network were already selling to other companies (making health products and jewellery), but the volumes were significantly lower. In working with Veja, they have gained a partner who is willing not only to pay more, but to use its position to connect them. A large tyre company is currently in talks with the cooperatives, with Veja hoping it will purchase rubber before the end of 2025. The cooperatives are working to secure global markets for other products such as nuts, seeds, honey and oil, looking to diversify their income streams and further maximise the value of keeping the forest alive.
The next step is to educate other countries about this, and rally support from the international community to further protect the forest. But without global carbon funding, which often requires complex applications and specific accreditation, support is likely to continue to stem from private commercial relationships. “We hear about worldwide climate financing, but we never get it,” says Maria Araújo de Aquino, daughter of a seringueiro, cooperative member and leader of movements for Black women in the community. “Whatever happens here will be reflected in the countries you come from,” adds Mendes de Barros.
Veja hosted Sophie Benson on a trip to the Amazon in May 2025.
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