Market Scene : ‘Rain Forest Chic’: An Idea Uniting Economy, Ecology : * Brazil is giving people in the Amazon basin a chance to make a living by selling products that don’t involve cutting trees.

From the depths of Brazil’s Amazon forest to the shelves of the American supermarket is a distance not easily bridged, but a growing variety of “rain forest chic” consumer products is making the connection.

New soaps, shampoos and lotions are introducing American consumers to Amazonian copaiba oil. Granola, cookies and candies are being made in the United States containing Brazil nuts harvested in the Amazon.

These and other products feed a small but rapidly expanding market based on the concept that tropical forests can be preserved by helping forest people make a living without cutting down trees. Cultural Survival, a nonprofit corporation based in Cambridge, Mass., has been the main force for putting that notion into practice.

For the last two years, Cultural Survival has been buying non-timber tropical commodities, mostly from the Brazilian Amazon region, and reselling them to American manufacturers. The total value of the imports in the operating year that ended Aug. 31 reached about $1 million, up from $349,000 the year before.

Cultural Survival’s list of wholesale American customers has increased from 17 to 40 items in the last year, and the number of consumer products containing the tropical commodities has risen from 19 to about 100. New ones being developed include fruit drinks, dried fruits, nut mixes, lip balm and bath beads.

Market growth has been so fast that Cultural Survival has been able to buy only a small percentage of its commodity imports directly from forest people such as rubber-tappers. To help organize forest communities and develop its supply network, the Cambridge group has set up a branch office in Brazil.

“A lot of communities don’t have products available in the quantity and quality needed to participate,” said Diana Propper de Callejon, the manager in Brazil. “It’s going to take time to bring a large number of small producers on line to supply the international market.”

So far, Brazil nuts gathered by rubber tappers in the Amazonian state of Acre and copaiba oil collected by tappers in the neighboring state of Rondonia are the only important supplies coming directly from forest people. Commercial suppliers and brokers provide most of the rest of what Cultural Survival imports.

But income from commercially supplied commodities is used for tropical forest conservation projects and to help forest communities. Under contracts with its customers, Cultural Survival receives varying shares of profits from products made with the ecologically correct commodities.

For example, Rainforest Essentials of Santa Monica returns 40% of the profits from its shampoo, soap and hair conditioner--all containing copaiba. Lyn Nelson, president of Rainforest Essentials, said in a telephone interview that sales of the products have boomed since marketing began in March.

“People really respond to this idea,” she said. “When they buy, they feel like they are making a contribution, which they are.”

And copaiba is “an incredible oil,” she said. “It’s just so moisturizing and nourishing.”

Nelson said the company is expanding its product line and she expects sales to reach $1 million a year by the end of 1992. “We are looking to add more and more ingredients to our products through Cultural Survival,” she said.

Ben Cohen, an East Coast entrepreneur who makes Rainforest Crunch candy with Brazil nuts from Cultural Survival, said sales surpassed $2 million in 1990, the first full year of its marketing. Half of the candy production is used in ice cream made by another of Cohen’s companies, Ben & Jerry’s.

“The product took off better than we ever expected it would,” Cohen said by telephone from Vermont, where the companies are based. “I think this is a combination of its tasting really good and people wanting to do what they can to help with the rain forest situation.”

“We’re creating bigger and bigger demand for Brazil nuts and therefore their value is increasing,” he said. That gives Brazilians more reason to protect forests where the nuts grow.

Cohen has recently gone into the cookie business, contracting with Greyston Bakery of Yonkers, N.Y., to make chocolate chip cookies under the Rainforest Crunch brand.

Two California companies, Santa Cruz Naturals and R. W. Knudsen of Chico, are preparing to market natural punches of mixed exotic fruits, including cupuassu from the Brazilian Amazon. An initial 10,000-pound shipment of the fruit was shipped recently by Cultural Survival.

“We hope to have three flavors of Rainforest Punch on the market by the first of the year,” said Kevin Kennedy, a spokesman for Santa Cruz Naturals.

The punch project was delayed because of difficulties in getting fruit out of the Amazon in good condition, Kennedy said. “Up the Amazon there is a lot of good wild fruit but no facilities for juicing or concentrating it.”

So the fruit in Rainforest Punch will not come from the forest but from commercial producers. Cupuassu is produced in deforested areas of the Amazon, but ecologists contend that if such crops became more profitable, farmers would abandon destructive slash-and-burn agricultural methods and settle on previously cleared land.

Wally Gates, chief operating officer of Cultural Survival’s rain forest marketing project, said it is importing commercially supplied and non-forest commodities so that the market can be developed at the same time that forest people are preparing to supply it. “We don’t want the market to escape while we’re helping to get them ready,” Gates said.

Currently, he said, Cultural Survival buys about a quarter of its commodities directly from producers and the rest from commercial suppliers and brokers. In addition to Amazon products, the group imports honey and beeswax from Zambia and Tanzania, banana chips from the Philippines, cashew nuts from Honduras and macadamia nuts from Costa Rica.

Manufacturers pay a 5% “environmental premium” for the commodities and agree to share some profits for Cultural Survival rain forest projects.

From $330,000 in sales of cashew and Brazil nuts last year, Cultural Survival made $116,500 from the “environmental premium” and profit sharing, said Jason Clay, the marketing project director.

Clay said project growth could have been faster in the past year were it not for a shortage of working capital. But he said that shortage will be alleviated by low-interest loans from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

So far, up to $500,000 in AID funding has been approved, and Cultural Survival is negotiating for an additional $2.5 million. Clay said he hopes to set up a revolving loan fund to help tropical producers.

Some critics have dismissed Clay’s plans as impractical. But that hasn’t stopped him.

His latest idea is to use dirigibles to airlift forest products, such as Brazil nuts and copaiba oil, out of isolated Amazon areas. Between harvests, the dirigibles could earn money by taking ecological tourists into the forest.

Clay said cost and payload calculations indicate that dirigibles could be used profitably.

His ultimate goal is to make preservation of rain forests so profitable that cutting them down would be impractical. “I think rain forests are going to have to generate income or they’re going to be lost,” he said.