In fact, more than 60% of the Brazilian Amazon region’s 30 million people live in urban centers, and every year thousands more leave rural communities for Manaus and Belém – the region’s largest cities – to look for jobs and a better life.
About 5.5 million, or more than half, of those who did have jobs were employed in the informal sector – the highest rate of informality in the country.
And while Black and Brown Brazilians constitute 80% of the population and the majority of the labor force in the north, their earnings are half the wages paid to white workers.
But the model of subsidizing manufacturing plants in the farthest – and least connected – corner of Brazil has not been enough to absorb the region’s growing workforce.
In 2017, Cenamo joined Minev to launch a business accelerator, the Partnership Platform for the Amazon, and now the accelerator AMAZ, to invest in companies that show the business potential of the rainforest while generating jobs and income for locals, all with a focus on environmental sustainability.
An economist by training who also runs the largest Amazon-based retail chain, Grupo Bemol, Minev believes the region’s urban centers offer the biggest opportunities today to build job-creating enterprises in sectors like technology and venture capital.
Brazil as a whole ranks at 124 out of 190 countries in the World Bank’s Doing Business Report, but in the Amazon the combination of bureaucracy and a lack of investment in communication, research and logistics infrastructure has created a context where it is “close to impossible to build a legal business.
A fifth of 15-to 29-year-olds are neither studying nor working, and Raphael Medeiros, at the Amazon Center for Entrepreneurship, said that while the world is in awe of the rainforest, young Amazonians don’t think their home states are cool, which also incentivizes a brain drain.
“In the three main fronts needed for a green economy to flourish – science, legislation and logistics – there is a need for government action,” said Minev.
Minev credits his grandfather, Samuel Benchimol, who started the Bemol group in 1942, with instilling in him an appreciation for the wealth inherent to the rainforest.