Sustainable rainforest fishery now yields US fashion leather
TRES RIOS, Brazil — Sometimes you start something and have no idea where it will lead. So it was with Eduardo Filgueiras, a struggling guitarist whose family worked in an unusual business in Rio de Janeiro: They farmed toads. Filgueiras figured out a way to take the small toad skins and fuse them together, creating something large enough to sell.
Meanwhile miles away in the Amazon, a fisherman and a scientist were coming up with an innovation that would help save a gigantic key fish that thrives in freshwater lakes alongside Amazon River tributaries.
The ingenuity of these three people is why you can now find a beautiful and unusual sustainable fish leather in upscale New York bags, Texas cowboy boots and in a striking image from Rihanna’s Vogue pregnancy photo shoot, where a red, fish-scaled jacket hangs open above her belly. Sales provide a livable income to hundreds of Amazon families who also keep the forest standing and healthy while it protects their livelihood.
The leather is a byproduct of pirarucu meat, a staple food in the Amazon that is gaining new markets in Brazil’s largest cities.
Indigenous communities working together with non-Indigenous riverine settlers manage the pirarucu in preserved areas of the Amazon. Most of it is exported, and the U.S. is the primary market.
Pirarucu, which can grow to nearly 10 feet in length, were endangered by overfishing. But things began to change when a settler fisherman, Jorge de Souza Carvalho, and academic researcher Leandro Castello teamed up in the Mamiraua region and came up with a creative way to count the fish in lakes.
They took advantage of something special about this species: It surfaces to breathe at least every 20 minutes. A trained eye can count how many flash their red tails in a given area, arriving at a pretty precise estimate.
The government recognizes this counting method and authorizes managed fishing. By law, only 30% of the pirarucu in a particular area may be fished the following year. The result is a population in recovery in these areas, allowing for larger catches.
In the riverine communities, people eat the fish, skin and all. But in the big slaughterhouses, where the bulk of the pirarucu catch is processed, the skin was being discarded. Then tannery Nova Kaeru showed up on the scene.
The company thousands of miles away from the Amazon on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro will process about 50,000 skins from legally-caught giant pirarucu or arapaima fish this year.
After discovering a way to transform toad skins into leather, Nova Kaeru co-founder Filgueiras expanded the tannery to include salmon and ostrich skins with techniques that don’t produce toxic waste.
Then one day a businessman knocked on the door with a stack of pirarucu skins and asked him to take a look.
They got in touch with the people managing the fishery in Amazonas state. That network has now grown to 280 riverine and Indigenous communities, most of them in protected rainforest areas, employing some 4,000 fisher people, according to Coletivo do Pirarucu, an umbrella organization.
The Association of Rural Producers of Carauari, from the Medio Jurua, sells each skin for $37, an important sum in a country where the minimum wage is around $237 per month. The money helps pay the fisherfolk, who receive $1.60 per 2.2 pounds, and helps cover the costs related to managing the fishing.
The pirarucu leather first made inroads in Texas, where it is used in cowboy boots. But the fashion industry is increasingly taking notice. In New York City, the luxury brand Piper & Skye has used pirarucu leather for shoulder bags, waist packs and purses that can fetch up to $850.