Evaluation Insights: Green Markets and Sustainable Consumption in Brazil

by

Series Evaluation Insights for Policy and Programming

Context

The Amazon rainforest faces accelerating deforestation driven by conventional agriculture, illegal land use change, and the absence of economically viable alternatives for local communities. As Brazil committed under the Paris Agreement to halt illegal deforestation by 2030, promoting sustainable production systems in Amazonia became both a national priority and a global climate imperative.

The fundamental development challenge addressed by this project is market exclusion: cooperatives and smallholder associations in the Amazon region produce valuable non-timber forest products, yet they lack the management capacity, market knowledge, and institutional support to access remunerative public and private markets. Products such as açaí berries, Brazil nuts, and oils from Amazonian plants carry significant ecological and socio-cultural value but are structurally disadvantaged compared to commodities from conventional agriculture. The poverty rate across all Amazonian states in 2017 exceeded the Brazilian national average of 25.4%, while gender-based discrimination further marginalised women within cooperatives and associations.

This project operates within the broader German-Brazilian Tropical Forest Programme, to which Germany contributed EUR 257 million through GIZ, KfW, and the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). Its strategic logic rests on the premise that expanding market access for socio-biodiversity products is not merely an economic intervention, it is a forest conservation strategy.

Intervention Overview

Project: Green Markets and Sustainable Consumption in Brazil (PN 2015.2131.9)
Executing Agency: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)
Period: 1 October 2016 to 31 July 2020 (3 years and 10 months)
Budget: EUR 5.1 million
Commissioning Party: German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
National Partner: Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply (MAPA) / Secretariat of Family Agriculture and Cooperatives (SAF)
Geographic Scope: Four Amazonian states (Acre, Amazonas, Amapá and Pará), with two priority pilot regions (southern Amazonas and southern Amapá)

The project’s objective was: “Market access for products of socio-biodiversity and organic farming, which are produced by cooperatives and small farmers’ associations in Amazonia, is extended.”

The intervention used a multi-level approach across three interlinked components:

  • Component A (Macro): Improving the implementation of national marketing promotion policies for cooperatives and smallholder associations, with the National Plan for Agroecology and Organic Production (PLANAPO) as the initial policy anchor.
  • Component B (Meso): Building the capacities of rural extension services (ATER) and state institutions to expand market access for socio-biodiversity products, including a knowledge management system.
  • Component C (Micro): Promoting direct access to private markets for cooperatives through marketing strategies, branding, public-private partnerships, and consumer campaigns.

A distinctive feature of the project is its three structured training programmes: CapGestão (management and marketing training for rural extension workers), CapGestores (training public procurement managers), and CapFeiras (preparing cooperative representatives for national and international trade fairs). The creation of five “marketing chambers” in four Amazonian states — multi-stakeholder coordination forums — constitutes a further institutional innovation.

Evidence: What Worked

The project delivered measurable results on all four outcome indicators, in most cases significantly exceeding the agreed targets.

Public procurement markets expanded substantially. In the two pilot regions, socio-biodiversity and organic farming products worth BRL 3,200,311.97 were marketed through public procurement programmes (PNAE and PAA) in 2019, representing a 146% increase from the 2017 baseline of BRL 1,357,776.18, against a target of doubling (100% increase). A key enabling factor was the CapGestores training programme, which qualified 225 public procurement managers (60% of them women) to design tenders that allowed them to purchase from family farmers and cooperatives in compliance with existing legislation mandating that 30% of public food purchases come from family farming.

Private sector engagement increased. The number of medium-sized and large companies communicating the ecological and social value of their products made with Amazonian ingredients reached 24 against a target of 23 (104% target achievement). Partnerships with Natura and Symrise through public-private partnership (PPP) instruments, as well as the emergence of companies such as the Colorado Brewery with its Amazon beer, demonstrated replicable private sector models.

Cooperative sales grew beyond projections. Cooperatives and smallholder associations in the four states increased their sales of socio-biodiversity and organic farming products by a factor exceeding the 20% inflation-adjusted target, reaching 112% of the indicator.

Gender tools were mainstreamed. Two groups of stakeholders in marketing chambers adopted gender tools in their planning, exceeding the target by 250%. The CapGestão programme, in which 48% of participants were women, integrated a dedicated gender module into its curriculum.

The pirarucu value chain emerged as a breakthrough. The Carauari Rural Producers Association (ASPROC) increased the price of sustainably managed pirarucu fish by 330% by creating the “Gosto da Amazônia” brand and linking it to gastronomic festivals in Rio de Janeiro. This demonstrated that consumer-facing branding linked to sustainable management certification can command premium prices in high-end markets.

Marketing chambers proved durable. Five marketing chambers across the four states became functional coordination forums connecting public, private, and civil society actors. States without chambers showed markedly slower progress in public procurement and agroecology policy development, providing an informal counterfactual.

Capacity building materials were widely replicated. CapGestão and CapGestores training materials were adopted by external organisations including the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM) and the Instituto Humanize, extending the reach of the project well beyond its formal beneficiaries.

Evidence: What Did Not Work

Despite strong output and outcome performance, several components fell short of expectations, largely due to policy discontinuity and structural constraints.

PLANAPO-linked investments became stranded. A substantial share of resources under Output 2 (capacity building and knowledge management) was devoted to designing a knowledge management system aligned with PLANAPO. When the Bolsonaro government discontinued PLANAPO in 2019, these investments produced no lasting institutional home. The project’s conceptual orientation toward PLANAPO was described as “unfavourable,” and resources dedicated to the knowledge management system were effectively lost.

Impact remained only moderately successful. The overall impact score was 71 out of 100 (Level 3: moderately successful), reflecting the limits of what a EUR 5.1 million market access project can achieve against structural deforestation drivers. The project addressed only one piece of the solution for forest conservation, while other necessary elements (land rights, law enforcement, large-scale environmental governance) remained outside its scope and deteriorated during implementation.

Policy coordination between federal and state levels remained difficult. Coordination among public institutions, particularly between environmental and rural development entities, remained a persistent challenge across the project term. The multi-level approach was designed to bridge these divides, but the federal government’s own structural reorganisations (three ministries in four years) undermined the coherence of the policy environment.

Credit access for cooperatives was not resolved. While CapGestão participants rated management training and public market access as the most useful outcomes, access to credit remained the most desired  and least achieved outcome. Cooperatives frequently lack the collateral, formal documentation, and financial literacy to access commercial credit, a structural gap the project was not designed to close.

Remote and most marginalised communities were underserved. The project’s focus on already minimally organised cooperatives was a deliberate design choice to maximise efficiency, but it meant that the most isolated and least organised communities (including many indigenous and traditional peoples) were not effectively reached. The digital divide severely limited access for rural populations during both project implementation and the remote evaluation.

PLANAPO II coordination was never carried out. Output 1 planned to advise on the coordination of PLANAPO II, but this was never implemented because PLANAPO II was itself discontinued. This exposed a structural risk in anchoring project objectives to national policy documents that can be terminated by changes in government.

Lessons Learned

The bioeconomy framing proved politically resilient. By positioning socio-biodiversity products as an economic development opportunity rather than a conservation constraint, the project avoided ideological opposition from the Bolsonaro government. The “Green Markets” concept was acceptable across political cycles because it did not prevent economic use of the forest — it simply changed what kind of economic use generates income.

Long-term programme architecture sustains results. The existence of a predecessor project and a successor project (Bioeconomy and Supply Chains, PN 2019.2348.1, 2021-2024) allowed a community of practice to survive institutional disruptions. The German-Brazilian bilateral programme provided an umbrella that enabled the current project to absorb lessons from failure and build on previous achievements without starting from scratch.

Anchoring results in national programmes creates fragility. PLANAPO’s discontinuation illustrates the risks of linking project results to specific national policy instruments that can be abolished by incoming governments. Embedding results at the level of individual institutions, value chains, and trained professionals proved more durable than embedding them in national programme documents.

Marketing chambers created institutional value beyond the project. The creation of multi-stakeholder marketing chambers at the state level generated unexpected institutional capital. They served as platforms for dialogue, knowledge exchange, and policy advocacy that continued to function after project closure.

The pirarucu case demonstrates a replicable but resource-intensive model. The transformation of a nearly extinct Amazonian fish into a premium restaurant product required sustained investment in branding, logistics, gastronomy partnerships, and consumer campaigns. Replication for other Amazonian products requires similar preparation; without it, the value chain potential will not be realised organically.

Covid-19 exposed and deepened the digital divide. The pandemic forced the project and its beneficiaries online, confirming that digital inclusion is a prerequisite for future development cooperation in the Amazon — not an optional add-on.

Implications for Policy and Programming

Governments and donors should invest in institutional continuity, not just policy documents. When national plans are discontinued, results anchored in trained individuals, active institutions, and functioning value chains survive. Project design should prioritise building capacities and relationships that outlast any specific policy framework.

Public procurement is an under-utilised instrument. Brazilian law already mandates that 30% of public food purchases come from family farming, yet this is not fully implemented in Amazonia. Scaling the CapGestores model to all municipalities in the four Amazonian states (and to other biomes) would not require new legislation, only training, monitoring, and enforcement support.

Private sector engagement needs clear safeguards. As demand for Amazonian products grows, there is a documented risk of crowding out traditional producers. Açaí is already being produced in large-scale monocultures in Asia and Africa and certified as organic. Development cooperation must build origin control systems and link socio-biodiversity certification to the communities that are the source of the products, not merely the ingredients.

Gender mainstreaming must move beyond training to structural change. Despite dedicated gender modules and good participation rates, women remain underrepresented in cooperative leadership. Future programming should include explicit targets for female leadership in cooperatives and marketing chambers, and monitor these with the same rigour as sales indicators.

Digital inclusion is now a precondition for market access. Post-pandemic conditions have made digital literacy and connectivity essential for producers to engage in e-commerce, access information, and participate in training. Future projects should budget for digital access infrastructure as a direct programmatic input.

The bioeconomy concept requires careful political stewardship. Different actors — government, industry, traditional communities, and civil society — hold competing interpretations of “bioeconomy.” Development cooperation should invest in facilitating inclusive conceptual dialogue to ensure that the concept does not become a vehicle for large-scale industrial extraction that displaces smallholders.

Potential for Scaling and Transferability

The project’s overall rating as successful (mean score: 81/100) positions it as a strong candidate for scaling, with important caveats.

What can be scaled directly:
The three training programmes (CapGestão, CapGestores, CapFeiras) are documented, tested, and already being replicated by partner organisations. Their modular structure allows adaptation to different value chains and regional contexts. The marketing chamber model can be replicated in Amazonian states not covered by the project, and there is already expressed interest from Tocantins and Rondônia.

What requires enabling conditions:
The pirarucu and other private-market models require prior investments in branding, certification, logistics, and consumer education before scale can be achieved. Replication into less-organised value chains without these preparatory investments will not produce comparable results.

Transferability to other countries and regions:
The project concept is in principle transferable to other tropical forest biomes where indigenous and traditional communities produce non-timber forest products. The key enabling conditions — the existence of national public procurement laws, a functioning extension service network, and multi-level governance structures — may not be present in all contexts. The Brazil nut and açaí value chains, being globally traded commodities, offer a direct bridge to international markets that more obscure products would not automatically enjoy.

The successor project (Bioeconomy and Supply Chains, EUR 4 million, 2021-2024) builds directly on these results, confirming the scalability logic within the German-Brazilian bilateral programme framework.

Methodological Notes

The evaluation was conducted by external independent evaluators (Karsten Weitzenegger and Monika Röper, Madiba Consult GmbH) on behalf of GIZ’s independent Evaluation Unit, which reports directly to GIZ’s Management Board. The evaluation took place under conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic, with all field work conducted remotely in August-September 2020.

The methodology combined contribution analysis with a hypotheses-based approach: the evaluators and project team jointly developed a Theory of Change (ToC) and formulated four evaluation hypotheses, then assessed the plausibility of causal links through document analysis, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, an online survey (46 respondents from the CapGestão programme), and end-of-mission workshops.

Key limitations:
The remote evaluation limited access to primary beneficiaries in rural areas, where the digital divide is severe. The evaluation’s sustainability assessment is explicitly predictive rather than observed, as land-use change processes require decades to produce measurable effects. A quasi-experimental counterfactual design was considered but rejected, because the four project states are not comparable to other Amazonian states. The GIZ Efficiency Tool also produced potentially biased cost-allocation results due to difficulties in assigning consortium costs to specific outputs.

Stakeholder Perspectives

Stakeholders across government, civil society, and the private sector expressed strong appreciation for the project’s capacity to bridge institutional divides. One key government partner described it as “one of the most successful and skilful projects I saw from GIZ, it managed to reconcile civil society, government and the private sector.”

Beneficiaries within cooperatives highlighted the transformational impact of the CapGestão management training, including improved internal governance, conflict management, and participation. Female cooperative members reported that the training opened awareness of their potential role as leaders, even as structural barriers remain.

Civil society interviewees raised critical concerns about the contested definition of “bioeconomy”: the concept is embraced by the government for industrial development purposes, while traditional communities and civil society organisations insist on principles of rights, social equity, and environmental integrity that the industrial interpretation does not include. This conceptual tension is identified as a key political risk for the successor project.

Private sector actors, including major cosmetics companies (Natura) and food companies (Mondelez), engaged constructively with the project. Their participation signals a market-based pathway that is scalable but must be governed by robust origin-control and benefit-sharing mechanisms to protect traditional communities from displacement.

Further Resources and Links

Implementing Organisation

Donor and Commissioning Party

  • German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ): bmz.de

National Partner Institution

Evaluating Firm

Implementation Partner

  • Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (IPAM): ipam.org.br

Related Knowledge Platforms

Related Projects

  • Successor project: Bioeconomy and Supply Chains (PN 2019.2348.1, 2021-2024)
  • Predecessor project: Sustainable Economic Development (Green Markets) with Focus on Socio-biodiversity (PN 2013.2454.0, 2014-2016)

Report Citation

Weitzenegger, Karsten, and Monica Röper. Central Project Evaluation. Green Markets and Sustainable Consumption in Brazil; Evaluation Report, Published by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, Bonn/Eschborn, Bonn: GIZ, 2021. giz2021-0272en-projectevaluation-green-markets-brazil.pdf. Accessed 20 May 2026.

Disclaimer: The author participated in this evaluation. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and cannot be attributed to any affiliated organizations. Portions of the text and images were supported by artificial intelligence.