“The fruit was traditionally collected from wild palms. Now companies have açaí plantations, and collectors are raising more açaí palms on their land, according to Antônio Cordeiro de Santana, an agricultural economist at the Rural Federal University of the Amazon. With cultivation more concentrated, resistance to disease and productivity have decreased, he said, even as the number of açaí palms in Pará has exploded.”

–Seth Kugel, writing in The New York Times