Rare blue dye faces risky path from rainforest to product | Science

Polines, Colombia—The road ends in Luz del Mundo. A few kilometers’ walk from here, just across the Chigorodó River, lies Polines, a scattering of open-sided houses on the edge of the forest. It’s a settlement of Indigenous Emberá people, about 80,000 of whom live in communities across Colombia and Panama. On a recent hot day, an Emberá man named Alirio Niaza scaled a large tree. Standing on one of the lower branches, he wielded a long pole with shears at the end. He carefully positioned the tip against a tiny branch, then pulled a cord that closed the blades. With a thud, a green, fist-size fruit landed in the grass.

For generations the Emberá have used these fruits to paint their skin. They scrape out the flesh of the unripe fruit and squeeze the pulp in a rolled leaf to extract a milky white juice. Mixed with charcoal, the liquid turns inky black and can be used to trace patterns on the skin. The sap reacts with the skin to form dark blue lines that appear within hours and stay visible for weeks.

“We use this for certain rituals,” says Gabriel Bailarin, who lives in Polines and is Emberá. A newborn child may be painted head to toe to ensure good health, he says. Jaibanas, the traditional healers, draw mountains, snakes, and other patterns, each with a different meaning, says Nataly Domicó, an Emberá woman who has studied Emberá traditional medicine. “The patterns are like a language on the body.”

Found in tropical forests across South America, the tree has many names. It is called quepera by the Emberá and jagua by most others in Colombia. Scientists know it as Genipa americana. The ripe fruit is sometimes eaten or squeezed for juice. But unlike its relative the coffee plant, it has gotten little attention as a potential crop—until now. After nearly 20 years of research to identify the chemical origins of the blue color and convert it into a stable dye, a jagua-based colorant is likely to be approved for use in the United States and other countries soon. It will enter a billion-dollar market for natural dyes that is hungry for a vivid, stable blue to color candies, cereals, and other foodstuffs. It will also become a test case for the responsible development of a natural resource long-used by Indigenous communities.

The man behind the project, Colombian entrepreneur Nicolás Cock Duque, says his business will help conserve biodiversity and improve people’s livelihoods in Colombia, breaking with the long history of exploitation of impoverished communities. It’s a novel effort that’s being closely watched in Colombia. But observers point to a host of uncertainties: Can the fruit be sourced in a sustainable, affordable way from these rainforest trees? Can jagua blue succeed in the market? And if so, what benefits will local communities, including the Emberá, actually reap?

IN 2005, Cock Duque was working in the Chocó region in Colombia’s northwest, where the largely undeveloped rainforest is one of the most biodiverse on Earth. Many people here subsist by mining gold and platinum. Cock Duque, who studied environmental policy at George Washington University, had founded an organization to certify traditional, less destructive mining operations with the idea of demanding a premium price for certified gold and platinum. The profit would finance restoration of the forests and provide extra income to the local population.

One day at the market in Quibdó, the region’s capital, Cock Duque came across a stall where an Emberá woman was selling a fruit he’d never seen before. “I asked her what it was and she said: ‘It’s jagua. We use it to paint our bodies.’” She cut it open for him. “Maybe 30 seconds after she opened it, these blue veins appeared in the white flesh.” These veins, he realized, might be mined, too.

A couple of years earlier, a German researcher had told Cock Duque to look out for a stable, natural blue, something that has long eluded food companies. The industry has for decades largely relied on two synthetic blues: brilliant blue, also called blue No. 1, usually made from petroleum; and blue No. 2, derived from synthetic indigo, which is used to color Viagra pills, among other things. But as consumer preference has shifted to all things natural, the demand for a nonsynthetic blue has grown, says Maria Buchweitz, a chemist at the University of Hamburg. Blue is desirable not just for its own sake, but because a bright blue dye can be mixed with yellow to produce a bright green, which is also in demand.

But bright blue colorants are rare in nature. “It’s really complicated for plants to make blue,” says Beverley Glover, a botanist at the University of Cambridge. In order for a molecule to appear blue to humans, it needs to absorb red light, the lowest energy part of the visible spectrum. “And it turns out in order to do that you need to make really complicated molecules, so they tend to be bigger, they have more side chains.”

Only one class of plant pigments has achieved a true blue: anthocyanins. The bright blue cornflower, for instance, assembles a large complex of six anthocyanins and six copigments arranged like spokes on a wheel around four metal ions. A few years ago, Buchweitz tried to develop the cornflower blue as a colorant for the food industry, but it didn’t pan out. “It’s too complicated and the food industry needs something simple that it can just add to different foods.”

THAT DAY AT the Quibdó market, Cock Duque bought a dozen jagua fruits and brought them back to Medellín, thinking he might be able to turn the blue into a product. First, his company needed to figure out the chemistry. A young researcher on the team, Sandra Zapata, who grew up in the Chocó and has known the fruit since she was a child, took on the project in 2007 and later turned it into her Ph.D. thesis with Fernando Echeverri, a chemist specializing in natural products at the University of Antioquia.

Previous research suggested a compound called genipin produced the blue color by reacting with amino acids. (This is what happens in the skin when the juice is used for body painting.) Zapata worked on standardizing the process and making it cheaper. Glycine, the cheapest and simplest amino acid available, turned out to work well. In 2010, she and others received a patent in the United States for a “blue colorant derived from Genipa americana fruit.” It spells out a simple process: mixing raw fruit juice with glycine and heating it.

Standardizing the color, however, was harder. Comparing fruits from different regions and even from the same tree, Zapata found that genipin concentrations varied widely, from 1% to 14%. “When I realized that I said: I need to change my strategy, I will work as an engineer.” She developed a method for blending different batches to create a more consistent color.

Identifying the molecule produced by the reaction of genipin and glycine was another huge effort. After years of work, Zapata and Echeverri determined that the main compound is a polymer, a long chain of the same molecular building blocks repeated dozens of times. They received a U.S. patent for this and related compounds in 2016. Ironically, although the goal was to create a natural colorant, it could be patented only because the polymer itself is not found in nature and requires human intervention to create—such as painting it on skin or mixing it with glycine.

Cock Duque’s company, EcoFlora Cares, has now spent more than a decade characterizing the dye and doing toxicology tests; it is now waiting for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve jagua blue as a food colorant. It has also applied for approval from the European Food Safety Authority and an intergovernmental body known as the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which would open the way for use in more than 100 other countries. “This has been an incredibly long process but we are hopefully nearing the end,” Cock Duque says.

“It’s very personal,” Zapata says. The project consumed her life and tinged milestone memories blue. She remembers clearly the first time she got a nice blue from mixing the jagua fruit juice with glycine. “I was so happy,” she says. Ten minutes later she got a phone call that her mom had died suddenly. Her son was born around the same time, and grew up eating jagua-colored ice cream and other treats she was working to develop.

Zapata’s driving force was always what the project could mean for many people in the Chocó and Colombia in general, she says. “I realized that this project could really change the history of many communities here.” That has not happened yet, she acknowledges. And even if the approvals come soon, there will be hurdles ahead that could jeopardize that goal. “So, this is like a very, very dangerous phase.”

MOST OF ECOFLORA’S work in recent years has focused on areas outside the Chocó. In the hills around the small town of El Prodigio, about 3 hours’ drive from Medellín, non-Indigenous farmers have long raised cattle and planted coffee, cocoa, and citrus fruits. Recently some of them have added the jagua. “In the beginning I thought it was crazy to plant jagua,” says Libardo Diaz, a farmer who previously knew the tree only as one to chop down for wood. He is part of a program by EcoFlora that encourages farmers to plant about 1 hectare of jagua trees, providing seeds and technical assistance and promising to buy the fruits if and when the colorant enters the market.

“These are the first commercial jagua plantations in the world,” says EcoFlora’s Sergio Arango Arcila. “When we started a few years ago, I had a lot of questions,” he says, emphasizing “lot”: how close to plant the trees? How long until they bear fruit? “Now we have some answers,” he says. The trees on Diaz’s land were planted a little more than 3 years ago and should bear fruit next year. “We are all waiting for it,” the farmer says. Keeping communities engaged in the yearslong process has been difficult given there are no profits to share yet, Arango Arcila says.

The plantations mark a departure from Cock Duque’s original vision: using wild jagua trees in the Chocó as the sole source of the blue colorant. The company’s patent application declared the fruits were obtained “through agreements with the ethnic communities” and that local communities would share in the profits. But collecting fruits from the wild trees and transporting them to the plant in Medellín turned out to be logistically challenging, Cock Duque says. “Scaling that up to the volumes that we will need is not economically feasible.”

If production relies on plantations, that erases one benefit of the original scheme: creating a reason for communities to conserve these trees. And Indigenous communities could lose out on profits—which highlights the biggest question about jagua blue: Who benefits if it is successful? In the past, the exploitation of biodiversity in the Global South was “an Indiana Jones situation,” says Maria Julia Oliva, an expert on genetic resources policy at the Union for Ethical Biotrade. “People would fly in, get something, go out—and maybe they would do something fantastic like develop a new cancer medicine. But there would be no recognition of the communities or the countries where the plant came from, the traditional knowledge on which some of that research would have been based, and no benefits flowing back to local development or biodiversity protection.”

In recent years, Indiana Jones has been reined in. The Convention on Biological Diversity, the international conservation treaty enacted in 1993, established the principle that individual states have sovereign rights over the genetic resources found on their territory and that any benefits from their use should be shared with that country. The Nagoya Protocol, adopted in 2010, laid down how this sharing was to be conducted and enforced.

But in the early 2000s, when EcoFlora started its quest to commercialize the jagua blue, there was no template, Cock Duque says. So the company negotiated with local communities in the Chocó to get their consent to proceed and then negotiated and signed a deal with the Colombian government that allows the company to exploit the jagua in exchange for royalty payments to the government, which is supposed to ensure that any benefits are shared in a fair and equitable way.

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In Emberá culture, body paintings made with a dye from jagua fruits play an important role. First, the pulp is scraped out of unripe fruits and pressed in a leaf to extract the juice.Cristina Abad Angel

Then charcoal is added to the juice, turning the liquid inky black.Cristina Abad Angel

Nelly Domicó, an Emberá woman in Polines, Colombia, prepares the dye.Cristina Abad Angel

Then Domicó uses a little wooden stick to draw on Nelcy Yamile Bailarín’s arm while her mother, Nepono Bailarín, holds her.Cristina Abad Angel

 

Because it was the first of its kind in Colombia, the deal has been closely watched, says Oscar Lizarazo, a legal scholar who studies benefit sharing at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá. “This is probably the most important test case for this in Colombia.” Lizarazo says the company has done far better than most by adhering to the spirit of the Nagoya Protocol even before it was adopted. (Colombia still has not ratified it.) But he says they could still do better, “especially by further recognizing Indigenous peoples.”

EcoFlora has kept its original vision alive in Polines, buying some fruits the community harvests from wild trees and helping locals plant trees, too. “This can be an important source of income for us in the future,” says Bailarin, whose father recently planted his first jagua trees. But at the moment there is no cooperation with other Emberá communities. And although EcoFlora has agreed to pay royalties both to the Colombian government and the University of Antioquia, there is no royalty agreement with the Emberá, which Colombian rules do not require. (One of the few such arrangements in the world was signed in 2019, when South Africa’s rooibos tea industry agreed to pay significant royalties to the San and Khoikhoi people, who have traditionally used it to make tea and herbal medicines.)

Cock Duque says he hopes to include more Emberá communities in the future. But he argues that his company’s obligations to the Emberá are limited. He says his discovery of jagua at the market in Quibdó was a moment of serendipity, and its use as a natural food colorant has little to do with the traditional knowledge of body painting.

That’s not how Domicó sees it, though. Emberá traditional knowledge has clearly played an important role, she says. “I hope when EcoFlora makes money with this, they make sure that benefits also reach the Emberá.”

EVEN IF ECOFLORA can successfully grow and harvest the fruits, it faces another obstacle: competition. Although no natural blue food colorant was approved in the U.S. when EcoFlora submitted its application, two others have since been greenlit. FDA approved a crude extract from algae, called spirulina, in 2014 and an extract from the flowers of the butterfly pea in 2021. Both have disadvantages, Buchweitz says: Extracting the blue compound from the algae is a laborious process, and the anthocyanins from the butterfly pea aren’t as stable, she says. “In terms of the color stability and the reproducibility of the color, this genipin-based blue seems to me the most likely to be successful in the future.”

Even there EcoFlora has competition. Months before the patent for its blue colorant was granted, a company called Wild Flavors in Kentucky patented a blue dye made by mixing jagua juice with juice from watermelons or other fruits. Agribusiness giant ADM bought the company in 2014 for $3 billion and has been selling the colorant as “huito blue” and sourcing the fruit from Peru. (The company does not need FDA approval because fruit juices are exempt.) And a genipin-derived blue from gardenia fruits that has long been used in parts of Asia could soon enter the U.S. and international markets, too.

After more than 15 years of work, the fate of jagua blue remains uncertain. If the product fails it would be a disaster for many people, Zapata says. “It would be crazy, crazy, crazy for the company, the communities, the investors,” she says.

But Lizarazo argues the project could end up having a positive impact even then. For one, it has probably helped foster a closer relationship between academia and industry in Colombia. And more important, it helps set a standard for how to take access and benefit sharing seriously when using natural resources, he says. “It has been an opportunity for the company, the communities, and the government to learn how to put these rules into practice.”

It also shows how much still needs to be done, Oliva says. Even if jagua blue succeeds and has the benefits its developers hope it will, that’s only one small victory, she says. “What we really need is for these types of practices to become mainstream.”