- Amazonia has high productive potential, yet, between 2005 and 2019, it grew at one-third the pace of the rest of the region due to logistical, scale, and market access barriers.
- Productive coordination between farmers and aquaculture producers in Leticia (Colombia) and Tabatinga (Brazil) reduces costs, improves quality, and enables access to better markets—without relying on external solutions.
- This IDB pilot in Amazonia is designed to scale across other border regions, becoming a shared solution to common challenges and contributing to a more productive and resilient Amazonia.
Jaime leads the San Pedro de Los Lagos community in Leticia, a city on the Amazonas River in southern Colombia. More than 40 families in the community combine income-generating and subsistence activities, including cassava flour production and artisanal fish farming, drawing on ancestral knowledge and practices that have long supported sustainable land management in this area.
Jaime’s goal is to keep production stable, reduce market access costs, and sell their products on better terms so the community can capture a larger share of the value they generate. One key to progress in this area is productive coordination, through which producers work together to strengthen their productive capacity and improve market access.
The experience of San Pedro de los Lagos echoes that of many communities in Amazonia: producers engage in income-generating activities, possess local knowledge, and maintain a close relationship with the forest, yet also face structural barriers that limit their potential. High logistics costs, the limited production scale, and shortfalls in process productivity and quality make these local economies less competitive, preventing them from generating stable incomes and improving living conditions.
Amazonia has great potential for sustainable productive development. According to Amazonia’s Border Regions: Pathways to Sustainable Productive Development, a recent IDB publication, sectors such as agriculture, aquaculture, and tourism can drive growth if solutions are found to longstanding challenges related to connectivity, scale, and market alignment.
Lagging Behind
The report notes that, between 2010 and 2019, GDP growth in many cities in Amazonia lagged behind the respective national averages. While national economies grew by around 60% between 2005 and 2019, Amazonia achieved only about one-third that rate, reflecting low economic dynamism and a reliance on low-value-added primary activities.
In the binational city of Leticia–Tabatinga, river transportation between collection hubs can take more than 20 hours, increasing the cost of transporting inputs and products, complicating coordination processes, and limiting timely access to markets.
Today, the main challenge is closing the gap between Amazonia’s productive potential, which has so far only developed on a small scale, and tangible gains in productivity and income by strengthening local capacities and reducing costs that constrain competitiveness.
Evidence from elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean shows that improving technical efficiency, adding value, and coordinating commercial factors are essential for rural economies seeking to generate sustainable opportunities that are compatible with rainforest conservation.
As the publication Amazonia: A Journey Toward Prosperity and Resilience notes, sustainable productive development is a core aspect of strengthening social and economic resilience in Amazonia. The report emphasizes that improving productivity and developing local institutions are key to diversifying income sources, reducing vulnerabilities, and avoiding low-growth paths that increase pressure on ecosystems.
All the same, there is only a limited window of opportunity for reversing these trends. Investing in local productive capacity is one of the most effective strategies for combining economic prosperity, quality of life, and environmental sustainability.
In this context, productive coordination can strengthen local resilience through two complementary areas of action: internal organization within the cluster and alignment with markets.
Within the cluster, coordinated action among producers can:
- Facilitate access to technical services and specialized support, optimizing costs and expanding coverage.
- Reduce individual risks through shared strategies such as joint purchases, coordinated production planning, and market diversification.
- Strengthen social capital and adaptive capacity by building trust, cooperation, and resilience in response to changes in the market, economy, and environment.
Beyond the cluster, productive coordination can improve logistics and market linkages, favoring more efficient supply management and greater responsiveness to market demands.
However, coordination of this sort does not happen automatically. Its effectiveness depends on enabling conditions such as trust among producers, sustained access to technical assistance, and essential logistical infrastructure. This pilot, therefore, aims to generate practical lessons on how to strengthen these capacities in Amazonia and adapt this productive organization model to other parts of the region.
In line with this vision and as part of the Sustainable Development and Integration of Border Regions in the Amazon Biome project, the IDB is providing technical assistance to the Leticia Mayor’s Office and the Tabatinga municipal government to help them work with local producers to explore ways to improve productivity and rural income.
One of the models being explored is producer collaboration: a coordination mechanism that strengthens producers’ collective capacities, improves efficiency and quality, and enhances market linkages within a complementary, binational framework.
Unlike other initiatives targeting specific sectors, this pilot focuses directly on the local production base, aiming to deliver tangible improvements in organization, production efficiency, and integration into higher-value-added value chains.
Why cassava and fish farming? The IDB’s analysis of Amazonia’s productive potential identified agriculture and fisheries as the sectors with the greatest economic potential and development feasibility in the Brazil–Colombia–Peru cluster.
The pilot focuses specifically on cassava processing and fish farming, as these two activities are already part of the local production base and involve a significant number of producers in the region. In addition to their importance for food security and rural incomes, these sectors offer clear opportunities to improve productivity, add value, and strengthen market linkages, as shown in the figures below.
The figures also summarize the results of the productive opportunities analysis for the Brazil–Colombia–Peru cluster. Each point represents a specific activity that was assessed on two factors: potential economic and social impact and the feasibility of implementing it in the region.
Activities in the upper right quadrant combine high impact and strong feasibility, making them priority opportunities for advancing sustainable, productive development in the region.
In the agriculture and fisheries sectors, this analysis reveals that activities such as fish farming and cassava processing show potential for productivity gains, higher income generation, and better market linkages.
A Replicable Model for Amazonian Border Regions
This pilot project is part of a regional IDB initiative that aims to develop solutions for one border region of Amazonia that can then be adopted in other regions facing similar challenges.
When producers in Leticia and Tabatinga learn to organize more effectively, reduce transaction costs, and access better markets, that knowledge won’t be limited to the Colombia–Brazil border: it can be replicated in any part of Amazonia facing similar constraints.
This approach complements other IDB initiatives focusing on sustainable tourism in Leticia and Tabatinga, expanding binational cooperation toward the core of local productive development.
As IDB strategic studies have found, the future of Amazonia depends on generating prosperity without jeopardizing the region’s natural assets. The productive coordination pilot project in Leticia and Tabatinga represents a concrete step in that direction, leveraging the social, cultural, and economic ties that are part of daily life on the border. It also combines productivity gains with strengthening local institutions and society, as well as regional cooperation.
By investing in leadership and producer coordination, the IDB aims to achieve more than short-term results: it seeks to build lasting capacities among the people living in the region.
When these kinds of results emerge, the model can be scaled across other border regions in Amazonia, becoming what the IDB calls a Regional Public Good: a shared solution to common challenges that contributes to a more productive and resilient Amazonia.
We invite you to learn more about this model in Amazonia’s Border Regions: Pathways to Sustainable Productive Development and explore how it can be replicated in other border areas across the region.
This article was prepared with the support of Sebastián González Saldarriaga, Unit Chief Private Sector, Synergies, and Trade at the IDB, and Iván Rendon, external consultant at Cluster Development, S.A.