The inhabitants extract rubber, Brazil nuts and other products from the forest for their own consumption or for sale, hunt, fish and engage in small-scale farming and animal husbandry.

The reserve was created in 2002 as a sustainable use conservation area after a long campaign by the rubber tappers to prevent the government from evicting them and clearing the Amazon rainforest for cattle ranching.

Based on cursory studies of flora the forest includes various plant species with economic value or potential including Euterpe precatoria, Phytelephas macrocarpa, Hevea brasiliensis, Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa), Copaifera species, Cedrela odorata, Dipteryx odorata, Torresea acreana and Swietenia macrophylla.

In the 1870s seeds were smuggled out of Brazil to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, and from there the plants were distributed to Malaya and elsewhere in South East Asia.

[6] The Brazilian military government that ruled from 1964 to 1985 wanted to open up the Amazon to protect national sovereignty, and resettled thousands of people from the south.

The Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform, INCRA) created farm settlements in Acre in the 1970s and 1980s along new roads through the forest.

[8] In the 1980s INCRA expropriated part of the area of the present Cazumbá-Iracema Extractive Reserve to implement the Boa Esperança (Good Hope) farm settlement project.

[3] The rubber tappers began a long campaign to preserve the forest, sometimes stopping loggers with human chains of women and children.

[8] INCRA threatened to evict more than 200 remaining families from the Iracema seringal so it could be converted to cattle ranching under the government's agricultural extension program.

[11] He organised the Cazumbá Rubber Tappers Association (ASSC) in 1993 to fight the INCRA evictions and with the help of Father Paolino Baldassari, the Catholic priest, managed to have them revoked.

[10] In 1995 Nenzinho persuaded a number of families to move to Nucleo Cazumbá, a central location on land his grandfather had owned, and form a cooperative to share the resources.

[13] The ASSC contacted the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) in 1999 after years of negotiations with INCRA had stalled.

[3] A letter from Nenzinho to the president of Brazil on 14 December 2001 called the Brazilian Amazon the lungs of the Earth and said, “We are the real conservationists who ... still live in the same places, preserving the forest around us.

IBAMA dealt only with the ASSC president, was focused on conservation and wanted to stop traditional ways of exploiting the natural resources.

They improved further when the independent Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) was formed in 2007 to manage the federal protected areas.

[17] An audit of 247 conservation units in Brazil published in November 2013 found that only ten had a high level of implementation, one of which was Cazumbá-Iracema.

[2] In October 2015 Cazumbá-Iracema won the third prize out of 120 entrants for the Pronatec Entrepreneur Award for an agribusiness project for processing açaí palm pulp.

The award is promoted by Serviço Brasileiro de Apoio às Micro e Pequenas Empresas in partnership with the Ministry of Education.

[21] The clearings range in size from 1 to 3 hectares (2.5 to 7.4 acres), and are used continuously for up to three years to grow annual crops, legumes, and perennial fruits.

[8] Other resources extracted for sale included wood, copaiba oil, honey and the fruits of açaí palm and patauá (Oenocarpus bataua).

[3] Some families were trying to diversify, for example using the latex fabric encauchado to make wall hangings or mouse pads shaped like Amazon forest leaves.

[8] The reserve helps maintain people in the country rather than drifting to the slums around the city, provides ecosystem services and acts as a buffer around the Chandless State Park.

He argues that raising cattle will allow people to earn the money they need to buy commodities or to send their children to be educated in the cities.