Every summer, as the first storm clouds gather on the horizon, Porfirio Baños leaves his family and construction work in the southeastern Mexican city of Campeche and heads for the jungle. There, the 50-year-old taps chicle latex from the chicozapote tree (Manilkara zapota) until the rains stop about six months later.

“I’ve always liked the jungle,” he muses during an evening reminiscing with other veteran chicleros holed up for the season in a makeshift camp. “We chicleros look after the jungle.”

The location is remote, the practice is old, the tools rudimentary, and the chances to chat with spider monkeys high. But this is no world apart. Mexico’s chicleros were once at the root of one of the great consumer phenomena of our time—chewing gum—before synthetic substitutes took over in the 1950s. Now their hope is to make a comeback with a vanguard product that will reinsert them in the global market in a way that will yield them a better price for their efforts and help protect the rainforest home of the chicozapote, often known in English as the sapodilla.

Chicle was the main ingredient of chewing gum starting with the first little balls sold in New York 140 years ago and continuing to the sticks included in GI rations during World War II. It is harvested only in the rainforest that extends from the southern Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico into northern Guatemala and Belize. The industry that remains, since multinational gum manufacturers switched to a hydrocarbon gum base, has survived largely thanks to Asian manufacturers who still favor the natural texture in their mix. There also are a few smaller clients such as a U.S. company that markets its gum as a sustainable forest product and a Mexican gum maker that sells its product domestically as an aphrodisiac.

But the future is uncertain. Local youth largely eschew work in the jungle for jobs in the Yucatán Peninsula’s tourist resorts or as illegal migrants in the United States. Unless better incentives can be found to attract the new generation, the chicle trade could die out when veterans such as Baños retire.

Enter Chicza Rainforest Gum, a sustainable-development project aimed at producing the first-ever certified organic chewing gum—and at ensuring that chicleros for the first time will own the finished product.

The project, partially funded through government grants, is administered by the chicleros’ association, known as the Chiclero Consortium. The consortium has yet to launch the gum formally, but it has been laying marketing groundwork. Since last year, for instance, the consortium has brought Chicza to organic food fairs in Europe. Organizers report they have signed an initial agreement to supply eight tons a month of the gum to Waitrose, a chain of mainstream U.K. supermarkets. They expect their gum, which is biodegradable, to go on sale in some 100 stores in the U.K. early next year.

“This sounds like good news for the chicleros and good news for the forest,” says Ann Snook, manager of the Maya Forest project of the U.S.-based group The Nature Conservancy. The Maya Forest, which Snook’s group and others are working to preserve, roughly corresponds to the area where chicozapote trees grow, providing their sweet fruit for the fauna.

Chicle already has been good to the forest, though conservation couldn’t have been further from the minds of the men who first transformed the substance into chewing gum.

The tale begins when a politically ambitious, exiled Mexican general teamed up with a nascent U.S. inventor on Staten Island circa 1869. Looking for a way to finance a campaign to regain the Mexican presidency for the 12th time, Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna had hit on the idea that the sap which Mexican soldiers chewed unprocessed could be turned into a lucrative rubber substitute that could be used to make carriage tires. He enlisted the help of a local inventor, Thomas Adams.

When the endeavor failed the general moved on, but Adams hit on a use for the ton of raw material that remained. He added sugar and flavor, creating chewing gum. The sap that ancient Maya chewed to clean their teeth yielded a product that came to weather economic depression and war, symbolize optimism and encapsulate rebellious cool. “It was the American product for the American century,” says Michael Redclift, author of a book called Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste. “It became the iconic representation of consumer society.”

All this meant chicle fever in the Yucatán Peninsula. A small army of chicleros lived in camps only accessible by small planes and a lot of walking. The old chicleros say malcontents who got fed up with the isolation and tried to walk out of the jungle would rarely last a day before being eaten by a jaguar.

Despite all the activity, the chicleros were careful to protect the forest. Once a tree was tapped they would leave it to recover for at least eight years, by which time it would be producing the valuable bright white latex once again. An experienced chiclero can tell how long ago a tree was drained by the state of the wounds on its bark.

During the boom years, some 20,000 Mexican chicleros export¬ed over 6,000 tons of chicle a year to U.S. chewing-gum makers. The subsequent slump in demand saw chiclero camps shrink until the cooperatives that organized them fell apart. Today, the consortium has some 1,400 members, though not all are active every year.

The work, however, remains remarkably similar. At the camp where Baños is spending this year’s July-to-February tapping season, the day begins at first light when the chicleros rise from their ham¬mocks. After a quick and hearty breakfast of eggs, beans and tortillas, they fan out along machete-cleared paths into the jungle to the sites where they left their tools the day before. Most work alone, their earnings based on how much chicle they bring in.

After identifying a suitable tree, a chiclero first clears the undergrowth around it. Then, with no help or security aside from a rope looped around themselves and the trunk, they begin to climb as much as 50 feet (15 meters) up the tall, straight trees. As they go, they slash the bark with their machetes in a kind of zig-zag pattern that reveals a rich red wood below. This releases the bright white chicle, which flows down the wounds in the wood into a bag fixed at the bottom.

“The work we do has changed little since my father was a chiclero,” says Baños, who learned his trade by following his father around from the age of about 10. The only major difference he identifies is that previously chicleros climbed barefoot while today they wear rubber boots onto which they attach an iron spike to get a better grip of the trunk. “It’s very nice work, although it is a bit dangerous, too.”

With the big cats learning decades ago to avoid humans in the jungle, the chicleros now list only two major occupational hazards. Their first and deepest fear is snakes, such as Bothrops asper, which lurk in the undergrowth and deliver deadly bites. Second, they worry about their razor sharp machetes slipping and slicing the rope holding them high in the tree. Many have died in this way, including Baños’ own father.

A good chiclero will tap about 15 trees in a day, returning to camp around mid-afternoon, about the time that the heavier rain tends to fall. Humidity is essential for the sap to flow, but working in a downpour makes an already delicate job more dangerous.

Weekends are generally spent in the camp cooking up the chicle in aluminum cauldrons. This is arduous work, involving hours of stirring before the bubbling viscous mass coagulates and can be poured into wooden moulds.

But if the chicleros’ work is much the same, the forest around them has changed enormously. It is now very rare to come across one of the mahogany and cedar trees that formed part of the emergent canopy and once so characterized the forest.
Loggers had been extracting them since the 19th century, but in the 20th century, the Mexican government granted major concessions to timber companies. This did not destroy the forest itself, but it has all but stripped it of its biggest hardwood trees.

While loggers mined the forest of hardwoods, Mexican farm and ranch operators cleared great swaths as they expanded the country’s agricultural frontier. The worst period was the 1970s and 80s, when landless peasants flocked to the area, encouraged by government incentives.

The result is that no working chiclero today is required to take a plane. Most camps are either set up at the end of logging tracks or within walking distance of one. And many chicleros in nearby villages now go into the jungle to do a day’s work by bicycle.

Still, environmentalists say, deforestation in this area has been relatively scant compared to the destruction wrought elsewhere. In nearby Chiapas, for example, the Lacandón rainforest has withered under the pressure of massive immigration, cattle ranching and logging.

A prime reason the damage hasn’t occurred on the same scale in the Yucatán Peninusla forest—sometimes called the Maya Forest or the Gran Petén—is the legacy of the chicle boom. The vision of the forest as a chicle resource prompted authorities to create community landholdings, known as ejidos, that included large woodland tracts. This helped keep the population density down and limited the amount of property that could be handed out to the landless when the government launched land-reform efforts.

Another brake on deforestation has been the 1.78-million-acre (720,000-ha) Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, created in 1989. The reserve’s nucleus makes up 35% of the forest’s total. As well as being Mexico’s biggest rainforest reserve, Calakmul is home to five of the six wildcat species in Mexico: the jaguar (Panthera onca), puma (Puma concolor), ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), margay (Leopardus wiedii), and jaguarundi (Herpaolurus yagouaroundi).

Baltasar Zapata, the biosphere’s deputy director, sees development related to the region’s tourism industry as the biggest threat to the reserve. “If it isn’t properly controlled, it could do great damage to the forest,” he says.

There are no plans for local resorts on the scale of Cancún, located on the northeastern tip of the Yucatán Peninsula in the state of Quintana Roo. But smaller developments have now spread down the eastern coast, along the so-called Riviera Maya, towards the state capital Chetumal on the Guatemalan border. And they’re extending inland, promoted by Quintana Roo and, to the west, by Campeche, where Calakmul is located. Already, the road running west from Chetumal is being widened. It runs right through the middle of the reserve and on to the Gulf of Mexico.

“The best hope against deforestation is a legal population taking care of its own forest,” says the Nature Conservancy’s Snook, who adds that the lack of such sustainable use in Guatemala, in part, makes the forest on that side of the border more vulnerable. “If people have a sustainable way of making a reasonable living from their forest, then they will.”

Chicle, along with wild-honey farming, is seen as a viable answer. Although the Chiclero Consortium is officially owned by the chicleros, it is run by former state government officials who won the trust of members by giving them greater returns and control than under the corporatist structures of the past. Participants see the launch of their brainchild—Chicza—as a make-or-break moment for the industry. “We saw a window of opportunity in the concept of organic chewing gum for the international market,” says Gerardo Ramírez, the project manager. “What we’re trying to get across is that this product is not only better for you than the plastic people put in their mouths now, it’s good for the forest.”

Another selling point, he says, is that after being chewed and discarded, Chicza eventually turns to dust—though the process takes five years.

Ramírez says the Chiclero Consortium believes it much more difficult to sell such a product to Mexicans, where organic produce is only beginning to find a market.

The new gum is made at a tiny factory next to the consortium’s headquarters in Chetumal. The first shipment was due to head for Britain last year, but it did not go out largely on account of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Dean, a category-five storm.

Looking ahead, however, the consortium insists there are more than enough chicozapote trees not being worked on ejido land that could be brought into production if Chicza succeeds and new chicleros come forward. For now, there is considerable pressure this year to boost the production of the old hands in order to meet the launch target of February 2009.

The camp where Baños stays is run by Alfonso Valdéz, 69, a toothless charmer who caught the tail end of the boom years when he started work at 12. He fondly describes the old days, when the camps were like small towns, with dances on weekends. And he doesn’t hesitate to critique the work of his guests.

“What, only 20 kilos?” Valdéz chides one camp member at the weekly weighing session. “Spend all week in the hammock did you?”