“It’s easy to criticize local burning practices, but they are not only cultural, they’re a necessity to local communities,” Acará’s environmental secretary, Sônia Elídia Reis Mota, told Mongabay from her office. “These crops are their subsistence. If they don’t burn, they won’t have anything to eat or won’t make enough money to buy food.”

When you have someone at the local environmental agency spilling lies like that, this certainly does not bode well for the rest of the forest there. You just need to literally go to the neighboring city, Tomé-Açu, to find multiple successful syntropic farms that formed a local coop to export their produce, and have learned that monocrops, slash and burn are not the answer, see (in Portuguese): A trip to the part of the Amazon where Japanese is spoken

They don’t really like cold weather, and as you mentioned, they are quite finicky early on

If you haven’t tried it yet, see if you can:

• Get your hands on fresh seeds
• When washing them, discard any that do not sink. Those floaters rarely grow
• Use fine burnt paddy husk for potting seedlings if available, or try a sandy loam soil (40% sand, 40% silt, and 20% clay)
• Ensure good drainage
• Yet they still like high humidity, so regular watering is good (2x a day), but too much and your root will rot
• First 2 months, keep it in 50% sunshade, after that, it thrives under direct sunlight

I’m closer to the equator, so you might need to adjust if you are in a different latitude