ESPERANTINA, Brazil (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — Sitting on the bare floor of a thatched-roof hut, Maria de Fátima Ferreira holds a babaçu coconut firmly against the sharp edge of a hatchet and cracks it open with two quick blows using a piece of hardwood.
In just a few seconds, the nut, about the size of a large lemon, is split into quarters to produce six slender kernels. Ferreira removes them and grabs another nut from a straw basket at a workers’ co-operative in Esperantina, a small town in the northeastern Brazilian state of Piauí.
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“The babaçu is such a big part of my life, I can probably break it with my eyes closed,” she said with a smile.
An estimated 300,000 babaçu breakers like Ferreira, living in some of Brazil’s poorest states, make at least half their income by gathering the nuts that fall from the palm trees and using everything they have to offer.
Oil is extracted from the kernel, the shell is used for charcoal and mesocarp, a nutritious starch-like pulp under the shell, is mixed in cakes and porridge. The leaves of the wild tree are used for roofing.
Over generations, the coconut breakers, or “quebradeiras,” have endured many threats to their way of life, including deforestation, the expansion of agriculture and pressure from large-scale mining operations.
Many live in settlements founded by escaped slaves in the late 1800s. Others are descendants of native tribes that lived in the area before European settlers began arriving in the mid-1500s.
Nearly all quebradeiras are women and only a minority have rights to the land where they harvest the nuts. Their vulnerability has been worsened by the lack of formal recognition for their activity, which is not considered economically important by the government.
However, these tough, hard working women hope the United Nations’ new sustainable development goals will help their fight for a federal law to protect the palm tree and give them access to babaçu forests, regardless of who owns the land.
Under one of the planned goals to achieve gender equality, governments will commit to reforms giving women equal rights to economic resources, as well as allowing them to own and control land and other forms of property and natural resources.
“Anything on the international agenda that will push the (Brazilian) government and Congress to pass the Free Babaçu Law will help us advance our cause,” said Francisca da Silva Nascimento, co-ordinator of the Interstate Movement of Coconut Breakers, formed in 1991 to help women fight for their right to harvest the babaçu.
The women also want to be recognized and protected under a new agricultural investment push led by the government in the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia. Much of that territory is where the babaçu trees grow across 46 million acres, partly in the Amazon Basin in northern Brazil.
In 1997, the coconut breakers’ movement persuaded legislators in one municipality in Maranhão to pass a law granting free access to any property to collect nuts. The law is now valid in 13 municipalities in three states, and the quebradeiras are lobbying for a national law to be passed.
They hope that push will be supported by a new map that charts the challenges to the babaçu forests and their livelihood. It was presented to Congress in August.
“This approach of not wanting rights to the land but rights to harvest the nuts, which are seen as a nuisance by farmers, is incredibly progressive,” said Aurélio Vianna, a program officer at the Ford Foundation, which supported the map project.
“The quebradeiras carry out a truly sustainable activity that is a great example of what the world wants in a post-2015 development agenda,” he said.
The nuts are harvested only in the wild, meaning there is no need to cut down forests for plantations. With a small investment by co-operatives, the entire nut can be used to generate income for hundreds of thousands of families in northern Brazil, allowing them to stay in their rural homes rather than moving to cities in search of work.
The babaçu production chain is a way to reduce poverty, end hunger, ensure healthy lives and manage forests sustainably, among other aims of the UN’s sustainable development goals, Vianna added.
The quebradeiras have learned over the past two decades how to add value to babaçu products to increase their income. However, improvements have been uneven across different communities.
In some areas, the quebradeiras have organized into co-operatives and bought equipment such as industrial ovens and oil extractors to make production more efficient.
These groups are able to sell babaçu oil and mesocarp flour to the government school lunch program and foreign cosmetics companies.
However, most quebradeiras in poorer and more isolated communities subsist by gathering nuts and selling the kernels because they lack the equipment or knowledge to do more, said agronomist Alvori Cristo dos Santos.
There is no comprehensive government program to support the nut breakers, though some have benefited from initiatives backed by state governments, municipalities and charities.
Brazil’s special secretariat for women’s policies recognizes the need to do more,
“We believe the quebradeiras are a great example of sustainable activity and we support them in their fight for better living conditions, but unfortunately the re-sources we have are scarce in the face of all the challenges we are up against,” , said executive secretary Linda Goulart.
