ACT Alliance

Lettuce farmer Waldeli de Andrade shows the last of his ruined crop after the flood. ACT members in Brazil have issued an appeal to help farmers like Waldeli.
Photo: ACT/Gustavo Bonato

A month after the worst natural disaster in Brazilian history left thousands of small farmers in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro landless, many families still don’t know how they are going to resume food production.

Vegetable growers Waldeli Andrade, 43, and Alessandro Silva de Oliveira, 24, exemplify the difficulties of hundreds of small farmers in rural Teresópolis, one of the regions where rain caused most damage.

Both men used to rent a few hectares of land next to a small river to grow lettuce which they sold to a middle man. During the night of January 11, the river turned into an avalanche of water and mud. Vegetables, irrigation pipes and pumps, and even a small tractor were wiped out. When the water course returned to normal flow, the farmland had become a sandy, rocky field, which was no longer fertile.

With nowhere to plant and nothing to sell, Andrade doesn’t know what’s next. “Now we have to rent another area but cannot find any available. To grow vegetables is what we do for living but it’s hard to go on. The government has promised help but so far, we have received no support.”

Andrade and de Oliveira are part of a contingency of farmers stuck in a kind of legal limbo. Local authorities estimate that 60 to 70 percent of farmers in Teresópolis are without papers to prove they are indeed farmers. In many cases, those workers don’t own land or never managed to legalise their ownership after inheriting a piece of land.

Government grants not enough
Recently, the Brazilian government offered farmers in the disaster areas special loans but only a small percentage of farmers can claim official grants. “The truth is that the majority doesn’t have papers, thus they cannot access money and federal government help,” says Ana Paulo Pegorer, agronomist and chief of the Teresópolis city hall’s agriculture development division.

Organic farmers in Fazenda Alpina, another Teresópolis district, face another difficulty. In the 1990s, the federal government settled a few dozen families in a remote and hilly area. They were offered land after fighting for it in the Landless Workers’ Movement, a social movement fighting for access to land on behalf of people driven off it. Many complained that little support was given, besides ownership of the land. The farming conditions in those rocky slopes were always poor.

A few families decided to change to organic farming, hoping to reach better prices in the market. That was the case of Mozart Gomes de Sá and his brother Adão. Since 1994 they have struggled to harvest six hectares of melon, beans, corn and bananas.

The night of January 11 changed everything for the worse. “I managed to save my family, but I lost at least 40 friends, which lived in this area. Our land is isolated. We cannot plant. Right now, we can count only with the force of our arms. To wait for the help of the authorities is pointless,” says Mozart Gomes de Sá.

To reach the former farmland, it’s necessary to use a helicopter or walk for hours. Land slides and rocks damaged the plants and the roads. Locals say that the settlement, which never really got government attention, is now reverting back to even less support.

After this catastrophe, there are plans to convert that area back to a natural reserve. So, there is little chance for investments. On the other hand, if the settled farmers abandon the area they were given, they also loose their rights to be supported by the government.

In a shelter improvised under a church in Teresópolis, we found Adão, Mozart’s 56-year-old brother. He used to be a proud organic farmer but now all he has is a box with a few personal belongings and a photo album, with which he used to show everybody what was once his corn field.

His budget was always very modest. He says he used to make roughly US $60 a month. Now he is worried because he has no money to buy food for the few ducks and chickens that were left on their own in the devastated areas and. But he hasn’t given up. “I will plant again. I want to see everything how it used to be.”

Last week, ACT Alliance’s team of rapid support workers visited the most badly affected areas in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro to calculate what goods are most needed to help families rebuild their lives. ACT Alliance members in Brazil have issued an appeal to support rural housesholds as well some poor urban communities.