With the global climate strikes, climate change is at the centre of attention worldwide. In Brazil, its consequences have long been felt: increasing drought, degraded soils and failed agricultural and environmental policies are endangering the environment and thus also small-scale farming. Many young people are migrating in search of new income opportunities. Together with our partner organisation Centro Sabiá, we offer young people like Gildo Jose and Gabriel Venâncio alternatives to this. They report how they experience the current situation in Brazil.
The burning Amazon and the global climate strikes have drawn worldwide attention to climate change this autumn. In fact, the consequences of misguided land and environmental policies have been evident in Brazil for years. Extensive monocultures are leaching out the soil, and the deforestation of the rainforests is driving the drought. Survival is becoming increasingly difficult for smallholders, who are farming according to age-old methods. This is driving many young smallholders from the countryside to the cities or to large plantations in search of a livelihood - where they often find themselves in exploitative working conditions or criminal activity.
Together with our partner organisations, we develop counter-models with which they can build up alternative future perspectives. For example, young people like Gildo Jose (with orange cap) and Gabriel Venâncio (far right in the picture) learn visionary agroforestry methods for small-scale farming from our partner organisation Centro Sabiá, thus creating an environmentally friendly and economic alternative to migration. The two young farmers are also politically active at Centro Sabiá and pass on their experiences to other young people. They tell us in an interview how they experience the current situation in Brazil.
When was the last time you ate healthy unsprayed vegetables?
Gildo Jose: Today, it came from my own garden
Gabriel Venâncio: We grow our own vegetables with our families. We do not use agricultural poisons or any other chemical additives. We produce in ecological Anbayu, organic with original, traditional seeds.
You learned the organic cultivation at Centro Sabiá. Why was that important to you?
Gabriel Venâncio: Centro Sabiá has been advising my family on organic farming for a long time. This has made us realize how important it is to consume healthy food. We want to live as healthy as possible. What we eat is what defines us.
Gildo Jose: At Centro Sabiá I learned to protect the earth, the water and the trees. This has also given me a new perspective on life. I would like to pass this on so that more people learn to live in harmony with our planet.
You run small-scale farming with your families. That is a hard life and hard earned bread. What's keeping you?
Gabriel Venâncio: I went to the city a few years ago to work and earn money. And I realized that this is not for me. For me, organic farming is not just a production method. It is a way of life that bears fruit and brings satisfaction.
Gildo Jose: It is good that we can eat well and healthily with organic farming. Above all, it provides us with an income from our own land, so we don't have to leave. It's great to have a big vegetable garden and a forest with birds and animals right behind the house.
With the fires in the Amazon and the Fridays for Future, climate change has become a topic of discussion worldwide. Can you feel it in your region?
Gildo Jose: Yes, clearly. There is much less rain. And when it rains, it's catastrophic downpours. In addition, the temperatures have become more extreme and we often have storms of a kind we didn't have before. Some areas are devastating progressively and the original water reservoirs are drying up. Nevertheless, people continue with their destructive practices. But by growing according to the agro-ecological methods that we learned at Centro Sabiá, we manage to make ends meet much better.
Gabriel Venâncio: The fact that we no longer have environmental stability, but it also has a direct impact on our production.
What is your assessment of Brazil's current environmental policy?
Gabriel Venâncio: On the one hand, we work to protect the environment and to preserve what we have. On the other hand, this government destroys all our hopes. It pursues exclusively the interests of the big landowners and agro-industry, which use a lot of agro-poisons and which practise monoculture and cattle breeding for export on a large scale. But I am convinced that we can change this if we small farmers fight for our agriculture and do not give up.
In view of this reality, does smallholder agriculture even have a future?
Gildo Jose: Currently, 70 percent of the Brazilian population is fed by small-scale agriculture. Organic farming feeds 10 percent. In order to strengthen it, we need many more people, politicians and spirits who think about the common good.
Gabriel Venâncio: We smallholders are in distress without support from the government and society and have hardly any room for manoeuvre. But we support each other, for example through our work with Centro Sabiá. I have the vision of a Brazil in which we have our place and are respected. I believe that the importance of small-scale organic farmers is growing. In Brazil, we smallholders are at the centre of a new diet. There are various signs of this.
The population is beginning to eat more consciously and the demand for ecological products produced without agricultural toxins is growing. If everyone has to do without agro poisons in the future, then we play an important role, because we already know how to produce sustainably and environmentally friendly.
What do they look like?
Gabriel Venâncio: The population is beginning to become more conscious of their diet and the demand for organic products produced without agricultural toxins is growing. If everyone has to do without agro-toxins in the future, then we will play an important role, because we already know how to produce sustainably and environmentally friendly. If the people in our exporting countries were to grow their own crops for their own needs or rely on regional cultivation, our exports and thus the large-scale production for export would certainly decline slowly. These exports would still be necessary because not everything can be produced locally. But the exploitation of Brazil as we know it today would stop.
