Brazil:
Impacts of eucalyptus plantations on women
The social and environmental impacts of monoculture eucalyptus
plantations have been well documented in many countries. However,
the gender dimension has usually been overlooked, thus hiding
the differentiated impacts they have on women. The following quotes
from a research carried out in Brazil on Aracruz Cellulose’ plantations
and pulp mill operation are therefore very useful to shed some
light on the issue and to encourage other people to look further
into these less well-known impacts.
“Indigenous
women, Afrodescendents (Quilombolas) and peasants, who used to
live with their families and communities in the places taken over
by eucalyptus plantations, had their socioeconomic role well defined.
As reported by Mr. Antônio dos Santos, from the Indian settlement
of Pau Brasil, Indian women had specific tasks. They produced
certain types of handicrafts such as sieves, for example, while
the men made bowls and oars. Together with the men, they worked
on the land planting and hoeing, and also fished. The Quilombola
women, for example, produced bijú --a typical food of this population--
to feed their families and to be sold and to produce income.
With the arrival
of the eucalyptus plantations, the women, like the other inhabitants
of the region, experienced the changes in the organization of
their territory and of their place in the community; in what they
produced and how it was produced. Their socioeconomic role in
the family and community underwent alterations and several of
these women, after having lost their land, were forced to seek
another place to live and work. They migrated with their children
and relatives to urban regions, close to the place where they
used to live, which is the case of many families that moved to
the cities of São Mateus and Aracruz. Others sought the metropolitan
region of the state, increasing the size of shanty towns, and
to continue caring for their houses and families, exchanged rural
activities for those of maids, cleaning women or washerwomen of
urban middle and upper
class families.
The women that still
resist in the midst of eucalyptus also continue taking care of
their homes and families, but at the same time, face more difficulties
than before. For example, the rivers and streams that were used
for washing clothing, and from where they used to take drinking
water and fish in, are mostly contaminated. Accordingly, the members
of the family, including the women, are forced to go to other
places to obtain drinking water. Doralim Serafim dos Santos, a
Quilombola, says that ‘nobody here washes clothes in this stream,
since the clothes become yellow and filthy. When I was growing
up we used to clean fish in the stream and the water was crystal
clear’.
Another problem is
the lack of native forest, a source of the raw material necessary
to create handicrafts. In addition, the contamination of the soil
caused by the use of pesticides on plantations jeopardizes the
planting of medicinal herbs by women. Medicinal herbs are used
frequently by traditional populations to prevent and combat illnesses.
The shortage of good and sufficient land also complicates the
coordination of domestic tasks and agricultural production. Nowadays
women have to cover long distances to work on third party plantations,
in the coffee and sugar cane fields, for example. These women
are more subject to occupational accidents. It is also worth adding
that today, in the state of Espírito Santo, 26% of the families,
i.e., 800,000 homes, have women as heads of the family. This means
that Espírito Santo is one of the Brazilian states with the greatest
number of homes headed by women in proportionate terms. This item
of data indicates that paid work for women has ceased to be merely
a form of boosting the family income and has become vital for
the subsistence of women and of their families.
There is also the
experience of indigenous women that, with the loss of their conditions
of subsistence, sought alternative ways of contributing to the
family financially. Some have become the maids of the bosses of
the company Aracruz. However, in 1998, after the process of self-demarcation
of indigenous lands, they were discharged in retaliation. They
had to go after other types of work outside the Indian settlements.
However, some of them were luckier and managed to get jobs as
teachers and health agents in the actual settlements where they
live. All this effort on the part of women to contribute towards
the family income has produced changes in their traditional role,
which has been affecting the entire community to a certain extent.
On the other hand, in spite of the ruin produced by Aracruz’s
large agro-industrial project, the company seeks to be close to
this population at all times, organizing aid actions. One of the
last alternatives that we have news of is the organization of
professionalizing courses for these women, with the objective
of making them into manicures, pedicures and waitresses, professions
foreign to this population.
Another situation
that merits emphasis is that of the reduced quantity of women
from neighboring communities that work at the company Aracruz.
It is not surprising that in the year 1998, only 6.8% of the company’s
employees were women, according to data from the time.
Nevertheless, most
of the women that worked at Aracruz performed cleaning services,
worked in the administrative sector of the plant, or in the nursery
and in planting of seedlings, perhaps because women are supposed
to be more qualified for this type of activity that requires careful
manual work. However, nowadays this activity is already almost
totally mechanized. The majority of these services are now outsourced.
In work on the land,
women also suffered occupational accidents like men. One example
of an accident occurred on July 14, 1986, when a former worker
from Aracruz Celulose was descending a ‘grota’ with a box of 30
eucalyptus seedlings, weighing 45 kilos. She fell and broke her
spine. After having been transferred to an office cleaning job,
she was fired as she was unable to stand up any more. Now aged
51, she cannot even carry a chair and needs to control the pain
in her spine with medication. She has never managed to get another
job.
Often, however, women,
in an invisible role, had to care for their husbands, sick and
the victims of accidents caused by the work carried out on the
plantations. Doralina says that ‘there were days when he came
home with his eyes hurting and was almost unable to get to sleep
at night, then his eyes got really bad, he couldn’t see properly,
and did a few tests’. There are cases of widows of ex-workers
from the company Aracruz and outsourced companies that need to
maintain the house alone, without any support”.
Excerpted from the
research “Eucalyptus Plantations and Pulp Production. Promises
of Jobs and Destruction of Work. The case of Aracruz Celulose
in Brazil”, by Alacir De Nadai,
Winfridus Overbeek, and Luiz Alberto Soares, commissioned by WRM
and The Network Alert against the Green Desert, May 2005,
http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Brazil/fase.html
