In Barra do Turvo, Brazil, women promote biodiversity and harvest healthy food at fair prices

This article was published on December 18, 2025, by Patrícia Cornils from O Joio e O Trigo, an independent Brazilian news outlet. An excerpt of this piece is being republished on Global Voices under a content partnership agreement. It is part of Global Voices’ May 2026 Spotlight series, “Global crisis, local solutions.” You can support this coverage by donating here. Every last Thursday of the month, very early in the morning, a truck begins traveling the winding road between hills that connect the town of Barra do Turvo, in the interior of São Paulo state, to the BR-116 highway, which cuts across Brazil from northeast to south. It collects foods cultivated and produced by about 70 local women farmers organized into 11 groups that form the Network for Supporting Agroforestry Women, known as Rama. As daylight grows, the truck picks up the boxes placed by the roadside by community members from the rural neighborhoods where Rama participants live. Into the boxes go seedlings, flours, coffee, breads, beans, vegetables, greens, and fresh fruits. In all, it amounts to around one ton of hundreds of varieties of crops and dozens of artisanal food products. In February 2025, when we visited Barra do Turvo, one of the products being offered was the subject of conversation because of rising prices: eggs. In this case, free-range chicken eggs, sold by farmers at BRL 15 (USD 2.97) per dozen, while in São Paulo supermarkets, the same dozen reached BRL 19. Prices within the network are adjusted only once a year, during assemblies of producers and consumer groups, regardless of increases in food costs. This is possible because the organization’s commercial system is not based on market principles. Rama’s foundations are solidarity economics, feminism, agroecology, food sovereignty, the defense of the territories and ways of life of the women farmers, and the fight against racism and all forms of violence. These principles are also adopted by the network of solidarity consumption groups that purchase food from Rama, called Esparrama — a word that, in Portuguese, describes the action of spreading out, or scattering, which the branches of plants perform as they grow. There are self-organized groups in the cities of Registro, Diadema, and São Paulo. The operating agreements of the network were collectively developed to protect the women’s autonomy over their production. The rules adopted make it possible to set fair prices for buyers and producers. One of the secrets to Rama’s price stability is that “the local women have autonomy in relation to the market connected to the global economy, its fluctuations and the financial market’s speculations,” notes Natália Lobo, a technician from the team of Sempreviva Feminist Organization (SOF), which provides technical assistance to the network. “It is different from being a producer who needs to buy nitrogen fertilizer to plant, and when there is a war in Ukraine, the price of fertilizer skyrockets. Another thing is to have a production system that is quite autonomous in terms of the inputs needed for planting and raising animals, with relations that are far less commodified compared to the rest of conventional agriculture,” she explains. Furthermore, if egg prices rise because corn prices rise, there is always the possibility of buying corn from neighbors, through relationships of care, trust, interdependence, and reciprocity that are also cultivated among the women. The same applies to seedlings and seeds, donated or exchanged, and to the knowledge built through their planting experiences in backyard fields. The value of these relationships is not recognized by classical economics. Commitment to women “We started Rama to support women’s rights. Because there were many women who suffered, many women without a voice, mistreated by their husbands, many were beaten and had no right to any money, nothing, just depending on the husband, right? That was what came first.” This is how Dona Dolíria Rodrigues de Paula, a resident of the Ribeirão Grande-Terra Seca quilombo, explains the origin of the network. In the Ribeira Valley, on the border between the states of São Paulo and Paraná, lies the largest continuous stretch of Atlantic Forest in Brazil, totaling 1.7 million hectares (4.2 million acres). Many traditional communities live there: quilombolas, Guaraní and Kaingang Indigenous peoples, and caiçaras. The women who form Rama live in rural communities of Barra do Turvo, a municipality with 6,900 inhabitants. Most have worked in their fields and backyards since childhood, using management techniques learned from mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers, and neighboring women. The women of Rama have different forms of access to land, or lack of access, depending on how the communities they belong to were formed. In addition to quilombola women, some small farmers came from other states, and also descendants of rural worker families from Barra do Turvo. In 2005, these communities formed an association to seek self-recognition as quilombola descendants and to demand legal titles to the lands they inhabit. Within Rama, some women have been involved in the Pastoral da Criança, a Catholic Church-affiliated organization, since the 1980s. Women mobilized in resistance against the takeover of their lands by conservation units, and family farmers with little or no cultivation area. Many of their lands had been taken over by ranches or sold by elders to large landowners for little or almost nothing, and they faced conflicts caused by cycles of monoculture expansion or livestock in the municipality. Diversity Fields (roças) are areas normally used for specific and temporary production: cassava, corn, and beans. In the traditional way of producing, there is rotation of the planted species and also rotation between the places where the fields are established, so the soil can recover its fertility. Backyards are spaces that women cultivate around their homes and manage daily. “The backyard is everything around our house — everything we planted, everything we have, everything we grow,” says Dolíria. “Almost all the women have one.” The diversity of Vera’s backyard is not an exception among the women of Rama. “Spaces under the domain of women have greater diversity and greater complexity of management than those managed by men,” wrote, in 2018, Liliam Teles, who is part of the Women’s Working Group of the National Agroecology Articulation and a member of the World March of Women — in her dissertation “Unveiling the invisible economy of agroecological women farmers: the experience of the women of Barra do Turvo, SP.” In the production carried out by men, whether in their own monocultures or on land belonging to others, the harvest happens once a year. In the women’s production, however, an important portion feeds their immediate and extended families throughout the entire year. One of the agreements among the women farmers is this: Our production is destined first to our own food or to the family we live with, those who live in other cities, children, relatives, and comadres. Never take food off the table to sell. Collective care In the Ribeira Valley, collectivity is part of the way of life. Farmers here have always organized mutirões — moments of collective work to help one another cultivate their lands. Rama was the first organization to carry out this communal work, composed only of women, as shown in the documentary “Vida em Mutirão,” and the first to include kitchen work in the list of tasks performed, which did not happen in mixed mutirões or those coordinated by men. The women listen to each other more, take better care of one another, and are better prepared to respect each woman’s way of doing things. Over time, Rama began reserving a percentage of the commercialization money in a fund that is used, among other things, to pay for the women’s transportation to the mutirões. It is not uncommon, however, for these funds to be needed to pay for medical exams or medications for one of them or a family member. Or for a community member who got into debt to cover a treatment. Lack of access to healthcare is one of the problems women in the region face — a symptom of inadequate access to public policies not only in agriculture but also in fundamental rights. When SOF began working in the Ribeira Valley in 2015, one of the first things the women farmers said was: “We know how to plant — we have done that our whole lives. We need to sell our produce.” As long as they have the guarantee of remaining on their lands, healthy foods produced agroecologically will remain in the countryside. What is missing is expanding support for this production, which is inseparable from women's lives, and improving logistics so that this food can reach people in the cities.