Terra Vista | Um documentário Brasil de Fato

Cacao, in fact, I got to know cacao when I arrived here to the settlement. I'd already talked about cocoa, I'd seen some trees, but I didn't know it. There, in the region where my father lived, I used to work with other crops.

Then I got to know cacao. It's a crop I like very much, a very good crop to work with. The agroecological transition was a necessity here but it has strengthened us, and people's income keeps growin.

So this is making people believe in the promise of the MST to change their lives, to dream. At the time of the colonels I was, I was exploited, I was enslaved. And today I work for myself.

Here, if we add up, we are, today around 450 or 500 people, because in each house there are three, four, there are fifteen, two, five, one. So, in general, everyone is surviving off of this land and everyone is being fed by this land, which previously belonged to just one person, in the time of of slavery. Cacao made this region very rich but the poor people suffered from that exploitation of labor.

I've always worked as an employee, on the farms, you know. I worked on the farms. And then came that excess of witch's broom fungus, and we ended up unemployed.

Then we lived in the city, but didn't have a steady job. That's when the MST arrived in Bahia. Being landless makes me proud to be in landless movement, because being landless [MST] for me, is to be a liberated person, a free person.

A person that can have the right to come and go, so to speak. In this region of southern Bahia there have been many problems with human beings picking a cacao gourd to eat. If the farmer caught you picking a cacao gourd to eat, you hungry, for you to eat, you'd be in trouble.

You'd be in trouble. Either you'd leave the farm or you'd get a whiplash, something you were going to get, you'd be in trouble. Not today.

Today we can do whatever we want with our cacao. There have been several situations here of people who had to to leave their land and go live on the outskirts of cities and live in the discards of society, precisely because the colonels, the farm owners, came and manipulated them, or controlled them, or directly expelled these families from the land, from small properties. And when the MST does this land occupation, when the MST brings these families, brings these people back to what is theirs, what is rightfully theirs, that person is no longer a slave and now has the condition of being a free man or a free woman.

We suffered five evictions very violent, a lot of arrestments, a lot of torture, a lot of hatred from local society and from the media. We arrived with 360 families. In the sixth occupation, we were down to 28 families, but even so, in the sixth occupation we managed to conquer this land.

In July 1994, it was expropriated and handed over to us. I have a habit of saying that the garden likes affection, affection. And what is affection?

It's what I'm doing here, it's this, touching her. I'm going to tell you something very clearly. The witch's broom [fungus], it didn't come by chance.

Because if it weren't for the witch's broom, we wouldn't be here today. <i>There are five </i> <i>witches' broom hotspots,</i> <i>30,000 to 31,000 </i> <i>infected plants. </i> If this disease takes hold in this region, the cost will rise by around 20 to 30%.

So you'd go into a cacao plantation it looked like It had really been set on fire, you hardly saw any cacao fruits. Most of the farms lost those families who worked because the peasant, the producer, couldn't be paid for. Then another degradation process began, because without cacao many of them went into logging on their properties.

The clearing of the Atlantic Forest became very pronounced in the region. When we arrived here, there was rampant deforestation, there were many areas of pasture and many degraded areas. The water problem, we suffered hardship, the river was running low.

There was no water. Water is life, soil is life, the environment is life. And then we started to replant on each side of the river.

Alongside the river, on both sides. And then we started planting, we planted mangoes, we planted açaí, we planted guava, we planted avocado. And many children ate and began to eat fruit from those trees.

They climbed trees, they ate lots of fruit. To this day we have plenty of fruits in the settlement. The fruits of the seasons.

So we've eradicated this problem as well of malnutrition. Without water, we have no food. When we understood this we recovered 92% of the riparian forest.

The river got better, we recovered 80% of our springs. Today we drink mineral water, we bathe in mineral water, all from within our settlement. Today I harvest the mango, I harvest the avocado, I harvest the jackfruit, I harvest cacao, I harvest cupuaçu, I harvest bananas, I harvest açaí, I harvest guava, I harvest jenipapo.

This is what agro is. They say on the television, "Agro is this, agribusiness is pop. " It's nothing like that.

This is what agro is about. Today, all you're seeing here wasn't here before. Today everything has passed through my hand, through the hands of my children and through the hands of my companions who also live here today.

In the forest, there is a whole diversity of microorganisms, of organic matter, of everything. It's a large diversity in the forest. That's why the land is rich.

That's why the land is strong. It took a lot of years for us to understand that it was possible for us to coexist with nature and production. We used to burn it, we burned, sometimes we threw a chemical product thinking that we could only survive if we used those practices.

Those practices that we brought with us from the farmer. For us today, land alone is not enough. We need to fight for our territories, we need to fight for the waters.

We need to fight for the forest. So, here at Terra Vista, this is what the agroecological transition is. We have edible plants, amaranth, taioba, orchid tree.

Agroecology is a way of life. It's about well-being, learning to live together in nature, respecting nature, and above all respecting and taking care of each other. So living together in the community is a model of life, it's a model of agroecology.

And we've been growing more forests. Now we have the Bem Virá forest that we are growing, another forest, through the agroforestry system. So the MST has its role, its task, mainly political, which is the preservation of the environment, which is to take the areas that we occupy – totally unbalanced, the soil, – and to readjust and bring light to this production, which is also the production of trees, the planting of trees.

We came to transform monoculture into a book of diversity. In other places you just break cacao and that's it. Dr and sell.

And here there's this difference of selecting the cacao, and removing the pulp, and making fine cocoa. To plant, to cultivate, to break, to dry, to pulp, to make coca honey, all this is important. Because you sell the honey, you have your money.

You sell the pulp, you have your money. The bean, you have your money, the chocolate also has its money. So it's really good to grow cacao.

We did a deep study of cacao. We studied cacao from its origins, from the Aztecs, from the Mayans. What was cacao?

Cocoa was the drink of the gods and goddesses. They only drank it in ceremonies. It was worth more than gold and silver.

We learned that it's an understory plant, which means it goes well with an agroforestal system. Once you've harvested, you select the fruit. Then you have to separate the fruit that's at the ideal point of ripeness from the other fruits that are diseased or overripe, or verdant.

from the other fruits that are diseased or overripe, or verdant. The one that is sick, overripe or verdant, they really go directly, to the barge, to dry, to be sold as a commodity. And this cocoa, which is on its ideal ripeness, it comes directly from the field and has to go to the fermentation house.

For many, many years, the region produced beans only for those cocoa mills. This is for you to know, have a sense, and change the paradigm a little bit, it takes a bit more work. Cargill, Bunge, Nestlé and I think there are about five others.

So it's a small group that exploits everyone, to this day and which used to take 97% of our wealth away. By making chocolate selling the finished chocolate, we'll earn more and we'll be able to dribble those guys. This is our 70% cocoa.

70% is the one that doesn't have milk. Our 56% has milk. We use organic sugar, and organic olive oil.

And it's produced here, here, the organic cocoa. We can add value with it. One shouldn't have to make the effort that we make on the farm to produce our cocoa and then sell it to a middleman for 200 reais, 100 reais.

That's also why with the work we do here, we can really deliver a quality product to a consumer who doesn't have an ideal income. We can reach that audience and show what chocolate really is. Unfortunately, Brazilians don't eat quality chocolate, in fact, we eat chocolate-based products and even derivatives of chocolate-based, because the percentage is very low.

It's basically sugar. If you look, the first ingredient is sugar. People have to come and see the production process, the process of building soil, the work that goes into it, for people to understand and appreciate and buy our rebel chocolate, with this history, with these flavors and with these practices.

We are studying this matter of taste and how people will taste it with their palate and talk about Terra Vista. "This is from a place I know, very beautiful, where people respect nature, where people are undertaking the agroecological transition. " 1998 was when we held a course with the movement here and I ended up receiving this flag.

I keep this flag as a symbol for it to never leave my life nor my side. Land reform is the way to fight hunger. It depends on the government understanding this and the population itself.

And woe, if it weren't for the land reform, because there were a lot of people starving. A lot. There were thousands, a lot of people, starving.

So the MST is a very powerful movement in the sense of tearing down the fence of a latifundium, of confronting the latifundia. And the MST has done something very important during the pandemic, bringing food to the people, showing to the people what settlements produce. While there is land, while there are landless people, we have to keep occupying land and we have to be occupying spaces, occupying university spaces, political spaces.

The MST has to be occupying all these spaces where we have been denied for over 500 years in the history of this country. The MST came as a guardian to support and help those in need. This is a seed.

Nobody can take it away from me. When I die, I'll take it with me. So I need to sow for it to germinate for the future.

And that is what the agrarian reform came for, to sow and to diversify.