Early on a Saturday morning in Monte Alegre, five women are out in the forest, deftly smacking fist-sized brown coconuts on a blade. In a shady spot amid the trees, they sit around a mound of babaçu – also called babassu – coconuts, separating seed from shell by knocking the nuts on axes half-buried in the ground, sharp edge pointing skywards. The chat is about their plans for the evening.
“I can’t make more effort, I’ve got to save some energy to dance this evening,” says Maria Cecília de Jesus, 39.
“When the coconut is good, we break it much faster,” says Beatriz Lima, 69, a community leader in Monte Alegre, in Maranhão state, north-east Brazil, where women have been doing this work for centuries.
“There was one day I broke 14 kilos of coconut. I was so happy,” says De Jesus. Her sister, Francidalva, 37, teases her back: “I’ve already broken 21 kilos.” The chatter races around the circle; the women share an easy camaraderie. Babaçu coconut-breaking has evolved into a strong women-led culture of about 400,000 people from Brazil’s north and north-east.
The fruit and the nut-seed oil have been valued since the first inhabitants of the Amazon and later by enslaved plantation workers. But the Babaçu palm trees are increasingly threatened by the cattle and soya farms that are flattening so much of the Amazonian forest. In the past few years, the pace of destruction has escalated due to illegal deforestation, land conflicts and the climate crisis.
A group of women from the Monte Alegre quilombo community set off in the early morning to collect babaçu coconuts
Ripe coconuts on a tree; and collecting those that have fallen or been shaken to the ground
It has left the Quebradeiras de Coco Babaçu, or coconut breakers, who have legal recognition as a traditional community in Brazil and see themselves as the guardians of the Amazon and Cerrado biomes, fighting for their identity.
Most babaçu grow in common forests held by the Brazilian government – and increasingly claimed by private landowners. The women collect coconuts between September and February.
A basket of babaçu coconuts
Anthropologist Noemi Porro has spent two decades researching communities of coconut breakers in Maranhão state, which has the highest concentration of babaçu trees in the country.
“The picking and breaking of babaçu coconut is, historically, an act of resistance and the pursuit of freedom,” Porro says. “The all-female coconut-breaking circle became the special place to share, reflect, debate gender subordination, sexuality, family, community and social justice.”
In Santana do Adroaldo, a quilombo community – meaning one descended from enslaved workers – in Maranhão, 10 women are gathered in the orchard of Maria de Jesus Andrade, 57. “They come here to break coconuts, but we also chat and have a beer,” says Andrade, founder of the women’s association for the municipality and a passionate coconut breaker.
All the women from the 20 families in Santana do Adroaldo are coconut breakers and take great pride in their work. Andrade taught her three daughters to respect the trees, but the middle one, 21-year-old Isabel, is most involved. “I do have plans to see the world outside and study more,” says Isabel. “However, I don’t think of quitting this activity. I’ve learned to like it with my mother.
“My dream is that more people recognise our value as coconut breakers.”
In Santana do Adroaldo, women crack the coconuts with village children
An axe is used to crack open the nut, exposing the fruit inside
“If I break coconuts every day, I make more money than I do at my other job,” says Barbara dos Santos, 28, a school teacher in Santana do Adroaldo. “If I spend a couple of days without breaking coconuts, I start missing it.”
Her colleagues, the headteacher and her assistant, Luiziane, 30, are also coconut breakers. “We don’t do it because we have no other option. We do it because we like it.”
In 1991, as conflict over land rights grew, coconut breakers from Maranhão, Pará, Tocantins and Piauí states founded the Interstate Movement of Babaçu Coconut Breakers (MIQCB). Its agenda includes economic empowerment and the preservation of forests, and it has helped develop the Free Babaçu law, which grants access to the palms on private property and prohibits felling. First implemented in Lago do Junco in Maranhão in 1997, the legislation has since been passed in municipalities in Maranhão, Tocantins and Piauí.
Helena Santos shakes babaçu coconuts loose from a tree
But the way of life remains precarious. Cleudemar Brandão, 41, lives in the quilombo community of Monte Alegre, where tensions began escalating in 2013, when some people started renting land to cattle farmers. Hundreds of babaçu were felled for pasture and others fenced off, limiting access.
Brandão’s mother, Dona Dijé, a prominent activist and MIQCB leader, died in 2018. “We are here to continue her legacy,” she says.
For women in the quilombo community of Sesmaria do Jardim, meanwhile, things changed 20 years ago when buffalo ranching expanded inside the territory.
“They claim to have bought that land, so they fence parts of our territory, and, consequently, parts of our babaçu forests too,” says Gloria Belford, 49. Buying or selling quilombo land is illegal. But now people from Sesmaria do Jardim have to negotiate electric fences if they want to access babaçu trees or fish in the lake. Reports in regional newspapers suggest there have been injuries caused by the fences. Belford knows a pregnant women who was hurt. “She needed to fish. She had to pass the fence and got a shock. Thank God she is all right,” she says.
After reporting the situation to authorities, Belford received death threats and is one of the three coconut breakers currently under the protection of Maranhão’s secretariat of human rights.
The quilombo community of Santana do Adroaldo sometimes clears palm trees to make space for useful crops such as manioc and beans
Cattle graze on pasture that was once dense forest
“We don’t have free access to our land and resources,” says Raimunda de Jesus, 56. “The trees already don’t give us as many fruits as they used to in the past.”
In Piauí state, the law was sanctioned by then governor Regina Sousa, 73, the first woman coconut breaker to take government office. She says implementation remains challenging.
“Deforestation for the development of monocultures – particularly sugar cane, in Piauí’s case – is still a trend. The Free Babaçu law faces strong reactions from landowners,” says Sousa. A bill to protect the palm nationally was introduced in 2007, but has yet to pass into federal law.
After four years of the far-right presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, which favoured agribusiness, many hoped new president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would reopen dialogue with social movements such as MIQCB. They celebrated the reactivation of the Amazon Fund, a key international source of funding shut down by Bolsonaro in 2019.
But to save the babaçu, Rosenilde Costa says the government must address land conflicts.
“If there is no political will to secure us the domain to our land. We have nothing. The land is everything: where we belong, where we develop a relationship with nature and people,” says Costa, 61.
Only once land rights are protected, Costa says, will Amazon and Cerrado women’s traditions remain safe, she says, “is a way of keeping my ancestors alive.”
The women from the Monte Alegre quilombo community, led by Beatriz Lima, set off to collect babaçu coconuts in the forest
