Note from Brazil: The Historical Role and Knowledge of Peasant Women in Promoting Agroecology

By Kátia Gomes
From MST’s website

Healthy food cannot be produced through unhealthy relationships! The work of peasant women in agroecological production and the defense of common goods holds political, social, and economic significance, aiming for protagonism and autonomy as a feminist practice, primarily in the construction of Popular Peasant Feminism.

It is important to make visible these spaces of construction, considering that we still experience gender relations in the countryside that are hierarchical, patriarchal, and racialized, easily observable in the daily lives of communities/settlements/camps. As Moura, Marques, and Oliveira (2016) found in studies conducted in settlement areas and other communities, women participate in family agricultural production; however, a strong gender inequality renders this work invisible, demonstrating that the sexual division of labor permeates the organization of life in the territories.

One way to render women’s work invisible is through the concept of “help,” where their multiple trips in the field, in the cooperative, and in dealing with animals are considered merely complementary to men’s work, just as their income is understood as supplemental to family income—essentially as “help.” Additionally, the responsibility for household care, the yard, and the people around them continues to fall almost exclusively on the women in the house, often assigned to girls at a young age, impacting their access to education, their time for play as a necessary practice for cognitive development, and their right to leisure and rest.

Historically, women’s work has played an essential role in the development of agriculture and nature. This work encompasses the care of seeds, the domestication of plants and animals, managing cultivated areas, and planning production cycles, planting, and harvesting guided by connections to natural cycles, such as the phases of the moon and the seasons.

Women developed much of the knowledge about medicinal plants, fruit-bearing trees, and their various uses across different biomes, primarily materialized through the care of seeds, which are seen as a common good of interest to humanity—”seeds, the heritage of peoples in service to humanity.”

All this knowledge has been and remains fundamental to the development of agriculture, the care of the land and nature, and often cost them their lives at the stake, accused of witchcraft. The relationship between peasant women, water, and forests with land cultivation is ancient. Their ancestral knowledge and practices contribute to the preservation of biomes, forests, springs, and agrobiodiversity. Their ongoing search for new ways to produce gives meaning to their production, protecting diversity, territories, biomes, and the ways of utilizing the goods of nature, reshaped daily, giving a communal sense to life.

Therefore, to build agroecology as a counter-hegemonic project against agro-hydro-mining-business, it is important to draw upon this historical knowledge of women, providing not just a different perspective on “new ways to produce,” but a new way of seeing the world, gender relations, labor relations, care for life, and common goods, focusing on how we relate to one another and to nature.

In this construction, Peasant and Popular Feminism becomes fundamental, as a strategy of resistance and projection of necessary changes in gender and racial relations, and in productive and social relations in the countryside, between rural and urban, understanding the interrelation of body-territory. For women, agroecology is a viable collective path to preserve common goods and the natural and social life. Thus, we continue our practices of environmental and ancestral care, facing daily the destruction of life.