In February, Brazil confirmed its first recorded case of the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes COVID-19. Since then, the disease has spread and surpassed the landmark number of 90 thousand lives lost, having a particularly strong impact on black women and the poorest populations, such as rural workers living in the country’s Northeast region. A study from the Centre for Health Operations and Intelligence (Núcleo de Operações e Inteligência em Saúde) at the Pontifical Catholic University (Pontifícia Universidade Católica: PUC) in Rio de Janeiro, indicated that more black and brown people die from COVID-19 in Brazil than white people.
The study analysed the disease’s fatality rate in Brazil, taking demographic and socio-economic variables into consideration. The research looked at about 30 thousand cases of COVID-19 notifications, recorded by 18/05 and made available by the Ministry of Health. According to this survey, deaths from the pandemic were three times higher in people with no schooling (71.3%) than in people with higher education (22.5%). When cross-referencing education and race data, the study confirmed that 80.35% of deaths were found in black and brown people without schooling, in contrast to 19.65% of white people who had a higher education.
“What the pandemic has proven is something that a number of studies have already demonstrated, which is the greater impact on poor and black populations when accessing health. COVID-19 has found fertile ground, because these people are living in a scenario of health inequality and precarious living conditions,” declared Emanuelle Góes, Doctor in Public Health at the Federal University of Bahia and researcher at the Centre for Data and Knowledge Integration for Health (Centro de Integração de Dados e Conhecimentos para Saúde: CIDACS) of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fundação Oswaldo Cruz: FIOCRUZ) referring to racial inequality and access to health services in an interview with the BBC News Brazil website published, alongside the research, on 12/07.
If before it was hard to cope with poverty and the social inequality linked to the burden of care work, injustice and violence, now, with the pandemic, the situation is increasingly challenging for such women in the Northeast region. Given the current political situation and understanding the importance of the defence of life and self-care, CESE, through the Dutch cooperation agency Wild Geese, has supported a project from the Rural Women’s Workers‘ Movement of the Northeast (Movimento da Mulher Trabalhadora Rural do Nordeste: MMTR-NE) – Balaio do Fica na Roça (A Hamper to Stay on the Farm).
According to information published by the Ministry of Health, at the beginning of the month (07/06), the Northeast presented the largest proportional increase in official COVID-19 cases in Brazil. The states that comprise the region corresponded to 31.2% of all records of the disease around the country, almost double those of the previous month. The pandemic is arriving at an accelerated rate in small towns and rural, riverine and fishing communities, inhabited by and more significantly affecting women.
According to Jacy Barreto de Sousa, resident of the Serrinha municipality (Bahia) and State Director of the MMTR-NE, the pandemic situation has been very hard for rural women workers: “They support themselves through produce and sales of their products. Many produce food for the National School Meals Programme (Programa Nacional de Alimentação Escolar: PNAE) and, given that schools are closed, they cannot produce since they have nobody to deliver to,” she declared, referring to the closure of markets and the scrapped government programme through which 30% of purchases by states and municipalities were aimed at family farming products.
Verônica Santana is from the town of Santa Luzia do Itanhin (Sergipe) and is an activist and ex-Coordinator of the MMRT-NE. She noted that, since 2016, rural women in the Northeast have faced the dismantling of various policies and institutional arenas for social participation related to family farming. She cites the example of the cultural and production potential of home gardens and says that such achievements go unnoticed in current public policies: “There have been setbacks to the recognition of women’s production spaces, such as home gardens and those ‘around the house’, as being true agri-food systems, given their diversity of production, and that they are responsible for families’ food security and income generation. In the 2015 March of the Daisies we managed to position home garden production as a public policy arena that requires specific funding,” she recalled.
For Verônica, the current government has demonstrated neither commitment to nor sensitivity about the demands of family farmers during the pandemic. For this reason, rural social movements have put pressure on parliamentarians to approve Draft Bill 735/2020 to provide emergency measures and access to universal credit for rural women: “We demand emergency financing for family and peasant farming, including women’s production as a line of action, and a return to the Food Acquisition Programme (Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos: PAA) as an important strategy for commercialization and to combat hunger, serving people in social vulnerability,” she declared.
The Balaio do Fica na Roça (A Hamper to Stay on the Farm) Project
Faced with this challenging situation, the MMRT-NE’s Executive Coordinators and Directors decided collectively and in solidarity to benefit the nine states in the Northeast region. Despite distances and limited resources, the project provided a new dynamic for listening and information exchange. In the project, the women reconstructed the unity and solidarity of being a rural woman worker from the northeast and outlined their main needs at this time in the pandemic. In this way, the resources from CESE aimed to provide emergency support in food and healthcare through the “Balaio do Fica na Roça” initiative.
The project benefited 100 families from 22 municipalities with staple food baskets, facemasks and cleaning and hygiene kits. Aline Carneiro de Paula, resident of Conde (Paraíba) and Administrative and Financial Coordinator of the MMTR-NE, explained that the distribution of food products to different locations respected each region’s food tastes and culture: “In Maranhão the women prefer to substitute cornmeal for more rice because they aren’t used to eating cornmeal. In Paraíba, the women could not give up purchasing manioc flour from the area and having rapadura sugar at the markets and, thinking about their children, we included popcorn,” she said.
The care kits gave access to masks, hand sanitizer and medications for many women who live in precarious conditions: “We came across some very precarious and vulnerable situations – women without access to drinking water, without monitoring by health workers, in wattle and daub houses, homes without electricity, and hunger,” Aline added.
As well as staple food baskets and hygiene and cleaning kits, the MMTR-NE provided contextualized prevention guidance about the pandemic for these communities: “We thought of the female beneficiaries who had no schooling and could not access the technology required to print materials. For this reason, we decided, through dialogue, maintaining safe social distancing, using masks and hand sanitizer, to pass on the principal guidance for combatting COVID-19,” she explained, referring to the option to pass on information orally.
Jacy Barreto explained the importance of CESE’s support: “It came at a very opportune moment, given that rural women workers are not able to sell their produce. We are grateful to CESE and its Executive Board, which encouraged the drafting of the project. The only thing the women have is the government’s emergency assistance for families with four, five, six people in the home. On its own, this money is not enough for survival,” she noted.
Resistance and solidarity
At this time, when constant protection and reinvention is required, the MMTR-NE has moved towards participating in emotional support networks, ones for solidarity and struggle against the pandemic and for the dismantling of public policies practiced by the current government. Social networks, even with precarious access to the internet, have provided an arena for sharing information, debates and acceptance: “We face the challenge of mobilizing and conducting our activism through social media, either as listeners, debaters or producers. We are in dialogue about the impact of COVID-19 on our lives, outlining strategies for confrontation, demanding public policies and applying pressure for more effective assistance from government officials and parliamentarians to help those most in need,” Aline Carneiro declared.
According to Aline, understanding this new way of fighting for rights, without going out onto the streets, is an act of respect and love for others. For her, as well as virtual engagement by participating in online meetings and live streaming events, care, emotional support and mental health are relevant discussions for the movement’s members: “Whenever possible we talk about this with our colleagues. We are physically isolated, but close to each other around the issue of care and emotional support. We are also aware of the increased burden of domestic labour, are engaged in the campaign for the fair division of domestic labour and care work, and even more aware of the increase in violence against women in these times of pandemic. We have joined so many others, putting pressure on the State for the protection of women and decent conditions for their survival and for that of their children,” she stated.
In these times of pandemic, it is women who play a fundamental role in coordination and prevention activities, and in the defence of rights, particularly in reference to food, health and education. CESE’s support represents a recognition of the importance of this work in a context of increased human rights violations and attacks on democratic freedoms.