Rio, July 7, 2004 (Agência Brasil) - Partnerships established by the Council of Organizations Against Hunger and For Life (Coep) have made it possible to introduce new techniques to farmers in the semi-arid region of Northeast Brazil, via the "Cotton: Technology and Citizenship" project.
The farmers learned how to process cotton in mini-mills installed in local communities, became acquainted with new methods of cultivation, including ways to combat pests, and began to sell processed raw or baled cotton directly to the mills, increasing their income by as much as 100% in some localities.
The inclusion of the Ministry of Communications among the project's partners brought the targeted communities - many of which lacked even electricity - minicomputer centers with broadband internet access, revealed the Executive Secretary of the Coep, Gleise Peiter. This is a necessary instrument for farmers to be able to keep up with world cotton market price fluctuations, she explained.
For Peiter, the history of the Northeast is interfused with that of cotton, considered the region's white gold. Until the 1980's, cotton was planted, harvested, and sold by farmers to middlemen, who delivered the product to mills to be processed in bales. At the end of the '80's, the opening of the market to imports and the consequent introduction of the American boll weevil pest in plantations caused a sudden drop in production.
When the '80's began, 20 million people inhabited the semi-arid region of the Northeast. 2 million were engaged in the cultivation of 3.5 million hectares of cotton. A large share of the production was for export. Subsequent to the opening of the market and the boll weevil invasion at the end of the '90's, only 250 thousand people cultivated cotton in the region, in an area reduced to 135 thousand hectares.
This drop in production, together with the idle capacity of the mills, prompted the national Coep organization to implement the project initially in the municipality of Juarez Távora, in the state of Paraíba. It was later extended to low-income communities in five other municipalities in the states of Paraíba, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Alagoas, and Pernambuco.
The organization's current goal is to extend the product throughout the productive chain. Coep is introducing looms in the communities to involve women in the manufacture of cotton products. Another stage will be geared to providing water, electricity, and food in the semi-arid region, through the construction of cisterns, planting trees near houses - for use in clean-burning cooking systems - and incentives for raising sheep and goats. The idea is to create development poles in these municipalities.
Peiter recalls that just the change in the process of producing and selling cotton, which went from kilos to tons, has sparked the development of a local economy responsible for all the advances achieved so far.
One of the chief partners in the transfer of planting techniques is the Brazilian Agricultural Research Company (Embrapa).
Reporter: Alana Gandra
Translator: David Silberstein
