The sound of the scythes wielded by brothers Jorge and Ubirajara Cardia breaks the silence in the hills of Vargem Grande, in the south-west zone of Rio de Janeiro city. Quilombola from the Cafundá Astrogilda community, they harvest bananas the same way their ancestors used to. Every week, they select the bunches of prata, maçã, and Cavendish bananas, cut them down and, on the back of their mules, go down the hillside with the newly harvested crop.
Through sloping ways in the forest, they travel about 5km (3 miles) along paths first opened by the Indigenous Tupinambá people and enslaved workers of African descent.
The abundant banana groves cultivated by quilombola communities and traditional farmers are part of the designated Pedra Branca state park conservation area. There, the banana growing tradition guarantees more than financial and food security for these communities.
Through a crop culture passed down over many generations, gradually evolving into a model agroforestry system [the integration of trees and shrubs with crops and livestock], banana growers help restore and preserve the park’s biodiversity. Part of Unesco’s Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve, it is made up of 17 Rio neighbourhoods and is considered the world’s largest urban forest.
“In agroforestry, the management of banana crops demands less work, and we save time as we only need to prune the banana plant. Then, nature, with its own rhythm, does all the rest,” Jorge Cardia says.
Originally from south-east Asia and the west Pacific, the exotic fruit was brought to Brazil by Portuguese colonisers in the 16th century. At the Pedra Branca state park, banana plants are so numerous and robust they look like a living green tapestry, weaving among a variety of native and foreign tree species, such as embaúba, carrapeta, jacatirão and jabuticaba.
This landscape exists only because of agroforestry, the agricultural system that, by promoting a deep integration of crop species, animals and trees, moves in the opposite direction of agribusiness and monoculture. “I call it ‘agriculture of life’ because this way of growing food cherishes the forest, the water, the space we live in,” Jorge says, proud of the flavourful organic bananas surrounding him.
Sarah Rubia Nunes also comes from a family of banana growers. She manages AgroVargem, an organisation of small-scale farmers who live and produce in the state park area and operate a local street market, where they sell about 250-300kgs (500-660lbs) of bananas each week. “Agroecology is no longer only about growing crops; it is a way of living. It is about the way I choose the world I want to live in,” she says.
If, back in the day, the landscape consisted of “banana groves here, forest there”, as Ubirajara says, through time, “everything gradually blended”. Now, the banana growers are true caretakers of the urban forest. Yet they have not always been treated as allies of nature’s conservation.
When Pedra Branca state park was created as a conservation area in 1974 to protect its 12,500 hectares (30,888 acres) of forest, its environmental management plan forbade the farmers, most of them living in the park, from using the land and from planting any exotic species, including bananas, allegedly harmful to the native ones.
Authorities should also relocate residents outside the park. But they stayed, and what had been a temporary situation became permanent, and local banana growers have gradually adapted to that environment.
Over time, the ecosystem also adjusted. Species that create little shade, such as the embaúba and the grandiúva, thrived alongside the banana plants, which require a lot of light. And so the region’s agroforestry systems emerged.
Annelise Fernandez, an environmental sciences professor at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, says the tension between the public authority and the farmers living and working in the park stems from a reluctance to recognise the role of traditional communities in preserving ecosystems.
“Parks are generally created in a very unilateral way, causing forced eviction and deterritorialising the communities. A more effective solution is to reconcile land rights and environmental conservation,” Fernandez says. “Often, these areas are preserved enough to become parks precisely because of communities that have long been living harmoniously with the ecosystem.”
Nunes highlights the role of traditional banana growers to preserve the Pedra Branca state park: “They have never destroyed the forest. Quite the contrary; as they manage it for their subsistence, they end up preserving it.”
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, agroforestry systems can reach up to 80% of the biodiversity of natural forests, improve soil health, water management and livelihood resilience, helping to mitigate climate change.
After several decades of fighting for land rights, in 2010 the State Institute of the Environment, which manages the park, recognised the role of traditional farmers as conservation agents.
In November 2023, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva issued a national decree establishing a framework for the coexistence between conservation and quilombola communities’ ways of living, culture and land integrity.
Yet banana growers face challenges posed by real estate speculation around Pedra Branca. It borders increasingly urbanised areas, where new middle-class condos are pressuring the forest and its natural resources – threatening the Atlantic Forest remnants and the waterways of Rio’s west zone.
“If you ask me what’s most harmful to the forest, [I’d say] it’s the real estate speculation surrounding the park, draining its water resources. The condos literally canalise the park’s rivers,” says Luz Stella Rodríguez Cáceres, an anthropology and geography specialist from Rio de Janeiro Federal University (UFRJ).
To safeguard farmers in Pedra Branca, Rodríguez Cáceres wants to see them included in FAO’s Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS). That would grant the banana growers recognition as income-generating communities and guardians of the forest. “This is a crucial framework to food heritage and agroforestry systems,” Rodríguez says.
Nunes says preserving the land and the community’s sustainable lifestyle is an act of resistance. “Agro-ecological family farming is resisting the delusional expansion of agribusiness and monoculture,” he says, remembering the pandemic – when markets would have run out of stock – and underlining pesticide abuse in agribusiness.
“In times of crisis,” he says, “it is the family farming that feeds the city.”
