PORTEIRINHA, Minas Gerais — Beneath the shade of the umbu tree, Maria Neves tells Maria José that ripe umbu fruit is like a woman on the brink of giving birth: It demands immediate attention. “Umbu doesn’t take a day off; it’s like milking cows, it’s every day,” says Maria Neves Almeida, a Caatinga dweller (or caatingueira) from the Furado da Roda community in the municipality of Porteirinha. Maria José dos Santos, known as Zezé in those semiarid valleys of northern Minas Gerais, agrees. “You’re there, under nature, harvesting. There’s no better wealth, no better health.” Zezé, an extrativist leader in the region, recounts that for decades, the livelihood of the small-scale farmer came from cotton. With the infestation of the cotton boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis), a type of beetle, in the 1990s, everything changed. “When we saw the cotton turn out this way, we thought it was the end of the road; everyone would starve,” she says. But it was in this infested territory that the traditional communities of northern Minas Gerais found hope in tastes and smells forgotten since childhood: native fruits. The coquinho azedo (sour coconut) is one of the fruits rescued by traditional peoples in the north of Minas Gerais, improving the health of people and biomes. Image by Sibélia Zanon. “In this season, everyone is harvesting the fruits, and the cooperative processes them into pulp. Since then, there has been a significant improvement,” says Zezé. “Back when we harvested cotton, it was at the cost of…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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