Food and nutritional security in Quilombo communities: racism and symbolic violence

Abstract

This is a study on food and nutritional security in quilombola communities in two municipalities of Recôncavo Bahia: Maragojipe and Santo Amaro. It aims to analyze food and nutrition security. This study follows a qualitative approach methodology of the action research type with workshops and community participation. The wealth of knowledge and practices of these populations was observed, forms of resilience and resistance against food and environmental racism, and other violence that they experience in their daily lives. It was possible to discuss alternatives with the communities when confronting adversities, mainly due to food racism and food and nutritional insecurity. Concluded that popular education and the appreciation of the traditional knowledge of this population, as well as the leading role of leaders in the production of shared knowledge, strengthen living and food conditions, however there is also a need for public policies for the better development of activities fishing, shellfish farming to guarantee food and nutritional security.

Keywords:
Food and Nutrition Security; Racism; Ethnic Violence; Sociocultural Territory

Resumo

Trata-se de um estudo sobre a Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional (SAN) em comunidades quilombolas em dois municípios do Recôncavo Baiano: Maragojipe e Santo Amaro. Tem como objetivo analisar as condições de vida, trabalho e saúde de pescadores artesanais e os desafios para a segurança alimentar e nutricional. O estudo segue a metodologia de abordagem qualitativa do tipo pesquisa-ação com oficinas e participação da comunidade. Observou-se a riqueza de saberes e práticas dessas populações, formas de resiliências e resistências contra o racismo alimentar, ambiental e outras violências que vivenciam em seus cotidianos. Foi possível arguir alternativas junto às comunidades, ao confrontar adversidades, sobretudo em função do racismo alimentar e da insegurança alimentar e nutricional. Concluiu-se que a educação popular e a valorização dos saberes tradicionais, bem como o protagonismo das lideranças na produção de conhecimentos compartilhados, fortalecem as condições de vida e alimentação, entretanto há também necessidade de políticas públicas para o melhor desenvolvimento das atividades da pesca, da mariscagem para a garantia de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional.

Palavras-chave:
Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional; Racismo; Violência Étnica; Território Sociocultural

Introduction

In the Recôncavo region of Bahia, quilombola communities experience health inequities that affect their Food and Nutrition Security (FNS). FNS is defined as the realization of everyone’s right to regular and permanent access to quality food in sufficient quantity, without compromising access to other essential needs, based on health-promoting food practices that respect cultural diversity and are environmentally, culturally, economically, and socially sustainable (Brazil, 2006), which is especially important to emphasize as essential for guaranteeing FNS. In other words, respect for diversity, culture, and sustainability is indispensable. For quilombola communities, recent studies (Duarte et al., 2024; Maciel et al., 2021; Araújo et al., 2020) reveal food and nutrition insecurity (FNI) at varying levels and even situations of chronic hunger.

The reality of quilombola communities remains unequal compared with that of other groups, despite advances in improving the overall population’s health status related to broader healthcare coverage, basic sanitation, lower infant mortality, immunization, and expanded and formalized income-transfer programs. Notably, undernutrition, obesity, and other chronic diseases are identified in this population group. A study conducted in Maranhão in 2015 found a high prevalence of undernutrition among quilombola children under 5 years of age (Silveira, Padilha, & Frota, 2020). Overweight and obesity were prevalent among quilombola women, most of them aged 30-39 years, in Vitória da Conquista, Bahia (Soares & Barreto, 2014) and in other Bahian municipalities (Soares & Barreto, 2014; Santos et al., 2020).

Also relevant are the problems experienced by quilombola communities related to environmental pollution and its effects in the name of economic development. Large enterprises and multinational corporations have been established near riverbanks and mangroves, promoting severe environmental degradation and affecting native species on land and at sea. These enterprises caused environmental damage, directly affecting the ways of life of traditional communities that depend largely on extractivism of native species, small-scale fishing, and shellfish gathering.

In this context, there is insufficient public policy action to protect the territory, the environment, and the health of the residents of these communities, even after repeated mobilizations denouncing violations of the human right to adequate food. By contrast, these traditional communities draw on ancestral knowledge and engage in forms of resistance against the inequities they experience. Practices related to fishing and shellfish harvesting, the cultivation of food and plants both for consumption and for maintaining rituals and beliefs, are examples of resilient knowledge and practices that demonstrate these communities’ capacity to confront the adversities imposed by capital-driven enterprises in the name of development. Their traditional knowledge and everyday practices reveal themselves as resilient strategies for survival despite social and economic adversity.

Against this backdrop, this study aims to analyze the living, working, and health conditions of small-scale fishing communities descended from quilombolas and how these conditions interfere with their situation of food and nutrition (in)security.

Methods

This descriptive qualitative action-research study was conducted in traditional quilombola communities in the municipalities of Maragojipe (the Giral Grande community) and Santo Amaro (the Cambuta, Acupe, and São Braz communities), in Bahia, from August 2022 to October 2023. The participatory research developed in these communities was primarily concerned with seeking solutions to the FNI experienced daily by their residents. The chosen action-research method aimed to clarify difficulties related to households’ access to, availability of, consumption of, and stability of food and nutrition, while also valuing and encouraging awareness of the FNS dimensions in order to transform the reality of these communities. Two representatives of the social movement Conselho Pastoral da Pesca (CPP), which has supported the community for more than 5 years, participated in this work, which further facilitated coordination with the researchers.

To address this study’s objectives, we adopted procedures that involved community member reflection and active participation. Listening to the problems they faced and to how they understood food security and insecurity produced meaningful statements about cultural food practices and the foundational complexity surrounding access to food in each specific context, as well as interpretations of the meanings attached to elements surrounding the right to food.

The exploratory phase aimed to understand the challenges faced by the communities: lack of resources to acquire work tools; racist information about dietetics; undernutrition; anxiety and fear related to various forms of violence that in some way threaten FNS; and lack of access to techniques for processing shellfish and fish for inclusion in school meals (PNAE). This study is nested in a broader project (Health, Environment, and Work of Quilombola Small-Scale Fishermen and Fisherwomen of the Bay of All Saints) that gathered available information on the reality of these communities through photographs and conversation circles.

The themes that emerged from the meetings included aspects related to insufficient or weak factors linked to the dimensions of FNS and the Human Right to Adequate Food (HRAF) (Daufenback, Coelho, & Bógus, 2021). Once the problems surrounding the topic had been understood, practical community challenges that could allow intervention and interaction between researchers and participants were assessed and selected. On this matter, we followed Barbier (2007), who also embraces participants’ difficulties for analysis, selection, weighing, and prioritization of the issues.

Initially, conversation circles were held, focusing on food-related knowledge and practices. The themes generated in these circles gave rise to workshops which, because of their itinerant nature, made it possible to become familiar with part of the local reality. The information produced was then organized into categories and related to the dimensions of FNS. These dimensions followed the study by Pereira et al. (2019), which assessed factors related to the theme in municipalities in Bahia, and FAO (2014) regarding FNS in Brazil.

The Research Ethics Committee (REC) approved the project. The names of the individuals mentioned are not fictitious, at the request of the communities, as a strategy to make this reality visible.

Results and Discussion

Eight meetings were held with the community’s active participation in the construction process: the first two were devoted to building rapport, identifying key participants, and agreeing on the action-research schedule, followed by six thematic workshops aimed at producing knowledge and changing the situations of inequity reported by community members.

The traditional riverside communities of Cambuta, Acupe and São Braz are located between the banks of the mouth of the Subaé River and the Bay of All Saints, in eastern Bahia. The population living in these communities is mainly engaged in small-scale fishing and shellfish gathering activities. They carry values, knowledge, and customs linked to these activities and to African ancestry.

The quilombo of Cambuta is located in an urban neighborhood of Santo Amaro, and much of its population lives on the edge of the mangrove. In addition to fishing and shellfish gathering, its residents also make ceramic handicrafts. The quilombo of Acupe is regarded by its elders as the area chosen by freed enslaved people to settle and has more than 7,500 inhabitants. It lies 18 km from Santo Amaro, in a rural area, and its main activity is fishing and shellfish gathering. The quilombo of São Braz is located in the district of the same name and preserves much of the memory of Santo Amaro, despite society’s attempt to erase that history. The community has just over 2,500 inhabitants, who to this day live from harvesting hog plum fruit, handicrafts, fishing, and shellfish gathering.

The community of Giral Grande, located in the rural area of the municipality of Maragojipe, is part of a cluster of ten quilombola communities totaling 550 families. Giral Grande is made up of the Calheiros family, an extended family of approximately 30 people, including children and older adults, whose activities include subsistence farming, the production of honey, cassava flour and related products, fishing, shellfish gathering, and textile-scrap handicrafts.

The results of these meetings gave rise to three analytical categories: Solidarity for Survival; Food Racism; and Sustainability, Environmental Protection, and FNS.

Solidarity for survival

The struggle for existence appears to be a constant in the different places where quilombola communities live. During the meetings, what we heard allowed us to learn about different ways of resisting the problems that hindered the preservation of ancestry, forms of social reproduction, permanence in the territory, and guaranteed FNS. The food practices of these communities express a language of resistance that transcends rationality, because it entails preserving the meanings of eating and living in that place. Thus, for example, the production of honey and cassava flour evokes an original language as a living memory of ancestry.

Previous studies portraying quilombola FNI have revealed specific features of these communities in ensuring food survival, especially with regard to their use of territory (Barreto & Freitas, 2017). The notion of territory used here refers to the perspectives of horizontalities and verticalities (Manzi & Anjos, 2021). In other words, traditional populations develop lived experiences and economic, social, and cultural relations in geographic space, as well as strategies of resistance sustained by solidarity. This way of being established in the territory is consistent with the conception of territoriality as a movement of reconstruction and resignification of identities through the occupation of space in an inclusive, plural, and democratic manner (Afonso, Correa, & Silva, 2020).

Whereas in urban households the assessment of FNS reveals perceptions concerning the regularity of food availability and access, for traditional populations the uncertainties go further: they are related to the value of traditional foods and their symbolic importance, to the historical threats to land access, and to human actions and environmental racism (Paulino Filho, 2022). Human actions pursued under the banner of economic development have caused harmful interference in nature. These actions have affected traditional communities most severely, as they are more vulnerable due to the lack of public authorities in guaranteeing rights. In this way, environmental racism can be characterized as practices that degrade the environment and, consequently, human life in territories inhabited by people regarded as inferior (Santos & Anjos, 2022).

Because of their historical and symbolic relationships with the territory, integrated into everyday practices and ways of being and doing, these communities are deeply connected with their environment. During field visits, several demonstrations of this relationship of coexistence and respect were identified, expressed in their practices and knowledge, as well as in different forms of food production observed in the communities studied.

In Giral Grande, for example, the rural community shows a variety of forms of food production. During repeated visits and activities with the community, some foods produced and consumed in natura were observed, such as vegetables, fruits, roots and tubers, cassava derivatives, honey, and animal protein sources such as chickens and eggs. Everything not produced by the community itself, such as processed foods, comes from local market networks in Maragojipe.

In addition, proximity to the Paraguaçu River and the Bay of All Saints ensures other forms of subsistence and food provision. The capture of shellfish and fish is used to supplement household production and secure income through the sale of fish, while also contributing to family diets. Although family and extractivist food production may be susceptible to seasonal climate variation, social relations of solidarity among families constitute a strategy used to guarantee FNS. As can be seen in the words of Dona Lenira, a quilombola leader, “I don’t let anyone go hungry here.”

According to her, relations of solidarity and mutual aid go beyond kinship ties and are common among the women and families in the area. The bond among community members is expressed in the everyday and seasonal activities carried out by groups, such as the digitório. This term is defined as the help one receives from friends and neighbors in weeding, clearing brush, and opening up scrubland, pasture, or planted areas. Digitórios help ensure subsistence at critical moments for a family that, due to lack of financial resources or physical condition, is unable to perform such tasks. It also allows work to be organized in a communal and cooperative way.

In another direction, in the community of Cambuta, Santo Amaro, economic and social relations are different. In economic terms, the information collected in this territory shows productive dependence on the sea and mangrove, which lie contiguous to the community. This dependence makes food availability more fragile and uncertain because of the historical and ongoing pollution of the waters by urban waste and contamination by lead and mercury derived from environmental liabilities (Manzi & Anjos, 2021), according to information provided by Paulo Sérgio, a fisherman from Cambuta, who stated:

“The lead contamination of mangroves and the territory is a consequence of the existence, in the past, of a pulp factory in the municipality. Because of this contamination, the population has access to compromised food and experiences miscarriages, anemia, skin diseases, and so on.” (Paulo Sérgio).

In fact, the contamination suffered is a consequence of the Brazilian Lead Company (COBRAC), which discharged slag containing lead, cadmium, and other potentially toxic elements into the soil, water, and atmosphere (Ribeiro-Silva et al., 2020), as well as mercury waste emitted by the pulp factory. Added to this problem of pollution and environmental contamination is the struggle to keep the territory. This community, deprived of free areas for food production and animal husbandry, also lives with territorial disputes involving private companies. All of this can be regarded as environmental racism (Barreto & Freitas, 2017).

According to some scholars of the topic, environmental racism is characterized as a set of practices established through governmental, legal, and economic policies that, under the banner of development, harm the environment in which groups deemed inferior live, work, and lead their devalued lives (Santos & Anjos, 2022). However, these practices do not occur without resistance and struggle from the affected population groups.

The realities that situations of insufficiency in the production, marketing, and access to food generate FNI in the territory, with hunger as a possible outcome. For the communities studied, the experience of hunger is lived under circumstances of disinformation and the erasure of traditional knowledge, the loss of intangible records, and the disappearance of native plant and animal species. For this reason, survival strategies are established through the valuing of local elements and persistence in keeping ancestral memory alive by means of forms of knowledge and practices of resistance rooted in what nature offers.

The entire food culture functions as resistance and a means of preserving community knowledge. In Giral Grande, the women reported using Bereguedê and Cizeira (black seeds that become sweet when ripe) as snacks for children, “which is a bite for the boys while lunch isn’t ready.” Another strategy used in both communities is dried-fish farofa as food during fishing. It is clear that there is some difficulty accessing other foods that would guarantee dietary diversity and health during work. Mr. Paulo (Cambuta) says they go out to fish carrying only dried-fish farofa, which harms their health because of the time they spend working with only that food. He recognizes that it would be important to have resources to buy fruits and vegetables. Lack of access to dietary diversity can become undernutrition or food insecurity. At the same time, the use of dry preparations during fishing appears to be an ancestral strategy for maintaining food safety, given the long hours spent in the tide or the mangrove.

Another problem experienced is a lack of or limited access to potable water during prolonged exposure to the sun. These are some of the elements that compromise the health and quality of life of this population group. Added to this are difficulty accessing healthcare, inadequate sanitation, and lack of techniques for processing fish and shellfish.

But when we think about community strategies of mutual aid, such as the digitório, we understand that hunger is felt and expressed in another way. Not through scarcity or the absolute – or almost absolute – lack of food, since these are food-producing people. What impacts is the lack of public policies that would provide better conditions for sanitation, housing, healthcare, education, and information so that, while respecting these groups’ singular social organization, they may have dignified working conditions for using and marketing their products and for safeguarding their health. Some studies indicate FNI among groups made vulnerable by limited inclusion in public policies due to social invisibility as rights holders – Declaration Launching the Brazilian Environmental Justice Network (2001).

Sustainability, environmental protection, and FNS – “The tide is a mother.”

When reflecting on the ways shellfish gatherers, fishers, and artisanal fishing women and men live in their everyday doing – which involves both work and leisure – we cannot think of their lives and survival apart from sustainable contact with the environment and natural resources. As an ancestral and historical legacy of these traditional populations, the sea, the river, the tide, the mangrove, the forest, and the air constitute subjective and symbolic aspects of life in community, surpassing their economic and material importance.

However, the most common complaints reported by traditional quilombola shellfish gatherers and fishers concern changes in the natural environment, scarcity and finitude of native species, and atmospheric and water pollution. All of these events arise from the incompatibility between the model of development and patterns of consumption in our society, which run counter to the preservation of natural resources and the environment and unfairly affect these traditional and quilombola communities more severely.

Environmental injustice affecting populations belonging to racially discriminated groups, traditional peoples, working-class neighborhoods, and marginalized and vulnerable populations have been defined as the mechanism through which economically and socially unequal societies assign the greatest share of the environmental harms of development (Souza, 2013). In Brazil, these populations display ethnic and gender characteristics common in national statistics related to risk of violence, FNI, low schooling, rights violations, and impaired health when compared with another share of the population characterized as white. Their identities are associated with violence and delinquency rather than, predominantly, with recognition, prestige, and power (Ribeiro & Sousa Junior, 2018).

In this context of racial discrimination, the quilombola fishing and shellfish-gathering communities in this study are affected by environmental racism. When analyzing the experiences of the populations of Santo Amaro and Maragojipe in relation to different types of environmental injustice, one sees that these are distinct.

The dumping of toxic waste and environmental pollution promoted by industrial enterprises, which affect the communities of Cambuta, São Braz, and Acupe, are longstanding and have worsened over the years. However, the unequal impacts caused by climate change are common to and perceived by all the communities, especially when related to extractivist production, putting the populations’ FNS at risk.

When examining the causes and historical roots of environmental racism, it is impossible not to establish connections between it and structural racism. The locations where these communities are established, and their rural and peripheral characteristics, reveal the situations of violation and oppression suffered by these quilombola populations and connect to the history of slavery of which Afro-diasporic populations are victims.

We should also consider that these communities experience insufficient public policies. This perpetuates the population’s lack of access to information, with consequences for the guarantee of social justice and access to health. These observed economic, social, and health-related inequities generated by environmental and structural racism produce impacts that are revealed in deteriorating health and FNS. The reduction of land, native species, the widening of sandbanks, and mangrove deforestation become common challenges to the communities, though in distinct ways, especially for populations dependent on the tide and the mangrove, such as the communities located in Santo Amaro.

Illness among shellfish gatherers and fishers due to chronic noncommunicable diseases is growing. Statements made by the participants during the workshops function as denunciations of the consequences and crosscutting effects of labor practices when healthcare is fragile and ineffective. Joint pain, diabetes, and hypertension were common complaints in both the communities of Santo Amaro and Maragojipe. In addition to working more and producing less, diets have become poorer because they consume more ultra-processed foods due to easier access and lower prices, and because they take nutritionally insufficient foods to their worksites (tide areas and fishing trips), such as fish farofa. In many situations, they use salt water to hydrate themselves, even while suspecting that this practice is inadequate.

Food racism

One of the strongest findings in our contact with quilombola communities was the perception of how unprepared health professionals are to deal with a culturally specific reality. These communities inhabit the world in a way in which nature is not an “other” to be appropriated or exploited disrespectfully, but rather something of which they understand themselves to be an integral part. In this way, they relate to the land, mangroves, rivers, and seas so as to sustain the existence of all living beings. They fish, gather shellfish, plant, and cultivate the land, producing food from these labor activities but also for the subsistence of the community itself. Nature, therefore, appears as essential to the maintenance and conservation of their own existence, and what is produced from it carries symbolic importance.

In the perception of these people, there is a symbiosis between what comes from the land and the mangrove and their own existence, as exemplified by dendê palm fruit. About this, D. Lenira says: “The doctor forbade me to eat flour and palm oil. He said the oil is poison. He told me to eat tubers [...] I felt so hungry that I fainted in the mangrove.”

When seeking healthcare, people from these communities are violated in their food culture when they are deprived of consuming what they themselves produce under the justification of preserving health or preventing disease. These medical prescriptions disregard the importance of traditional foods in these people’s life histories. The affective, ancestral, and identity-related meaning is also inscribed in the eating habits of these communities. Foods such as cassava flour, dendê palm oil, and shellfish are, through the action of health professionals, placed on the list of foods considered harmful and therefore understood as risks to these people’s physical integrity.

These prohibitive prescriptions are not accompanied by any technical-scientific explanation, since, when asked which type of oil should not be consumed, it is only dendê palm oil that is cited as “poison.” When we think about the relationship between dendê palm oil and Bahian cuisine, we know that it is strongly influenced by African cuisine (on the African continent, dendê palm oil is called palm oil, referring to the tree from which it is obtained, and it is widely used in food practices), thus constituting an element of Afro-Brazilian identity (Santos et al., 2023). Cassava flour, in addition to being deeply present in the customs and eating habits of Black people, is also strongly linked to the food culture of Indigenous peoples.

It is well known how relevant the land and the relationship established with it are to the survival and subsistence of quilombola peoples. In this sense, the food that is produced takes on identity-related importance because it expresses food culture through bodies of knowledge shared across generations (Santos, 2023), as well as among families, given the communal character of these social groups.

We understand that these prohibitions appear to be imbued with stereotypes regarding the nutritional and dietary value of these foods, not because of their nutritional composition, but because of their relationship to a culture from which there has long been an attempt to distance, erase, and extinguish since the colonization of this country. The racism that structures Brazilian society also manifests itself among health professionals, taking the form of food or dietary racism, sustained by ahistorical discussions about healthy eating. The prohibition of certain foods without considering and respecting a population group’s food culture is itself as a form of violence that produces illness rather than health. D. Francisca, indignantly, says:

“Doctors tell us what we cannot eat, but they do not tell us what we can eat. I wanted to know what I can and cannot eat, because the doctor forbade me from eating so many things! I’m hardly eating anything, because I don’t know what I’m allowed to eat. He told me to stop eating bread, cassava, which I love, cassava flour, and any sweet fruit. So now I’m not eating!” (D. Francisca).

According to Santos (2023), food racism manifests itself through barriers related to difficulty accessing the natural resources the territory offers, to health and social assistance services, as well as to the devaluation and abandonment of Black people’s food culture. When health professionals’ care interferes with and places this food culture at stake, we may think of dietary racism (considering diet as the regular choices a person makes to sustain their nutrition).

It is also apparent that this discriminatory conduct refers not only to the foods themselves, but also to the people to whom it is directed. There is negligence toward traditional knowledge, as well as toward how these Black individuals are treated when they need healthcare. Thus, health ceases to be a fundamental right, and complaints are treated with disdain by health professionals, as reflected in the statements of the study participants – an example of the racial violence suffered by those rendered invisible as Brazilian citizens.

One example of blatant racism in the conduct of health professionals was how one of the sons of a shellfish gatherer was treated when there was a diagnostic suspicion of respiratory problems. All foods of protein origin were suspended. The boy was only six years old at the time and was in a developmental stage, yet there was no justification for that restriction. In addition, no guidance was provided as to which foods should be used to replace animal protein or to ensure an adequate protein intake of plant origin. The health professional’s guidance caused anguish, despair, and lack of confidence in healthcare within the community, which, in addition to being precarious, proved ineffective.

When we assess the FNS of these communities, we are directed to the dimensions of access and utilization, because although these communities have access to food through their own production or through what nature provides in an intrinsic relationship of communion, the information accessed through professionals – who are attributed the legitimate and hegemonic knowledge about health – creates a conflict between ancestral, orally transmitted knowledge and the misguided guidance received. This conflict generates uncertainty about what to use, whether such foods are appropriate, and whether they may be harmful. Food is available, but if it cannot be eaten, what foods can replace it? This leads to another issue: the search for foods in the formal market (supermarkets, bakeries, butcher shops) and informal market (street fairs), without any guarantee that the choices being made are the most appropriate and the ones that will ensure health and well-being. These factors can drive food insecurity that might otherwise be avoidable.

This possibility is troubling because, according to II VIGISAN (2022), a survey conducted by the PENSSAN network (Brazilian Research Network on Sovereignty and Food and Nutrition Security) on the FNS situation of the Brazilian population, food insecurity predominated in 60% of households headed by individuals who self-identified as Black (Black and brown), and was even more of concern when these households were located in rural areas of the country (three times higher than in households headed by white individuals). Traditional communities, including quilombola communities and communities of fishers and shellfish gatherers, mostly live in rural areas and are characteristically Black.

Beyond food racism, the communities experience other issues related to the complexity of the territory in which they live. In Santo Amaro, for example, the consumption of ultra-processed foods is observed and justified by the limited availability of diverse fresh foods suitable for consumption, given their more urban context and their exposure to the limitations generated by environmental liabilities. This situation is characterized by what Llaila Afrika (2012) called nutricide, referring to the difficulty or lack of access to healthy foods that should be part of food culture. According to this author, nutricide is equivalent to the food genocide of the Black population. For the communities studied, this genocide is expressed through inadequate planting conditions and the reduction in the production of native species available for capture, thus constituting a food desert.

Against this backdrop, our work as a research group was established as an attempt to deconstruct this entire misunderstanding, showing how these recommendations amount to violence against the food culture of this community. The workshops aimed to reduce doubts and discuss alternatives to the guidance received from professionals, in an effort to help maintain these people’s health in light of their needs.

Final considerations

This study sought alternatives together with the communities, especially regarding the role of universities in combating the challenges related to food racism, environmental racism, and FNI; and some of the possible fruits of this encounter with the community were made viable through the foundations of popular education and the valuing of the leadership of these communities. Notably, the production of shared knowledge is necessary to support the knowledge and practices of these traditional populations.

These actions will continue in other workshops to be conducted through partnership and support from the National Secretariat for Small-Scale Fisheries of the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture. Understanding the limitations of academia in addressing certain demands that emerged in the workshops, especially structural ones, the bodies responsible for guaranteeing the rights of these populations should assume their responsibilities – for example, the need for public resources to support fishing and shellfish-gathering activities. The attempt to coordinate with municipal and state managers will be a challenge to be faced jointly by researchers, academics, representatives of social movements, and the communities.

• Financial support:
  This study was not funded by any research funding agency.

Acknowledgments:

Pastoral Council for Fisheries (CPP), State Reference Center for |Occupational Health (CESAT), and Fiocruz for their assistance with the logistics of conducting this study.

Information: Research Ethics Committee (CEP) of the Bahia School of Medicine (CAAE: 58505822.1.0000.5577).

Data Availability Statement:

The data underlying the research are included in the manuscript.

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Edited by

• Editors:
  José Miguel Olivar
  Ramiro Fernandez Unsain

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  28 Aug 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  06 Jan 2025
• Reviewed
  22 June 2025
• Accepted
  23 Oct 2025