Representatives of different territories, partner organizations and Fiocruz programs got together at Quilombo da Fazenda, in Ubatuba (SP), between 3 and 6 November, to celebrate the beginning and plan actions of the project “Sustainable Development and Health Promotion in vulnerable populations subsisting on family agriculture and in rural and urban traditional communicities and peoples in the context of Covid-19”.
The initiative will directly involve 700 people from 38 communities in three regions of Rio de Janeiro and Ubatuba, in the state of São Paulo, encouraging the incorporation of social technologies, generation of labor and income, community organization, and families’ food and nutricional security.
The actions in the territories where they act are planned and coordinated by Fórum Itaboraí, in a dialogue with the communities themselves: Politics, Science and Culture in Health (Fiocruz Petrópolis), the Observatory of Sustainable and Healthy Territories of the Bocaina (Bocaina Program), and the Development Program for the Fiocruz Mata Atlântica Campus. The Vice-Presidency of Environment and Health Promotion and Care (VPAAPS) coordinates the project that brings together the different programs, attempting to create an atmosphere of management, monitoring, production of knowledge, and shared communication between the actions.
In addition to representatives of territorial programs of Fiocruz and of the Sergio Arouca National School of Public Health (Ensp), the meeting was also attended by farmers indigenous people, representatives of quilombos, caiçaras and institutional partners, such as Embrapa Agrobiologia, the National Articulation of Agroecology (ANA), Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), and the Forum of Traditional Communities of Angra dos Reis, Paraty and Ubatuba (FCT).
The program of the event consisted of participative methodologies that promoted the exchanging of experiences in rounds of conversation, in experiences in communities from Paraty and Ubatuba, in group activities that focused on different work fronts, and in the collective building of the project’s identity, which is now called “Ará”.
At the occasion, Hermano Castro, Vice-President of Environment and Health Promotion and Care (VPAAPS/Fiocruz), emphasized the importance of initiatives that promote sustainability and autonomy of communities in their territories, reinvigorating resistance processes that are historically protagonized and which were made even more complex by the pandemic: “Our role as a public institution is exactly this, to be a partner and to help build advancement. To aggregate means to guarantee investments, not only through solidarity, but also increasing and investing in this project”, he said.
Guilherme Franco Netto, coordinator of Fiocruz’s Health, Environment and Sustainability Program, says the meeting had a strategic importance from various points of view: on a local level, in the territories where the project will be developed, attempting to promote health and food security by means of agro ecology; and on regional, national and global levels, keeping in mind the wide acknowledgement of the articulation to defend the Mata Atlantica biome.
Franco Netto emphasizes that, in addition to that, the project materializes Fiocruz’s initiative to establish a health and agro ecology program with the goal of strengthening public policies that focus on health and agro ecology, on the defense of SUS and food sustainability. “Finally, it is very closely aligned with the aspirational vision of the 2030 Agenda and with the deliberations of the UN’s Conference of the Parties of the Climate Change Conference, which was recently concluded on 13 November, in Scotland”, he adds.
