“Two weeks, and still nothing,” Rosa sighs. Two weeks of no milk for herself, her two boys and the rest of the family. This scene resonates a driving theme through the rest of the film Garapa.
Garapa. A Brazilian term for raw sugar cane juice: something sweet, something dense with calories, but ultimately just that – saccharine. No vitamins, no minerals, no substance. To try and raise growing families predominantly on a diet of garapa understandably inflicts long-term strain on families in “developing countries” such as Brazil.
The film tells the story of Rosa, the family of a woman named Robertina who lives in Santa Rita, and the story of Lucia and her family, who live in favelas (slums) in Sao Joao. Both communities lie in Ceara, a northeast frontier region of Brazil and historically known as a backwater region (by even Brazilian standards). The families wait for monthly government payments via a “Zero Hunger” program to buy food for 10 to 12 days at a time.
Rosa’s husband at one point says, “Look, I am 28 years old and not once in my life have I eaten three meals in a single day.”
While one may ponder why none of these families grow food, scenes of wilted bean plants, dust furrows, and stagnant water holes suggest there are only slivers of life; slivers of life that cannot sustain entire growing families. Though it isn’t articulated directly in the film, the starkness of the agricultural landscape beckons the question of how it has become so devastated. According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), some 5.8 million metric tons of synthetic fertilizer were applied to Brazilian soils by the early 2000’s, averaging 90 kilograms per hectare. Furthermore, some 836 kilograms per hectare of pesticides were layered across these same plots during this time. WRI further elaborates that due to the “cash crop” demands for soybeans and soybean-based products internationally, monocultural systems require intense use of pesticides and fertilizers. This doesn’t even include growing sectors of cotton swaths, a crop that is also water-intensive.
Garapa illuminates the connections between weakening the living land of Ceara to its weakening families. With no way to holistically, or even profitably, grow crops for their own families or neighbors, Rosa, Robertina, and Lucia scrape by. Rosa’s son’s tooth rot, Robertina’s son’s scabies, and Lucia’s daughter’s malnutrition develop into demonstrably more deadly conditions.
Yet, alongside themes like helplessness, there is a strange sense of hope. When Rosa’s family receives monthly bean and rice rations bought via “Zero Hunger” money, a sense of ease and gratitude settles in; they don’t have to chug garapa and they thoroughly savor something with actual body. All the while, a sense of helplessness lingers between Rosa’s, Robertina’s, and Lucia’s familes- be it in the scenes of Robertina’s hung-over husband unable to go out in the fields and cultivate or the incredibly patriarchal culture where Lucia’s partner can sleep around with women in Sao Joao without any sort of grounding. Grounding to a profession, to his family, even to the community itself.
The real power of Garapa comes in the underlayers: digging through the dirt and scrum of daily Cearan living to innovate ways to bring about outlets for environmental, economic, political, and societal substance. A recent DC Food For All post notes that Oaxaca, Mexico, where many Hispanic immigrants to DC come from, face comparable food security issues to those living in Ceara, Brazil. Recent tactics to alleviate these food securities have arisen. Practical strategies include investing in rooftop gardens, constructing rainwater barrels, and establishing seed storage facilities. Furthermore, there are focused efforts to increase access to local food via farmer’s markets and actively promote initiatives for fair trade policies in both D.C. and Oaxaca (via Autonomous Network for Food Sovereignty and other groups).
Such grassroots rallying and transitioning to local food movements curb the influence of monocultures, especially if heirloom crops are brought back into the greenhouses and fields. Once polycultural diversity makes a presence, and people are able to see the enlivening of the soil, the surrounding watersheds and wildlife communities, the human community recognizes the power to such diversity. Never again will they be so easily swayed to shallow monocultural madness. To help curb the slide into monocultural madness, local grassroots institutions have taken action where district and federal governments might be lacking. The Common Good City Farm offers urban youth and residents opportunities to engage in the relatively subversive act of producing their own food, declaring their own independence from long-distance produce imports. The produce of the Farm and other urban garden scenes in D.C. are then able to feed institutions such as D.C. Central Kitchen, a locale offering a trifecta of meaningful food, meaningful employment, and meaningful community as those in poverty can gain work preparing food cultivated blocks from where they live. In turn, growing membership only aids in building an interconnected community, even an ecosystem, where every niche of food production can be fulfilled. A closed loop system sets in and those in D.C. begin to connect themselves to farmers the country and the globe over, including those in the dire straits of subsistence farming where Garapa unravels.
At the end of Garapa, the following Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics appear on the screen:
902 million people starve globally on a daily basis, with some 16,000 children in that population dying of malnutrition daily and averaging out to one child dying every five seconds. Some 1,400 people died during the course of the film.
