Association of Mulungú Family Farmers, Paraíba State

The aim of the Association is to elaborate projects that improve the lives of the rural population and assist negotiations between the Mulungú Municipal Government and local residents.

Part of the project aims to empower community residents through collective work on arable areas with subsistence crops, so that all the families can maintain their crops with sustainable management and improve their yields.

Another area involves handicrafts workshops, training young people and mothers in sewing, painting on fabric, crochet, and embroidery.

The Association also promotes a youth group with cultural activities like theater groups, staging plays discussing the local reality.

The Project

With the project Dignity of Family Farmers in the Leo-Lândia Mulungú Agricultural Village, Paraíba, the association intends to empower the family farmers of the Leo-Lândia Agricultural Village to exercise their citizenship.

The proposal is to promote full access to public resources and services and empower them to fight discrimination on grounds of their adverse economic condition.

The project aims to foster the farmers’ own understanding as citizens with rights and to train them to fight for their interests with public agencies and civil society, with awareness-raising courses, development of skills for drafting petitions and other documents, and organizational practices for seminars and meetings with public administrators and community leaders.

The Leo-Lândia community was formed just over 10 years ago and consists of some 120 families, mostly descendents of residents from neighboring rural communities like Utinga, Castro, Lagoa de Castro, and Passagem de Castro.

The population has shown high school dropout and failure rates as well as serious diseases resulting from malnutrition and poor quality of the drinking water (like hepatitis).

The project will conduct a detailed participant diagnosis of the community’s current socioeconomic and environmental conditions, including primary data collection from each family in order to more precisely outline the community’s current situation and the progress made over the course of the project.