(I’ll worry about adding references once this text is the real deal, for now is just a draft of the soup in my head)

Objectives

• Regenerate land that was previously deforested by latifundium owners
• Resource redistribution by offering the possibility to own and develop land in a conscious way to low income people
• Offer permaculture education to the people who are working on the land
• Create worker co-ops to sell products in nearby cities
• Strength people’s relationships:
  • making them self-sufficient food-wise sharing their products with the community
  • safety net, support those who are in need
• Assist on permaculture research, understand Brazilian’s micro-climates, give back to the scientific community
• Scale: create forms of reproducing this framework of natural development + alternative governance models in other parts of the country
• Explore how to develop from purely agrarian communities to one that builds their own machinery. See open source ecology
• Offer these families opportunities to move away from an agrarian life if that’s what they desire, specially focusing on their children and their educational development

Focus group

• People from lower income who want to become farmers or are farmers and are open to develop and research permaculture techniques in Brazil

Connecting to these people:

• People involved in the MST movement might be able to help
  • Seems like they’re highly bureaucratic but their bureaucracy doesn’t seem related to corruption
• BH tem um setorial de agricultura urbana
  • I know about EMATER (my dad used to work there, I wonder if he still knows people)

What a successful first iteration of the project looks like

Who: One or two families that are low income and have very aligned principles with the Objectives session. By “family” I mean group of individuals who want to live and work together in the land. The idea is to connect with local MST folks here, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be them. Where: Nearby the Belo Horizonte region. Reason being: this is my city, my country, I know the social-economical context. I know the climate, I know the politics. It’s the most comfortable place where I can be more effective to develop a program like this. What: Buy land, lease it for free to this family or group of people for as long as they’re making the project happen. (Eventually give the land to them or allow them to buy it from us for cheap). Separate a few months of our lives, build a house together (restore a house together?). Put in practice permaculture practices, understand the environment around us, iterate, adapt, find organizations and partner with them to sell the food. I have no idea how long this takes. We have approximately 3 months, meaning we can’t really plant crops and get them. Maybe a first wave of some crops. We need to set up the sell agreements before we leave the country, but we will have well organized predictions of the production, so it’s fine I guess (or at least so my reductionist mind tells me).

Moving into a scalability

Let’s build an NGO. We give land to people and free support to education. Once they’re comfortably established they pay us back the land. So we can buy more land and help more people! → Ask money to rich organizations and people 🥺

• will EA ever fund us