On a sweltering morning, Ivone and Iza Farias load their handmade crabbing traps into their boat and set off along the Mocajuba River in the Amazonian mangroves of northern Brazil. The motor’s rattle drowns out the hum of cicadas and trills of birds as they glide down the still estuary. One by one, Iza tosses the baited traps into the water by the riverbank as the boat chugs along.
“This is our supermarket,” she tells Mongabay, gesturing toward the spindly roots stretched into the water. “This is where our money comes from. This is where everything we have comes from.”
The shellfish gatherers circle back and guide the boat toward the submerged traps, pulling them out of the water in hope of finding a crab inside. They keep the large crabs and toss back the small ones. Harvesting the crabs this way, along with practices like not fishing during the crabs’ breeding season, helps preserve the population.
Sisters Ivone and Iza live in the São João da Ponta Extractive Reserve, a protected area that balances the needs of traditional communities and wildlife conservation by allowing sustainable, small-scale extractive practices, such as hunting, fishing and harvesting. It’s one of 23 protected areas overlapping the world’s largest continuous belt of mangroves that covers the Amazonian coast of Brazil’s Amapá, Pará and Maranhão states.
In the past two decades, Brazil has lost 20% of its mangrove cover. Extractive reserves play a crucial role in mitigating the significant impacts of human activities on mangroves, which are vital ecosystems for preventing coastal erosion, storing carbon and supporting millions of people. Mangroves store more carbon per hectare than tropical rainforest, studies have found. However, in Brazil they continue to face localized threats such as fires, logging, and the encroachment of monocultures like coconut and oil palm plantations.
Crucial to controlling these threats are women like Ivone and Iza, who are part of the Mothers of the Mangroves network, an all-female collective with more than 800 fishers, shellfish collectors and artisans from 12 coastal extractive reserves in Pará. Working together, they act as guardians of the mangroves and their traditional heritage while ensuring financial security within their communities.
“To care for our coastline, our sea, our territory is a legacy and responsibility that we carry,” Renilde Piedade da Silva, a community leader in the Mothers of the Mangroves network in the Mocapajuba Marine Extractive Reserve, tells Mongabay during a visit to the São João da Ponta Extractive Reserve. “We, the Mothers of the Mangroves, have a mission to show that the mangroves are not just a source of income, food and livelihood; it’s responsible for life on the planet.”
Despite living in one of the world’s best-preserved mangrove areas, conditions for traditional communities remain far from ideal. Most lack infrastructure such as paved roads, basic sanitation and sometimes even clean drinking water. But the women tell Mongabay that what matters most to them is the preservation of their mangroves and their culture.
“Everything I am today is thanks to the Mothers of the Mangroves network,” Silva says. “We simply want our territory preserved and respected, both local residents and fisherpeople, especially women.”