Every year, hundreds of women farmers in the Borborema region, in the semi-arid region of Paraíba, carry out marches against machismo and in defense of agroecology, a method that seeks to produce food according to ecological principles.
The protest they held on Monday (4), however, targeted a type of enterprise rarely associated with environmental damage: a wind energy complex.
“We are not against renewable energy,” farmer Roselita Victor da Costa Albuquerque, one of the coordinators of the 13th March for Women’s Life and Agroecology in Borborema, tells BBC News Brazil.
“We are against the industrial model of renewable energy production that is expanding across our region, a model that harms nature and women,” says Albuquerque.
The object of concern of the movement —which claims to have taken 4,000 women to the streets of Solânea (PB) this Monday—is the Serra da Borborema Wind Complex.
In charge of the company EDP Renováveis, which in 2019 obtained a prior license to carry out the project, the complex will occupy an area of 7,600 hectares —or 7,600 football fields— and will have a capacity of 302.5 MW, the enough to supply about 36 thousand homes. It will consist of eight wind farms with 55 turbines (wind turbines). EDP Renováveis said it was “committed to ensuring the minimum environmental impact” of its wind and solar parks.
The work is part of a context of rapid advancement of wind energy in Brazil and around the world.
On the one hand, the movement is seen as positive in helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; on the other hand, the expansion is associated with a series of conflicts and environmental damage in the Brazilian northeast (read more below).
Main sources of electricity in Brazil
According to the Ministry of Mines and Energy, wind farms, which in 2000 accounted for less than 1% of the national electricity matrix, began to account for 11% in 2021 and became the third main source in the country, behind hydroelectric plants (57% ) and thermal plants (12%).
Much of this growth occurred in the northeast region, which is home to 90% of the country’s installed wind energy capacity. And the share of this source should grow in the coming years, as works in progress or planned are delivered.
The advancement of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, is considered crucial for reducing the use of fossil fuels, whose burning accelerates climate change.
For women farmers in Borborema, however, the way in which this source of energy has expanded across the Brazilian semi-arid region threatens women and jeopardizes local ways of life.
Roselita Albuquerque, an agrarian reform based agriculture and one of the coordinators of the movement against the wind farm, says that the topic entered the radar of residents in 2018, when companies began to study the region’s winds.
A group of women farmers then traveled to the interior of Pernambuco to verify the impact of wind farm construction on local communities. Albuquerque says he encountered several problems caused by the plants.
According to her, the constant noise from the turbines was affecting the residents’ mental health. “We saw women with high blood pressure, or even depression, because they couldn’t sleep with the noise of the wind turbine”, she says.
He also says that many farmers who had leased their land to the mills had to reduce the size of their gardens or abandon agriculture, as many properties in the semiarid region are small and have run out of areas to produce.
“The production area has been greatly reduced, because you cannot work under the generators due to the discomfort of the noise and the risk of accidents”, he says.
‘Children of the Winds’
Another impact, according to her, affects especially young women and concerns the specialized labor hired to build the plants – mostly male workers, coming from other regions of the country.
Some of these men, according to Albuquerque, harass local women and girls or have romantic relationships with them. “After they get pregnant, the men leave, and the women stay with the children to raise,” says Albuquerque.
She claims that the children born from these relationships are known in the region as “children of the winds”.
“It’s a serious social issue,” he says.
As an alternative to building wind farms, she advocates a “decentralized model of producing energy from solar panels” in residents’ homes.
“That way we could consume what we need and sell the surplus,” he says.
Confidential contracts
The construction of the wind farm in Borborema has not yet started, but Albuquerque says that several families have already signed contracts to lease their land to the company in charge of the works.
The exact number of families is unknown, as the contracts have confidentiality clauses.
Albuquerque says wind energy companies deal directly with families rather than looking for neighborhood associations.
“If this debate went through the unions and associations, we could make these reflections collectively and say if we want the complex or not”, he says.
Albuquerque says that, despite the confidentiality clauses, some contracts reached the associations.
Lawyer Claudionor Vital, who advises workers’ organizations in the interior of Paraíba, tells the BBC that he has already analyzed several land lease agreements for the generation of wind energy in the region.
According to him, the documents usually follow the same pattern and define that the remuneration of families will be proportional to the energy generated in the properties.
“When companies look for families, they use the discourse that they will earn from R$3,000 to 4,000 a month, but this is not a concrete amount, they do not write this in the contract”, says the lawyer.
For Vital, the contracts should stipulate the payment of a minimum income to families so that they are not subject to the oscillation of the winds.
Also according to the lawyer, the documents have long terms of validity (from 30 to 50 years) “with the possibility of extension at the discretion of the companies and unilateral fines that inhibit families from rethinking or giving up on the business”. “Companies can give up without paying a fine,” he says.
Another problem with the contracts, according to the lawyer, are clauses defining that the property will have as a priority the generation of wind energy.
In practice, says the lawyer, this means that carrying out other economic activities in the territory, such as growing food, is subject to company approval and cannot affect energy generation.
“Companies now have control over what can and cannot be produced, which impacts the way in which the land is occupied where the enterprise is installed”, says Vital.
Environmental and social problems linked to the expansion of wind farms in the northeast have been documented by several researchers in recent years.
In 2020, BBC News Brasil published a report on the impact of wind farms on jaguar populations in the Caatinga.
In 2019, the UFC (Federal University of Ceará) released the book “Socio-environmental impacts of the implementation of wind energy parks in Brazil”, with 16 articles on the subject.
Among the cases detailed in the book are fishermen who stopped fishing in ponds buried by the construction of the dams; communities that lost access to mangroves where they collected molluscs; and communities that have found it difficult to access extractive areas due to road construction and deforestation associated with an enterprise.
The book cites the case of a community in Camocim (CE) that, in 2009, was unanimously against the construction of a wind farm.
However, it says, after the company invested in a housing fund, “approximately half of the community members changed their view of the wind farm from negative to positive.”
Another excerpt from the book compares the mostly negative positions of a wind farm in a community in Ceará to the positive evaluation of a project of this type among residents of a region of Texas (USA).
The article states that, among other points, the divergent opinions could be explained by the difference in the remuneration of each community.
In Texas in 2015, each turbine earned residents about $6,700 in royalties a year, according to the study. The value, in the current exchange rate of the dollar, corresponds to approximately R$ 33.9 thousand.
In Brazil, according to a study by Mariana Traldi, a professor at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology in São Paulo, payments are usually much lower.
In an article in Ambiente & Sociedade magazine, in 2021, Traldi estimated payments to residents of two communities —one in Bahia, the other in Rio Grande do Norte— based on the results of companies operating in the locations and on contracts to which he had access.
Payments per wind tower ranged from BRL 684.46/month (BRL 8,213/year) to BRL 1,122.99/month (BRL 13,475/year) and would correspond, according to the researcher, to 0.91% of the gains corporate gross.
The values, says Traldi in the article, indicate that the incorporation of communities in the “process of capitalist accumulation is taking place in a marginal way”.
The BBC sent the criticisms and fears of agriculture to EDP Renováveis. In a statement, the company replied that the Borborema project is “in an early stage” and that it always seeks to develop “parks with the greatest possible social consensus”. The company also said that it promotes “education and training programs” to “ensure that family farming and renewable projects coexist and prosper”.
Finally, EDP Renováveis said it was “committed to ensuring the minimum environmental impact” of its wind and solar parks.
Abeel (Associação Brasileira de Energia Eólica) told the BBC that “the lease does not normally exclude the possibility of residents staying on their land, including practicing their traditionally developed activities, since the implementation of wind farms usually uses a small percentage of the leased properties”.
Regarding the harassment of local women and the phenomenon of “children of the winds”, the organization says that wind energy companies privilege the hiring of local labor and promote “numerous training on relationships with local communities and education programs sexual”.
As for the complaints about the noise of the turbines, he says that the structures are implemented “respecting a distance from residences defined by the relevant legislation”.
Abeel also says that wind farms generate income for rural landowners “in regions that are usually quite limited for agricultural production and marked by the exodus of the rural population, thus encouraging people to settle in the countryside”.
“It is also worth noting that there are many private social investment programs developed by companies in the sector, which seek to encourage income generation by families residing in park areas”, says the association.
unfavorable situation
For Roselita Albuquerque, from the women’s movement in Borborema, the “current situation in Brazil and family farming” leaves many local families tempted to accept wind farms.
She states that, in recent years, farmers in the semi-arid region have suffered several losses, such as the termination of the Food Acquisition Program (government purchases of food from family farming), the stoppage of the Cistern Program and the replacement of Bolsa Família by Auxílio Brasil ( which increased the average value of the benefit, but reduced its target audience).
“This has an impact on the lives of peasant families, families are in a situation of great social vulnerability”, he says.
In this scenario, she says it is challenging to convince residents — many of whom are men — that the wind farm is not beneficial to the region.
One of the women’s strategies is to discuss how young people will be affected, as the long terms of contracts will affect future generations.
“What will rural succession be like with a model of energy production that will reduce production areas? What will these youth hope for?”, he asks.
Read more on the BBC
