Five years after the Brazil oil spill, fishing workers deal with losses and hopelessness

Brasil de Fato

Five years on from the oil spill that devastated 11 of Brazil’s coastal states, especially parts of the northeastern area of the country, the consequences of the disaster continue to affect fisherpeople, shellfish gatherers and other workers who depend on coastal fauna. The impacts can be seen in the income and hearts of coastal populations. That is what artisanal fisherman Erivan Bezerra de Medeiros, who has spent almost 50 years fishing and five years frustrated by Brazil’s lack of measures, says.

“This is the fifth year we’ve come here to Brasilia to demand our rights [in the face of] this absurd crime that happened in the country – one of the worst in Latin America so far. There has still been no reparation, either for the fisherpeople who were affected or for the riverside communities, traditional communities, Indigenous peoples and quilombolas,” laments the fisherman, who lives in a community on the southern coast of the state of Rio Grande do Norte where around 200 workers were left out of the aid announced by the then Bolsonaro government. Medeiros says it is no longer possible to measure the personal and professional damage caused by oil.

The fisherman’s statement tallies with the figures: at the time of the oil spill, the Bolsonaro administration promised financial aid for 300,000 coastal workers, but the benefit only covered an average of 60,000 to 80,000 people, according to the Fishing Workers’s Pastoral Council (CPP, in Portuguese). In northeastern Brazil, from the state of Bahia to Maranhão, the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture counts 460,000 fisherpeople. Formally, the category of artisanal fisherpeople includes shellfish gatherers, rafters, riverside dwellers, quilombola fisherpeople, Indigenous people and other workers.

The spill, which began on August 30, 2019, and lasted until March 2020, affected all nine states of northeastern Brazil and also extended to the states of Espírito Santo and Rio de Janeiro. More than 3,000 square kilometers were affected, according to projections by the federal executive branch’s environmental technical staff. Today, Erivan Medeiros is involved in the “Sea of Struggle” campaign, which seeks compensation for the population affected by the spill. He says the lack of justice in the case has caused a series of problems for the sector. “Many people have fallen ill because of oil. Some are getting blind, others have committed suicide because they haven’t been compensated, and so on. This is our fight,” he says.

The oil spill contaminated many areas iof Brazil’s northeastern coats  / Adema/ Sergipe State Government

In the state of Pernambuco, fisherwoman Joana Mousinho is experiencing a similar drama. After 60 years of artisanal fishing, she says that, despite having been issued with the General Fishermen’s Register since the 1980s and being the first woman to chair a fishing colony in Brazil, she was not included in the distribution of aid by the Bolsonaro government. To this day, Joana is waiting for compensation from the state. “In my town, only one fisherwoman received it.” A prominent leader in the coordination of the National Fisherwomen’s Articulation, she emphasizes that the oil spill marked her life and artisanal fishing forever.

“Some species of fish disappeared, the shellfish decreased and [at the time] the staff immediately took care to put up containment barriers to make sure the oil didn’t get in [to the whole area] because, if it did, there’s an extensive mangrove swamp there and the female workers make ends meet by gathering shellfish in the mangrove swamp,” she says. She also mentions a series of health problems that have affected the local community because of the oil, including skin problems.

“The after-effects are still there. At the beginning, when the oil appeared, nobody knew what it was and it was mainly women who went into the water to get the oil out. Many still have blisters on their skin that look like burns, sores, spots, etc. And none of them got medical attention to treat it. There are also those with psychological problems, unable to go into the sea for fear of getting burned and hurt again. Everybody lost their sources of income. When government aid came out in my town, only one fisherwoman received it, and it happened because her address was still registered in another town. She had just moved,” she says.

Joana Mousinho, the coordinator of the National Fisherwomen’s Articulation, attended a hearing at the Chamber of Deputies / Fishing Workers’s Pastoral Council 

Scenario

Erivan Medeiros says the problems caused by the oil spill add to the other challenges that are currently knocking on the doors of artisanal fishing workers. This is the case of the consequences of the climate crisis and real estate speculation, the latter translated into agendas such as the Constitutional Amendment (PEC, in Portuguese) Bill 3/2022, the so-called “Beaches PEC”. The text is currently under analysis in the Senate and makes it easier to privatize seafront land owned by the Brazilian state through the Navy.

“We feel the consequences of all this. Where I come from, there’s a luxury resort, which worked to change the city’s long term development plan and deforest the Atlantic Forest, impacting the cliffs. They built a condominium with 38 luxury plots. There is an action before the Public Prosecutor’s Office to suspend this license. If the Beaches PEC is approved, it will put an end to our lives on the coast. Despite this, we continue to resist. We will continue to fight against all of this. The oil spill, for example, happened five years ago and, to us, it seems like ten. All of this makes us sad and sometimes hopeless, but we continue to resist,” says the fisherman from Rio Grande do Norte.

Response

Government officials recognize the pent-up demand for attention to coastal communities. “Five years after this tragedy, we really wanted to be here to celebrate some progress, but unfortunately many people, almost 100% of them have not been compensated,” admits the general coordinator for Territories and Integration of Public Policies at the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture, Kátia Cristina dos Santos Cunha. She has been following the issue since the time of the disaster. The statement was made during a public hearing debating the tragedy in the Chamber of Deputies on Tuesday afternoon (10).

The general coordinator said the government has invested in Decentralized Execution Terms (known as TEDs), a form of credit transfer between public bodies for the execution of programs and projects. Estimated at BRL 2.1 million (US$ 370,000), one of them seeks to draw up and implement public policies for the protection of resources and sustainable cultural and socio-environmental practices in communities in Pernambuco, Alagoas, Sergipe and Bahia. Another TED, developed in partnership with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), seeks to identify problems and possibilities in artisanal fishing communities, creating observatories for fishing territories and study centers for ecosystem management, climate emergencies and environmental racism.

Working group during an oil removal operation on the Costa dos Corais, in the state of Alagoas, 2020 / Felipe Brasil/ Fotos Públicas

Kátia Cunha also said that the ministry was talking with Fiocruz to produce a technical cooperation agreement for the acquisition of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for fishing workers and others, including repellents and sunscreens. “The ministry has been making an effort together with the Artisanal Fishing Secretariat, which is a historical demand from fishing workers, to try to repair [the problems]. Obviously, it’s not enough because the demand is huge,” she said, adding that the government has been open to dialog with the segment in order to understand the needs of workers.

Brasil de Fato later approached the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture to address the workers’ complaints about the lack of financial aid to help the sector deal with the socio-economic impacts generated by the oil spill. We asked if the ministry had been working in any way to provide financial compensation for coastal workers, whether there is a target audience to be served and what the deadline would be. It replied that “there has been no formal demand for financial reparations from fishing-related organizations to the ministry” and that the department “has been working with these communities through partnerships.”