These coconut breakers rely on the babassu palm and its harvest of oil-rich nuts for their traditional sustainable livelihood.Many of these women live on the edge of the Matopiba region, dubbed by some as “the world’s last agricultural frontier” which has seen an almost 300 percent increase in soy expansion over the last two decades, most of which came at the expense of native forests and vegetation.In recent years, industrial agribusiness has moved in fast, privatizing and fencing the commons, converting the babassu palm groves to soy and eucalyptus plantations and cattle ranches, and making it harder for the coconut breakers to access the palm from which they derive their living, and their social and cultural identity.In addition, the women say they have been increasingly exposed to threats, intimidation, and physical and sexual violence by farmers and other male agribusiness workers. But the coconut breakers are determined to defend their palm groves at any cost, and to resist the enclosure of the commons. Access to babassu palm trees is essential to the livelihoods of 400,000 Brazilian women, but industrial agribusiness expansion is putting those livelihoods at grave risk. Image by Yndara Vasques courtesy of MIQCB. A Mongabay team, Sarah Sax and Maurício Angelo, recently traveled to the Brazilian Cerrado to report on the impacts of booming agribusiness on the savanna environment and on the traditional people living there. This is the first story in a series telling what they found there. Every September for half a century, Maria Antônia Trindade Mendes has started the babassu harvest season in the same simple way. She ties a bag crafted from babassu palm fronds around her waist and walks out with a group of women from Quilombo São Caetano de Matinha (a Brazilian settlement made up of 200 runaway slave descendants), to the palm groves surrounding their community. There, where the northern edge of the Cerrado savanna blends with the Amazon rainforest, the women gather basketsful of babassu nuts — small, brown oblongs, resembling coconuts. Later, Trindade Mendes takes each fist-sized nut she’s gathered and, with the grace of someone who has repeated the same motion thousands of times over five decades, cracks it open to extract the half-dozen or so kernels within. These she sells to a cooperative that separates the oil for use in cooking or beauty products. The babassu harvest lasts six months, and the money earned must support her family for an entire year. But this August, Trindade Mendes wasn’t preparing for the babassu harvest season. Instead, she was in Brasilia taking part for the first time in the “Daisies’ March,” Latin America’s largest demonstration organized by female rural workers that happens every 3-4 years. There, amid the dust, shouting and clamor, the unique hats of the “coconut breakers” could be seen streaming in and out of the vendor exhibit hall, and to and from the temporary camp that housed the roughly 100,000 women attending from across Brazil. Trindade Mendes took to the streets this year to protest threats to herself, her livelihood and to her traditional way of life: especially the increasing violence directed at coconut breakers, and the ongoing privatization of the common land on which babassu groves grow. “Before we lived free, went out at night, and during the day. We were not afraid,” she says. “Now, they are taking away everything. The only things that have rights are cattle and agribusiness.”