- Deforestation, wildfires, illegal land use and climate changes are sources of concern for the traditional Afro-Brazilian quilombola communities in Brazil’s Jalapão region.
- Communities here rely on the sustainable harvest of the region’s native “golden grass” to craft traditional items that provide their main source of income.
- Jalapão is home to the largest mosaic of protected areas in the Cerrado, the savanna biome where the most the deforestation in Brazil occurs today: 5 million hectares (12.4 million acres) of native vegetation have been lost over the last six years.
- Jalapão’s golden grass has earned a Geographical Indication seal, giving the communities bragging rights and exclusivity for the product; but local craftspeople say there’s less of the grass to be found in the humid areas where it grows.
JALAPÃO, Brazil — The buritis, or moriche palms, are fighting for their lives in the streambed now lined with scorched earth. For two years now, drought has advanced a barrier of dead vegetation through this once-humid oasis, called a vereda by the people who live in the Jalapão region of central Brazil. A crested caracara (Caracara plancus) emits a solitary caw. Luzia Passos Ribeiro looks away.
“I feel like I’m suffocating,” she says, giving voice to what a buriti palm trapped in the dry earth might say.
But if today is a tough day for the buriti palms, on another day they will show their splendor and spread their ripe seeds that will later spring up across the surrounding ground.
At 35 years of age, Passos Ribeiro has seven children and a future to look out for. So much so that one day she reached the point where she declared in a voice so firm that it would have made any crested caracara jealous, “Only those we want inside our quilombola territory will be allowed to stay!”
That was how they got rid of the tractor, backhoe, flatbed and pickup truck belonging to a farm that had been operating on land belonging to the Quilombo do Prata community. The quilombo, a rural community founded by formerly enslaved Afro-Brazilians, was officially recognized in 2006 in the municipality of São Félix do Tocantins, in Tocantins state, but has not yet been granted title to its land.
Deforestation is slowly making the water disappear here, threatening not only the famous glow of Jalapão’s native golden grass but also its natural water resources, which attract tourists from all over Brazil. The region is home to the broadest mosaic of conservation areas in the Cerrado, the savanna biome that covers a fifth of Brazil’s land mass. That means much of the native vegetation is still largely preserved, but wildfires, illegal land use and climate change are taking their toll. Newly paved roads, which make life easier for both the local communities and the tourism industry, have left the land here scarred by asphalt and exploited by real estate speculators.


The golden hat
At the start of the 20th century, Laurina Ribeiro Matos was already familiar with the practice of braiding the Jalapão region’s famous “golden grass,” Syngonanthus nitens, into ropes for hanging hammocks. She got the idea to take it a step further, making other, more artistic, objects. This was how this newcomer to Jalapão region, drawn here by the promise of land, decided to weave a hat for her husband.
Little did Matos know that the hat she crafted would give birth to an activity that would provide economic security for the region’s women over many generations. It was her daughter, Guilhermina Ribeiro Matos, also known as Dona Miúda, who made the golden grass well-known by the 1990s.
“I learned [the craft] from my mama when I was 12 years old. That was the best day of my life,” says Noeme Ribeiro da Silva, also known as “the doctor,” or Dotora. She’s the daughter of Miúda and granddaughter of Laurina Ribeiro Matos. “The golden grass, it’s important throughout our entire lives. Do you need to buy some medicine? Golden grass. Are you going to build something? Golden grass. A pressure cooker, an iron, a refrigerator, a bed, a mattress? Golden grass is what makes all these things possible.”
In Quilombo Mumbuca, in the municipality of Mateiros, Tocantins state, da Silva’s house has a sign out front: The Doctor’s House. She was given the nickname at the age of 9 when she cured an inflammation in her father’s eye with alfavaca tea (Ocimum gratissimum, or African basil) that she picked in her backyard. Since then, Dotora has never turned anyone away. “God honors those who share goodness,” she says.
Seated in a wooden chair surrounded by smoke from her woodstove, Dotora weaves an object from golden grass alongside her sister, Antônia Ribeiro da Silva, also known as Tonha. “My home shines like gold when the grass brings us together here to talk,” she says. “When we’re not here, we’re at the house of other craftspeople, talking, making things.”

Weaving together communities
The Mumbuca Village Craftspeople and Extractivists’ Association has 147 members. Of these, 100 are women who make a living mostly from golden grass. “We have our little shop and I sell my things there. Ninety percent of the money that comes in goes to the women who make the pieces, 5% goes to the salesperson and 5% goes to pay costs of the association,” says Silvanete Tavares da Silva, the association president and a craftswoman since the age of 9.
That first hat made more than 180 years ago by Laurina Ribeiro Matos has led to job security and income for the women of Quilombo Mumbuca today. But its reach is even broader, bringing other communities together.
Laudeci Ribeiro Monteiro, director of the Mateiros Craftspeople and Small Farmers’ Community Association (ACAPPM), was just a little girl when she started learning how to weave from Tonha and Dona Miúda. Back then, the most exciting event of the year was going to traditional cultural festivals in neighboring communities. But Monteiro didn’t have her own hammock. “My mom used to say to me, ‘I’m not taking to you other people’s houses so you can sleep on the floor.’”


At the age of 10, Monteiro decided she would earn her own money so that she could buy a hammock. She wove a few items with the grass — small baskets, jewelry boxes — and made a deal with her father that, if he sold them, he would buy her a hammock. They also agreed that if there was any money left over he would buy a needle — something that was hard to come by in the region and caused her to break down crying when it broke.
“When he came home with that hammock and needle, it was like I had a new lease on life. A new pickup truck wouldn’t have been any more exciting for me,” Monteiro says. Today, she proudly wears jewelry made from golden grass and says, “I was able to imagine my freedom — it felt like anything was possible.”
ACAPPM has 80 members, 60 of them women. There’s another association of golden grass craftspeople in Quilombo do Prata, with 35 members, most of them also women.
Many communities in the region produce and sell objects from the grass. In 2011, the National Industrial Property Institute (INPI) listed Jalapão on the Geographical Indication Registry, giving the region exclusive bragging rights to handicrafts made from golden grass — the same way that Champagne or Parmigiano Reggiano can only come from specific regions of France and Italy, respectively. In 2019, a federal law established state sustainable management policies for golden grass and buriti palm, regulating the harvest and management of these resources.
Giving back the flowers
The honeybees in Quilombo Mumbuca get stirred up during the golden grass harvest. “They sound like a drone,” Tonha says, watching a swarm of bees at the top of the murici trees (Byrsonima crassifolia).
It’s harvest time, and José Ribeiro da Silva, whom everyone here calls Mumbuca de Paizinho, is walking around the truck organizing things and loading up the grass. Golden grass harvest begins at the end of September and lasts until November in Jalapão’s veredas, the shallow stream oases. Whole families work together to collect the golden stalks, which will be braided together with buriti palm fiber to make hats, fruit bowls, placemats, purses and jewelry.
To be licensed to collect golden grass, families must register with the Tocantins Nature Institute (NATURATINS), which regulates sustainable harvest so the species will be preserved. Harvesting is only allowed during this period when the grass is mature. Harvesters promise to leave the flowers in the veredas so the seeds can germinate and sustain the species. “It’s the way we can give back to nature and that nature can keep developing for us,” says Taiane Ribeiro Tavares, Laurina Ribeiro Matos’s great-great-great granddaughter and a craftswoman herself.

The afternoon sun shines on the truck as it rolls over the winding path toward the vereda. There’s no actual path visible, but the driver remembers the way from walking this way for years before the family got the truck. The harvest will begin the next morning after a night of camping out under the full moon.
“This place used to be covered in grass. There was a lot, really. Tons. Now it’s like this,” Tonha says, walking across the humid meadow hunting out the sparse stalks. “People are pulling up the grass without leaving the heads [of flowers].”
The next day, the morning sun gets more intense and there’s still a long way to walk — so much so that Paizinho, who is nearly 2 meters (6.5 feet) tall, moves beyond the family’s range of sight.
“I’m tired. I want to drink some cold water,” grumbles Tonha’s granddaughter, Lorena Ribeiro Tavares.
Tonha comments, “Soon we’ll be gone and her generation will keep learning about the swamps, the roads, the veredas, and also learning how valuable the grass is.”
Aside from the need for sustainable management, those who earn their living by creating items from golden grass have other concerns: grass that’s picked before the official harvest season begins, wildfires, and deforestation for cattle pasture and soybean farming throughout Jalapão.
Arid expansion
“Jalapão is important to the northern Cerrado. It’s still largely protected because of all the conservation units, called the Jalapão Mosaic, together with other types of protected areas like the quilombola territories,” says Kolbe Soares, conservation specialist at WWF-Brasil. “Many of the quilombola territories lie within conservation units. The people living there, as is the case with these craftspeople, maintain harmonious relationships with the land and help to protect the Cerrado. Like the women who maintain sustainable practices while collecting golden grass.”
The Jalapão Mosaic is a patchwork of nine conservation areas that straddle the states of Tocantins and Bahia, covering nearly 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres), or an area the size of Belgium — the broadest expanse of protected area in the Cerrado. Together, these conservation areas and the traditional communities living here play important roles in standing up to the pressure being placed on them mostly by the spread of pastureland and soybean monoculture.
“The spread of agribusiness is a huge threat coming from western Bahia. In the municipality of Mateiros, broad swaths of land have already been deforested, and in the village called Prata, they have deforested land inside the quilombo territory as well,” Soares says.

The most recent data from Brazil’s space agency, INPE, showed a 25.7% drop in Cerrado deforestation in 2023. But most of the destruction was focused in the Matopiba region, the agricultural heartland that sprawls across the border region of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia states. Tocantins was the Cerrado state with the second-largest area of lost vegetation, amounting to 201,900 hectares (about 500,000 acres), while Maranhão ranked first with 248,700 hectares (615,000 acres) of deforestation.
Matopiba holds 47.8% of the Cerrado’s remaining vegetation and the largest remaining unbroken stands of savanna and grassland vegetation, which are extremely important for protecting water. Of the 5 million hectares (12.4 million acres) of native vegetation lost in the Cerrado over the last six years, 72% lay in the Matopiba states. Even though the vegetation itself is protected, most grows on private land, leaving it vulnerable to future destruction.

Pests and poison
Nearly all of Tocantins lies within the Matopiba region. The municipality of Mateiros, inside Jalapão, shares a border with western Bahia and is dealing with problems due to soybean monoculture and both the heavy machinery and pesticide use that come with it. Aerial spraying of pesticides is contaminating the soil and water, and also poisoning the people who live there.
Most of the 70,000-hectare (173,000-acre) Galhão River Basin lies in Mateiros, which is also home to Quilombo Mumbuca, the Mateiros Craftspeople and Small Farmers’ Community Association, and important tourist attractions like the famous fervedouro springs, sand dunes and waterfalls.
“We began to feel it in 2014. They would spray the poison over there and the pests would come to our gardens,” says Jardilene Alves Batista, who lives in the village of Galhão and ran unsuccessfully for the Mateiros municipal council in the recent elections. “Then came the sicknesses: diarrhea, stomachaches, people with fevers and vomiting. Some people’s whole bodies broke out in blisters. As long as we didn’t bathe with water from the river, there was no problem. But when we did, our bodies would blister up.”
Most of the 105 families living in Galhão drink water from the river. “Water from the Galhão used to be clean. It was totally transparent. But after the trees were cut and the banks started washing away, it’s silty and the river’s water level dropped,” says firefighter and local resident Adao Batista Souza. “They cut the trees down really close to the river and there are many artesian springs at the headwaters and along the banks. They are also using water from the river for crops and cattle farming. They extract a lot of water for that.”

A study carried out by the Tocantins State Prosecutor’s Office found 120 incidences of illegal deforestation in the Galhão River Basin. “The casual practices of agribusiness in the regions which do not adhere to sustainability have led to soil erosion, causing the soil to be carried into springs and riverbeds,” prosecutor Francisco Brandes wrote in an article on the prosecutor’s office website.
“The poison, it intoxicates you,” says Alves Batista. “It makes you sick and you just get sicker. That farm is inching its way closer to us. There’s a newly deforested area really close to us now.” She says she’s been finding dead birds in the region, lots of them. “A day will come when we will give up our lives, because we have no way to get out of here. There are many families. Where will they go?”
“The Galhão River is directly impacted by all the agricultural activity near its source,” says Bruno Machado Carneiro, a professor at the Tocantins Institute of Science, Education and Technology (IFTO). “The communities located in the middle of the river basin are subject to all the sediment washed down by the rains. This time of year [November], they are planting soybean in the region. So pesticides will be used on a large scale and will most likely impact the quality of the water in the basin.”
Carneiro says the general lack of environmental licensing makes the region vulnerable. “Licensing exists so the environmental impacts of agricultural activities can be minimized. This includes the creation of topographic contours and terracing to control the erosion process that washes sediments into the riverbed.”
Other concerns are that landowners are unilaterally altering their properties’ registries in the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) — a self-declared land register — and a recurrence of land ownership conflicts in the region. “We have seen that the changes people make to their CAR registries are mostly attempts to align the properties’ status with environmental policy and eliminate any existing environmental infractions from the past,” Carneiro says.
Tenuous ownership
According to COEQTO, the Tocantins State Coordination of Quilombola Communities, some 50 of these communities in the state have been certified by the Palmares Cultural Foundation, Brazil’s highest coordinating body for promotion of Afro-Brazilian culture. But not a single quilombola territory has been granted title to its land.
Land ownership irregularities run deep into the region’s history, involving conflicts with farm owners — whose land was never properly expropriated or compensated for by INCRA, the land reform agency — and traditional communities who, in turn, see soybean monoculture spreading illegally across the water sources in their untitled territories.
In addition to watching the drought spread, the people living here have also seen how the few head of cattle that they own grow sick, and in some cases die, from ingesting limestone, widely used in the region to prepare the soil for soybean cultivation.


“Things have changed much over the last 10 years,” says Carneiro, the professor. “We never used to see these enormous machines driving on the roads [toward Quilombo do Prata]. Today it’s normal to pass six or seven of them carrying loads of limestone.”
In Prata, the community started fighting back after trees were cut down along the border of Parnaíba River Headwaters National Park, a conservation area that’s part of the Jalapão Mosaic. Given their two-year struggle to fight the advancing destruction, which resulted in the removal of the farm equipment, quilombo member Luzia Passos Ribeiro laments that Jalapão’s currently protected areas won’t be enough.
“The park is big, right?” she says of the mosaic’s nearly 730,000 hectares (1.8 million acres). “But it’s not enough for us, because if it had stretched farther toward Bahia instead, then those farms they have there, they wouldn’t have happened.”
Different types of fire
“You know, I’m worried about those wildfires burning the grass,” says Taiane Tavares, the Quilombo Mumbuca craftswoman. “Every year, we worry we won’t find the grass growing there anymore. The climate seems to be too hot, and there are many fires. So it worries me.”
There’s no doubt the fires are evident, with smoke rising on the horizon and tainting the smell of the air we breathe. During our reporting in the region, we witness wildfires being spread by whirling winds on multiple occasions.
According to data from the mapping initiative MapBiomas, 97% more land was burned in the Cerrado between January and October 2024 than during the same period in 2023. Of the 9.4 million hectares (23.2 million acres) burned, 85% were native vegetation. In all, 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million acres) of land burned in the state of Tocantins last year.


Accidental wildfires are easily set off by cigarette butts thrown from passing cars in dry weather. But some fires are set deliberately to clear land, making them more attractive to investors. Land along roads that are slated for paving rises in value, fueling real estate speculation. While the spreading asphalt will help the communities in Jalapão in many ways (the works were ordered by the Public Prosecutor’s Office), other aspects are obscured by the tarmac.
“My concern is that the flow of trucks bringing in material for agribusiness will increase along with the flow of tourists,” says Tocantins Federal University professor Lúcio Adorno, who has been working on environmental conservation projects in Jalapão since 1994. “According to our sources, these roadway improvements aren’t just for the local communities. They are also intended to create a corridor for exports to Bahia,” he adds, noting how close they are to the North-South Railway stretching from Maranhão to São Paulo, which is used to transport mining ore and agribusiness commodities.
Adorno says he doesn’t believe the monoculture projects underway in the region are compatible with the characteristics of the local soil. “What we expect is that their farming won’t be successful because of the region’s extremely sandy soil and the increasingly hot climate. This means that these projects will only serve to further degrade Jalapão.”
Also the owner of Jalapão Cathedral Private Natural Heritage Reserve (RPPN), one of the most scenic attractions in the municipality of São Félix do Tocantins, Adorno says he’s seen “nights lit up by fire” on the highway connecting the state capital Palmas to Jalapão, and adds that people here are “making a living farming livestock in the ashes.”
Jalapão Cathedral Private Natural Heritage Reserve neighbors a broad swath of recently burned land sporting a sign that reads “Saint Expedito Farm,” named after the patron saint of urgent causes.
But if fires need to be halted during the dry season, they’re also recognized as a useful tool in the Cerrado when managed properly. In use here since 2014, the practice of integrated fire management (IFM) was officially adopted in Brazil in 2024 under a federal law that defines management as part of the fire prevention process.
“The idea is, through the understanding of nature’s processes, to use fire very responsibly while being extremely conscious of wind direction, temperature, humidity and timing,” says Cassiana Moreira, a specialist at the Central Cerrado Cooperative. “It’s very important that we differentiate things. There are many types of fire. There is good fire, which has positive impacts, even on golden grass.”
The communities here traditionally use fire management in the humid fields every two years. “The same fire used to make native pasture grow is also used to manage golden grass,” says Rejane Nunes, supervisor of the Jalapão Environmental Protection Area (EPA), part of the Jalapão Mosaic.
Nunes says fire is traditionally used by Jalapão’s communities to manage their land, and has now been adopted as a means of management inside the conservation areas.
“Planned fires used together with other prevention tools like firebreaks, monitoring, planning meetings and fire brigade training as part of integrated fire management resulted in a significant reduction — up to 36% — of wildfires at the end of the dry season in Jalapão,” says Lívia Moura, a specialist in IFM at ISPN, the Social, Population and Nature Institute. “We not only saw improvements in the dialogue between different sectors, which helped reduce old conflicts, but we also saw new agreements and commitments being made that improved the quality of life for the traditional and local communities in the region.”
Banner image of Elizabete Melquiades dos Santos during the golden grass harvest. Image courtesy of Fellipe Abreu.
This story was first published here in Portuguese on Jan. 13, 2025.