They live on the river that forms the border with Uruguay and Argentina – a river in Brazil full of dams already built and being planned, where conflicts over pulp and paper industries are common. The majority living in the upper part of this Uruguay River Basin are small farmers. Since the 1960s these farmers have depended on rural electrification co-operatives for access to electricity. But these co-operatives worked just like any other private company...
So around the middle of the 1990s (when the privatization of energy services was starting in Brazil) the members of this co-operative known as CRERAL – 6,000 families in all – got organized through the trade union of rural workers and demanded control. They appropriated the co-operative and took up the challenge of controlling their own electricity supply – a group of farmers managing energy technology and markets! Some years later, they decided that instead of buying energy they could produce their own, renewably, using the local resources they had. So now they have two mini hydro-dams, which provide more than half the electricity for the small farmers living there.
