POPULATION-BRAZIL: Agrarian Reform Faces Identity Crisis

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 7 1999 (IPS) - Brazil’s agrarian reform has been presented by its government as a success, but its future appears uncertain, partly because of a growing rural-urban drift.

During the first government (1995-1998) of newly reelected president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 287,539 families were settled, surpassing the goals set for the agrarian reform programme as well as the results of the previous 30 years, according to Minister of Agrarian Policy Raul Jungmann.

But in the same period, an estimated 400,000 families left the countryside in an exodus that is still going on and which cancels out the effort to keep farmers on their land.

The programme of Cardoso’s new government, which was sworn in last week, has no new numerical goals. It plans to improve the quality of life in “a new rural world”, without specifying concrete measures or figures.

Cardoso announced that Jungmann was being kept in his post, but he also said there would be changes in the structure of his ministry, which could be incorporated into the Ministry of Agriculture, or absorb the latter’s rural development division. The idea, which was still being developed, was to combine the government’s agrarian reform and small-scale agriculture programmes.

Families who benefit from the programme receive subsidized loans and help in settling into rural plots. They need to repay only half of the credits they receive and at low interest rates. As a result, they do not want to “free themselves” and face the normal risks of farming, Jungmann observed.

Many settlements have depended for decades on the Agrarian Reform’s Programme for Special Credit, taking advantage of its subsidies and “small-scale farmers want to return to the position of settlers”, an unsustainable situation, he added.

“The model has become exhausted,” and it should change in order to offer quality of life to the new farmers as well as the old ones, said Martin Seligmann, who directed the policy over the past two years as president of the Institute for Settlement and Agrarian Reform.

Seligmann has left that post and will now head the executive secretariat of the Community Solidarity Programme, which sponsors social programmes under the leadership of First Lady Ruth Cardoso.

Jungmann talked about resettling 85,000 families per year as against 101,094 in 1998. The main concern is no longer numbers, he said, but the “quality of the settlements”, which should include schools, medical assistance, credit and other conditions for the farmers’ insertion into the market and sustainability.

One big obstacle will be the fact a 43-percent cut in the ministry’s budget as part of a fiscal adjustment the government decided to implement for three years, to conform to International Monetary Fund (IMF) requirements.

The Landless Movement (MST) is accusing the government of abandoning agrarian reform and falsifying its results. In the last four years “it hasn’t settled more than 130,000 families”, said Joao Pedro Stedile, head of MST, which has done much to mobilize farmers, especially in land occupations.

The MST rejects modifications to the reform programme that the government has proposed, such as its decentralization and greater participation by municipalities in acquiring land and financing settlements.

But the main criticism is aimed at the Land Bank, which will receive one billion dollars from the World Bank to fund the purchase of land for the farmers. The government wants to “privatize the agrarian reform” and shirk its obligations, charged Gilberto Portas, a national coordinator for the MST.

The publication two weeks ago of an agrarian census increased the doubts over the effectiveness of a reform effort which, according to Jungmann, cost about six billion dollars over the past four years.

The data, collected in 1995-1996 by the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics, shows that the proportion of Brazilians working in the countryside decreased from 23.3 to 17.9 percent since 1985.

The concentration of rural land ownership has also increased. Ranches over 1000 hectares in size represented 45.1 percent of the total ranchland in 1995, up from 44.1 percent in 1985.

Jungmann justified the agrarian reform programmme as a way of preventing further unemployment and reducing the number of farmers flocking to the cities and abandoning the countryside, home to 22 percent of the some 160 million Brazilians.