DEVELOPMENT-BRAZIL: Gov’t Strikes Out at Large Landowners

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 18 2000 (IPS) - Brazil’s minister of Agrarian Development, Raul Jungmann, declared Monday that the titles of 1,899 large rural landholdings had been declared null and void, affecting 62.7 million hectares, or 7.4 percent of the country’s territory.

“It is the beginning of the end to the latifundium” in Brazil, said Jungmann in a message broadcast over radio and television.

The measure is part of a government-led process to reorganise agricultural properties and fight fraud in landownership after a study revealed irregularities in 3,065 large estates averaging 10,000 hectares each.

The Ministry of Agrarian Development suspended the registration of the lands in December and banned their supposed owners from selling the rural property, transferring possession or offering it as collateral to obtain bank loans.

The government office also gave the owners, who are under suspicion, a period of six months to present documentation that proves they legally acquired their land.

On Monday, the deadline to present ownership papers, Jungmann formalised the nullification of titles for the 1,899 rural properties, now presumed to have been appropriated through illegal means.

Just over one third of the owners in question could not prove they legally held title to their lands.

The Agrarian Development minister stressed that a “major legal battle” would be the next step to uphold the measure that gives the State the equivalent to five times the area obtained over the last five years as part of its agrarian reform programme, or 23 percent larger than Spain.

Jungmann explained that the land recovered by the government would not be available for sale, parcelling out, inheritance or as collateral for credits either from public institutions or private banks.

“The white book of land occupation in Brazil,” distributed by the Agrarian Development Ministry, reports landownership irregularities in the country’s poorest states and reveals the mechanisms of fraudulent appropriations.

One typical case is that involving an area of nine million hectares distributed among 83 municipalities in Pará state in northern Brazil. It was registered under the name of Carlos Medeiros, who received the land in “onerous assignment of hereditary rights.”

They are lands Medeiros allegedly inherited from two Portuguese citizens and then sold to dozens of different people and businesses. However, they were previously public lands, belonging to either to the national or the state government.

Investigations concluded that Carlos Medeiros never existed. Even his supposed lawyers could not locate him. Using a fictitious owner was apparently the method they chose to illegally appropriate the land.

Most of the properties that have come under suspicion are located in the Amazon states of northern and western Brazil. They are regions were agricultural exploitation is fairly recent, a process the Brazilian government promoted, especially in the 1970s when the military regime pushed to populate the sparsely inhabited Amazon forest.

With this offensive against large landowners, the government hopes to clean up the scams of the past and use these extensive areas for new settlements under its agrarian reform programme, promoting family farming as well as environmental preservation, said Jungmann.

To prevent the illegal transfer of land in the future, a bill is being debated in the National Congress that updates the standards for real estate registry of rural lands and their taxes.

The new rules would prevent illegal appropriation by setting up a national land register, expanding information and identification data on each property and increasing penalties for those who abuse the system.

The minister told an international press conference that the government’s agrarian reform programme, which settled 372,866 families from 1995 to 1999, will continue this year, helping to settle at least 90,000 more families.

The programme performs a social role from the outset by allowing participating families to escape poverty and pursue subsistence farming, he said.

Through the education of their children, an essential component of the process, the families will achieve the technological and productive conditions that will allow them to compete on both the internal and external markets, stated Jungmann.

Improving the standard of living for the rural poor in Brazil continues to be an important goal as the country still has 23 percent of its population, or 34 million people, living in rural areas. Half of that total is economically active and 13 million are involved in family farming, according to data from the Ministry of Agrarian Development.