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AGRICULTURE-BRAZIL: Lula Under Pressure for Land Reform

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 21 2003 (IPS) - Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised to settle 400,000 landless families on small farms of their own over the next three years.

The government announced its National Plan for Agrarian Reform Friday, under pressure from more than 3,000 protesters camping out in Brasilia this week, demanding the redistribution of land to one million families of landless peasant farmers by late 2006.

The Landless Workers Movement (MST) and National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) demonstrators marched 210 kms along highways to reach the Brazilian capital Wednesday after setting out Nov. 10 from Goiania, the capital of the central state of Goiás.

”Patience,” urged Lula, addressing the landless activists in their camp. He said land reform would move forward without abuses and ”within the country’s possibilities.”

He said that in order to avoid committing errors of the past, his government would not merely settle families on their own parcels of land, but would stimulate the creation of cooperatives and set in place mechanisms to offer new farmers the necessary technology, technical advice and loans to get started.

The plan announced by the Ministry of Agrarian Development foresees the distribution of land to 35,000 families this year and to larger numbers of families over the next three years, to reach a total of 400,000 by the end of Lula’s four-year term, which began in January.

The plan will also entail the granting of legal title to land already being farmed by some 500,000 families, while another 127,500 families will be able to purchase small farms through a special system of soft loans.

The land redistribution process and the expansion of agribusiness will generate some 2.75 million new jobs in rural areas, according to the Ministry of Agrarian Development’s plan.

CONTAG president Manuel José dos Santos said the plan was an improvement over the agrarian reform programme carried out under the administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), and that the task now was to help the government meet its goals.

The leaders of the MST, however, argue that granting legal title to land that has already been occupied and financing purchases of land do not form part of agrarian reform efforts, and that what counts towards that end are new settlements on fallow or unproductive land that has been expropriated.

The MST will wait until next June for the government to live up to its promises, but will continue to mobilise, to press for ”true” land reform, said Joao Paulo Rodrigues, one of the coordinators of the landless movement.

Another MST leader, Joao Pedro Stédile, welcomed Lula’s visit to the camp set up by the landless demonstrators in a park in Brasilia, where he spoke directly to the protesters Friday. The president’s gesture indicates that agrarian reform ”is now on its way forward,” said the activist.

On Thursday, Stédile said that only popular pressure, in the form of protest marches and occupations of land left fallow by large landowners, will ensure that land redistribution is carried out in Brazil, where rural property is concentrated in the hands of just a few thousand owners of ”latifundia.” The government can do little on its own, he argued.

As in much of Latin America, the latifundium – defined by Webster’s as ”a great landed estate with primitive agriculture, and labour often in a state of partial servitude” – dominates the Brazilian countryside.

According to Isabel Cristina Diniz with the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission, ”the concentration of land ownership in Brazil has increased in recent years,” and just 50,000 people own half of the farmland in this country of 177 million.

The MST, CONTAG and the Pastoral Land Commission were demanding approval of a programme proposed by a group of experts headed by Plinio de Arruda Sampaio, which would have entailed the settlement of one million families during the Lula administration: 200,000 a year from 2003 to 2005, and 400,000 in 2006.

But that goal is ”not feasible due to financial and operational reasons,” Antonio Buainain, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Campinas, said in an interview with IPS.

The government does not have the funds to distribute land to so many people while it is making a huge effort to balance the budget by slashing spending, he said.

Moreover, that goal would require modifications in the model followed by agrarian reform efforts in Brazil and the institutions in charge of carrying it out, which under the current conditions are incapable of accelerating the redistribution process.

Expropriating land for redistribution is carried out according to ”rules and timeframes that impose a slow pace,” said Buainain, who added that the government ”has already lost almost a year.” In his view, it will even be difficult for the Lula administration to meet the goals it has set for itself.

The president of the governing leftist Workers’ Party (PT), José Genoino, said it is not just a question of convincing the executive branch of speeding up the transformation of rural land ownership patterns, because the process also faces heavy resistance in parliament, as well as obstacles in the courts.

But the rural workers’ movements and experts who drew up the land reform proposal backed by the MST argue that unless one million families are settled on small farms of their own, the structure of the Brazilian countryside will not be altered to the extent needed to expand the domestic market and stem the exodus of rural families to the slums surrounding the cities.

Lula’s triumph in the October 2002 presidential elections gave rise to hopes that agrarian reform would move ahead at a faster pace, because that was one of the longstanding demands set forth by the PT, which is allied with the MST and CONTAG.

But the government’s delay in drawing up its National Plan for Agrarian Reform spurred an intensification of occupations of unproductive land and protests by the MST in recent months, which culminated in the march from Goiania and the camps set up by peasant farmers in Brasilia this week.