BRAZIL: Landless Movement Turns Up the Heat

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 28 2005 (IPS) - While the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil is facing an ongoing political corruption scandal, it is also feeling the heat from the country’s strong landless rural workers movement, whose activists staged occupations of public offices and idle land this week.

The protests are part of a new offensive by the Landless Workers Movement (MST) to pressure the Lula administration to fulfill its promises to speed up the land reform process.

The latest wave of protests began Monday, with at least 15,000 landless farmers occupying 23 state offices of the National Institute for Rural Settlement and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), six rural properties that the MST considers unproductive, and the offices of state banks, and throwing up roadblocks.

“The end of the year is approaching, and the government is not living up to the agreement signed last May, by which 115,000 families were to be settled this year,” Jaime Amorim, a national MST coordinator, told IPS.

Amorim is active in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, where some 800 people occupied three INCRA offices.

Minister of Agrarian Development Miguel Rossetto said he was surprised by the MST protests and stated in the capital, Brasilia, Tuesday that 50,000 families have already received parcels of land this year and that property is available for another 82,000, which he said demonstrates that the government is making good progress towards meeting the targets that have been set.

He noted that the situation is especially bad in the state of Pernambuco, where the goal is to settle 8,800 families a year and so far “only around 1,250” have received plots of their own.

As in much of Latin America, the latifundium, or great landed estate, dominates the Brazilian countryside, and much of the rural property in the hands of large landowners is left idle.

The MST and smaller rural movements calling for a land reform programme that is swifter and more effective than the efforts that governments have been carrying out for years point out that only 60 million of the 400 million hectares of land registered as private property in Brazil are actually put to agricultural use, while there are more than four million landless campesino families.

The Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission reports that the concentration of land ownership has been increasing in recent years, and that just 50,000 people own half of the farmland in this country of 184 million.

As part of this week’s campaign, the MST staged occupations in 19 of Brazil’s 27 states, demanding that the government make good on seven specific promises it made in response to previous MST offensives.

In November 2003, the government set the goal of redistributing land to 400,000 families during its four-year term (2003-2006). In the first two years, the agrarian reform programme settled 117,500 on parcels of their own, according to the minister.

Last May, some 12,000 landless farmers marched 200 km to Brasilia to extract a promise from the government to expropriate a larger quantity of unproductive land, provide greater assistance to the new rural settlements and intensify the land reform process overall.

An agreement was reached to expand the land reform budget and to restructure and strengthen INCRA, which carries out the land reform efforts and is to give priority to landless families living in camps around the country while they wait for small plots of their own, sometimes for years.

In the camps, the families live in tents made of plastic sheeting and survive on government food handouts, donations, whatever they can grow (if land is available), and their small earnings from casual labour on nearby rural estates.

So far the Lula administration has only provided land to 24,000 of the families living in the camps, according to the MST, which says that at this pace, there is little hope for the 140,000 families still camped out around the country.

The key to accelerating the land reform process is to raise the minimum productivity levels required of landowners, who must keep production above those levels to avoid having property expropriated by the government and redistributed, said Amorim.

The constitution allows the expropriation of rural property that fails to live up to the social function of producing a minimum level of goods and jobs.

The current levels were set in 1975, and it is up to the government to update them – another of the unfulfilled promises it made last May, complained Amorim.

Minister Rossetto admitted that this step has not yet been taken, but he added that a proposal to increase the minimum productivity levels has already been drawn up, and depends now on approval by other government bodies, primarily the Ministry of Agriculture.

The MST says the problem is resistance by landowners, who are afraid that their property will be expropriated or invaded by landless farmers.

Nor has the government lived up to its pledge to restructure and strengthen INCRA. In Pernambuco, the MST protesters also set forth specific local grievances, demanding the removal of 22 INCRA prosecutors “who were hired during the (1964-1985) military dictatorship,” said Amorim.

These officials, who are “ideologically opposed to agrarian reform,” block expropriations of idle land on rural estates as well as the settlement of landless families, which means the land reform efforts cannot move forward until they are dismissed, he maintained.

The Lula administration has been shaken badly by a series of corruption scandals triggered in May when a legislator accused the leftist ruling Workers’ Party (PT) of making monthly payments to allied conservative lawmakers, to secure support for the government’s initiatives.

Although it is unlikely that Lula himself will be impeached, the scandals have brought down a number of top leaders of the PT, a long-time ally of the MST.

Nevertheless, Bernardo Manzano, a professor of agronomy at the Sao Paulo State University, told IPS that “this is good timing for the MST offensive,” because “without pressure”, agrarian reform simply will not move forward.

The government has the resources and is in a position to make faster progress towards the goals that were adopted, and “the time to exert pressure for it to live up to its promises” is now, given the fact that presidential, regional and legislative elections will be held next year, said Manzano.

But Minister Rossetto criticised the occupations of INCRA offices, arguing that the protests “are not helping, but rather are hindering, the efforts to settle the families,” by keeping officials from doing their jobs.