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AGRICULTURE-BRAZIL: Landless in Long March Toward Agrarian Reform

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 13 2004 (IPS) - April is traditionally a month of stepped-up activity in favour of land reform in Brazil, and the Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST, Landless Workers’ Movement) and smaller farmers groups are making sure that this year is no exception.

They have carried out more than 100 invasions of unproductive farmland over the last month and a half and staged massive marches along highways on the way to Brazil’s large cities.

The demonstrations will culminate in huge protests in capitals of several Brazilian states on Saturday, the International Day of Farmers’ Struggle, which commemorates the massacre in Eldorado de Carajás, a town in northern Brazil where 19 rural protesters were killed by the police during an otherwise peaceful march on Apr. 17, 1996.

The MST, a powerful national movement pressing for accelerated land reform efforts, occupied part of a rural estate Tuesday in Sandovalina, in the Pontal de Paranapanema region, located in the southwestern part of Sao Paulo state. The region has long been a hotbed of land disputes. More than 400 people took part in the land seizure.

More than 900 families occupied four other local properties on Monday, reviving the tense climate that has prevailed in Pontal a few years ago, when local landowners threatened to use armed militias to expel the peasant activists.

Since early March, the MST has carried out at least 64 similar operations in 14 of Brazil’s 27 states, mobilising some 20,000 families.

Smaller rural movements have also stepped up their activities, to pressure the government of former trade unionist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to speed up the purchase and redistribution of idle farmland.

In the northeastern state of Pernambuco, for example, these groups have invaded 56 properties in the past three weeks. Half of the actions were led by some 6,000 families with the MST, and the rest by the Federation of Agricultural Workers, the Organisation of Struggle in the Countryside, and the Land, Work and Freedom Movement.

But this week’s priority are the marches. In Pernambuco, between 4,000 and 5,000 protesters will walk for three days to arrive Friday in the state capital, Recife, Jaime Amorim, one of the national MST coordinators who is active in that state, told IPS.

”The process of agrarian reform is not moving ahead as we had hoped it would” under the government of Lula, who leads the leftist Workers’ Party (PT), said Amorim, who criticised the slow pace at which the expropriation of unproductive land and resettlement of landless rural families are taking place.

The MST claims to represent 200,000 families, who live in camps on occupied land or alongside highways and in other public spaces throughout this country of nearly 180 million.

Lula pledged to settle 400,000 families during his four-year term, from 2003 to 2006. This year 115,000 families are to be given plots of land to farm, according to Agrarian Development Minister Miguel Rossetto.

But so far, the government has only settled 14,000 families in 2003 and 7,000 so far this year, which has been a frustration for the landless movement, says the MST, whose leaders, nevertheless, still see Lula and the PT as their ”allies”.

The MST thus believes it is necessary to pressure the government by means of land seizures and marches to curb the increasing concentration of land – a historic dynamic in Latin America – and speed up the resettlement of landless rural workers.

Forty-six percent of all farmland in Brazil is in the hands of just 26,000 landowners, while 4.6 million rural families are landless and live in dire poverty – figures that clearly demonstrate the need for faster, more effective agrarian reform, according to the MST national leadership.

Joao Sampaio, president of the Brazilian Rural Society, which represents big landowners, demanded that the government take firm action to clamp down on the ”illegal” property invasions, arguing that the tension in the countryside is discouraging and slowing down agricultural production.

Land reform is needed to correct distortions in property ownership, Sampaio acknowledged. But, he said, it cannot be carried out by breaking the law and violating private property rights.

He also accused the government of encouraging the MST to act, by providing assistance, such as food distributions, to the families living in the movement’s camps.

The struggle for land reform intensified in Brazil, Latin America’s giant, in the early 1960s. Agrarian reform was one of the top priorities of the government of president Joao Goulart (1961-1964), who was overthrown by a coup d’état that gave rise to a military dictatorship that lasted more than two decades.

The MST justifies its land seizures, which it labels ”occupations”, by pointing out that the 1988 Brazilian constitution states that rural property must serve a ”social function”, and that unproductive land is subject to expropriation – purchase – by the state for redistribution through the land reform programme.

Since the restoration of democracy in 1985, successive governments have promised to carry out agrarian reforms. But since then, only 500,000 families have been resettled, and often left without access to credit and other conditions that would enable them to farm their land.

The government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003) announced that it distributed land to 620,000 families, but the MST says that according to a census by the University of Sao Paulo, only 358,000 families were settled.

Brazil is the world’s leading exporter of soybeans, beef, coffee and sugar. But the struggle of rural activists for a plot of land of their own continues – and dozens are killed as a result of land disputes every year.