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BRAZIL: Innovative Small Farmers Set to Redefine Development

Mario Osava

RÍO DE JANEIRO, Jun 8 2006 (IPS) - While their protest marches and occupations of government and business offices recall the struggles of landless campesinos, this group of Brazilian farmers are drawing attention to a distinct facet of agrarian reform. These workers have mobilised to hold onto the land they own and build a more just and environmentally sound society.

The Small Farmers Movement (MPA) has incorporated many new organisational ways of fighting economic and social injustice.

The activists stepped up their protests this year, “with very positive results,” Aurio Scherer, an MPA coordinator, based in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, told IPS.

Following the most recent protests, held May 23 and 24, the government granted payment deferrals for investment loans and reduced debts taken on to pay for production expenses. Weather problems and falling prices have triggered several bankruptcies, and Minister of Agrarian Development Guilherme Cassel has acknowledged that there is a farm price crisis.

Another “major step forward” was, according to Scherer, the government’s promise to make the temporary social security provisions for rural communities a permanent law, consolidating one of Brazil’s main income-redistribution policies, by allowing campesinos to retire at the age of 60 for men and 55 for women and draw a pension equivalent to the minimum wage of 155 dollars a month.

These are some of the concrete results achieved by the relatively new organisation, which in just a few years has attracted national support in an agrarian sector dominated by export-oriented agribusiness and plagued by growing social and economic imbalances.

But even these successes reveal only part of the organisation’s scope. In specific terms, the MPA addresses the day-to-day struggle to foster price, trade and credit policies favourable to small farmers, who are constantly threatened by climatic and market fluctuations. However, since its inception in 1996, the organisation has also incorporated broader, socially conscious ideals, such as salvaging and validating the campesino way of life through grassroots agrarian development projects.

With a hands-on, practical approach, the MPA organises farmers, providing support in their daily struggles to improve their quality of life and overcome the threat posed by agribusiness – that is, the expansion of monoculture export crops.

“We are defending an alternate production and technological model, based on campesino methods and agroecology,” Altacir Bunde, a national MPA leader, explained to IPS.

Campesino agriculture is also the environmental opposite of agribusiness, which shows “absolutely no respect” for its surroundings, exhausts natural resources, and subjects campesinos, indigenous communities and other traditional rural groups to various forms of violence, said Horacio Martins de Carvalho, an agronomist who specialises in rural social issues.

In contrast, agroecology, in addition to promoting environmentally friendly farming, provides “healthy food” to the population – another of the movement’s goals.

Campesinos represent “a wide variety of ways of being, living and producing that run contrary to corporate agribusiness,” and are thus “the only social actors who can effect social change in rural areas,” Carvalho told IPS.

The 4.1 million families dedicated to small agriculture produce 80 percent of Brazil’s food and make up 85 percent of the rural labour force, said Bunde. This sector, then, is “the key to a more egalitarian rural society,” he maintained.

The MPA is also against the concept of family agriculture, which it considers an impractical formula that undermines the survival of rural life and encourages the “integration” of small producers into agroindustry, a trend particularly visible in tobacco production.

The movement is fighting to eradicate the “semi-slavery” that multinational companies impose on tobacco farmers, said Scherer. Big business creates a state of total dependency: the industry sells supplies at higher-than-market prices and even provides credit to small family farmers, “trapping” them in debt, he explained.

Still, tobacco farming is one of the most profitable activities for small family-owned farms and employs 100,000 families in Rio Grande do Sul, he acknowledged. Thus, its replacement by other crops must be “slow and gradual,” he said, but it has already started, partly because aggressive health policies have helped reduce tobacco consumption.

The fledgling MPA set down its first roots in this very state, at the southernmost reaches of Brazil, home to a significant population of small farmers, most of whom are descendants of European immigrants.

A severe drought that began in 1995 severely damaged local agriculture. In response, more than 25,000 bankrupt farmers gathered in “drought camps”, where the movement was born.

Scherer abandoned his union activities in favour of the MPA. “Unionism had become obsolete, complacent and slow,” and offered no answers to the problems faced by campesinos, partly because each union’s activity is limited to its municipality, whereas the movement is a more flexible, less hierarchical organisation, he explained.

The MPA thus distances itself from unions, such as the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers, and has instead formed alliances with the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and other organisations in Vía Campesina, a global network of rural social movements.

Thus, as the struggle of landless workers has gained significant ground in past decades through the MST’s new organisational approach, which has been adopted in many Latin American countries, the equally innovative structure of the MPA has managed to unite a sector traditionally isolated by its inherently rural environment.

The main distinction, of course, is that in the MPA the small farmers “own land and are fighting to hold onto it,” in the face of policies that prioritise agribusiness, said Scherer.

The MPA is organised in “base groups” in rural communities, with an average of 10 to 15 families, represented in municipal networks, and even regional groups of municipalities, explained Bunde. This form of collective leadership, another feature of the movement, is also represented at the state and national levels.

While it started off slow, since gaining strong support in five states by 2000, the MPA movement has taken off in popularity, and is now active in 19 of Brazil’s 26 states, and ready to take on broader challenges.

Brazil’s boom in vegetable-based fuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, is an excellent opportunity for rural agriculture. It would be “a strategic move to link agroecological food production with renewable biomass energy,” avoiding the situation that for 30 years has characterised Brazil’s alcohol-based fuel industry, which is completely dominated by big sugarcane agribusiness, said Scherer.