Land-hungry in Brazil
Ana Maria Galano, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
| When thousands of machete-wielding
Brazilian farm labourers take over their Promised Land it may look like a scene from
the remake of a great film epic. In reality, it is not the workers who are out of
sync with the times but the great landowners or fazenderos who own most of the land
in Brazil, an enormous country with 350 million arable hectares. In few countries is there such a glaring inequality in private land ownership as there is in Brazil. At the bottom of the ladder, five million families do not have have even the smallest plot to cultivate. Just above them, six-and-a-half million “family smallholdings” are packed into the quarter of the farmland where 80 per cent of Brazil’s rural population lives. At the top of the ladder, 500,000 great estates, averaging 600 hectares each, occupy three-quarters of the arable land. Brazil’s National Institute for Settlement and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), a public body, has found that 150 million hectares of the fazendas are under-used, including 20 million fertile, easily accessible hectares that could be farmed immediately. On 17 April 1996, an MST procession was marching to the capital of Pará State in the Amazon region when military police opened fire at Eldorado dos Carajás, killing nineteen. Since 1985, over a thousand people have been murdered, executed or have “disappeared” in the process of appropriating unused land or confirming a usually precarious right of occupation. “For big landowners, the peasants’ demands are an intolerable threat,” says João Pedro Stedile, a member of the MST national executive. “They strike back violently with their henchmen or through a state machine in which they have a great deal of leverage.” The movement has nevertheless been successful. In 1991, some 15,000 landless peasant families were living in acampamentos, temporary roadside camps set up as close as possible to the unused or under-used lands of the big estates. A highly visible illustration of the clash between exclusion and unfair privilege, they attracted widespread media attention. Today, their ranks have swelled to more than 40,000. Moreover, about 150,000 families have recently been settled on over five million hectares in more than 1,500 assentamentos, homesteads set up for the beneficiaries—or the victors—of the battle for agrarian reform. After being at a standstill for decades, land reform is starting to pick up speed again. The first land redistribution law dates back to 1964, but subsequent military governments gave priority to settling the Amazon region. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso says that “the agrarian structure, which was inherited from the colonial period, is inadequate and unjust.” By settling 300,000 families on more than 14 million hectares between 1995 and 1998, he claims that his government will have done “more than has ever been done in the past.” But this leap forward is also the result of a shift in the balance of power, for which the MST is largely responsible. The rural exodus, in which the urban population rose from 30 to 80 per cent in half a century, helped build a wall of indifference between the towns and the countryside. With great tactical expertise, MST thrust the agrarian question into the spotlight. At the same time, by forcing its way into the big estates, the movement has created a series of faits accomplis that compel the government to take account of the landless and negotiate with them. The typical MST member is under thirty-five, did not finish primary education, has at least three children, is a descendant of European immigrants who arrived in Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century, and before joining the movement worked either as a seasonal day labourer or a full-time agricultural worker. In just a few years, the movement has managed to create a network of alternative economic and social ventures. For example, 400 “farm co-operation” groups exchange information on innovative agricultural methods that are gradually gaining ground among local farmers. Some 850 primary schools and 20 high schools are up and running, while day-care centres and community restaurants are easing women’s load of household chores. The authorities can no longer sideline the MST when it comes to agricultural issues. By building a participatory and egalitarian structure that goes against the grain, it offers alternative perspectives to broad swathes of Brazilian society. Its adversaries denounce its political radicalism and illegal methods, while its defenders call it Latin America’s most promising social movement. Brazilian economist Celso Furtado goes so far as to say that it offers “the only answer to mass unemployment in Brazil” because “a return to subsistence agriculture is preferable to urban poverty.” The MST is facing this challenge with the slogan of “Agrarian reform: everyone’s struggle.” |
The occupation
of vast under-used estates by Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) might
seem like a struggle from another age. In fact the movement is offering new responses
to the greatest scourge of modern Brazil—social exclusion.
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Occupation of the 83,000-hectare Giacometi fazenda in Paraná State. After years of struggle, it should eventually support 4,000 families. |
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Below, a family in its new home in the settlement of Conquista da Fronteira, Santa Catarina State. |
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Brazil’s agrarian structure |
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A combative art
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