Civil Society, Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, Population, Poverty & SDGs

BRAZIL: Government, Activists Still at Loggerheads Over Land Reform

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 21 2005 (IPS) - While Brazil’s leftist government claims this was the best year ever for land reform, the National Forum for Agrarian Reform and Justice in the Countryside complains that land redistribution efforts have fallen far short of the target.

The land reform programme of the administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva settled a far smaller number of families than promised and is doing little to nothing to transform the heavy concentration of land in Brazil or to expand family farming, said the Forum, made up of 45 trade unions, church groups, indigenous and women’s organisations, in its year-end report.

Vice minister of Agrarian Development Guilherme Cassel countered that “this was the best year for agrarian reform in the history of Brazil.”

>From January to last Monday, 111,200 families had been awarded plots of land of their own, and this week the total will reach 115,000 – the goal agreed with the rural movements, Cassel told IPS.

But Joao Pedro Stédile, one of the leaders of Brazil’s powerful Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), alleged that the Lula administration is using “the same tricks” as the previous government, counting families who had already been settled but only received official papers this year, as well as people who replaced families that had abandoned the land they had been granted in the past.

Furthermore, he said, most of the new farms are in isolated parts of the country’s Amazon jungle region, and the families are living “in terrible conditions,” unable to produce or market crops.


The main points of the agreement reached by the Lula administration and the MST last May are not being fulfilled, such as the number of families to be settled and the priority that was to be put on families who are living in MST camps, said Stédile.

According to the MST, there are currently140,000 families living in these makeshift camps, under sheets of black plastic, waiting to be assigned a small plot of land on which to subsist. The camps are set up alongside roads or on occupied land left idle by large landowners.

Cassel, on the other hand, said nearly 20,000 families settled this year came from the camps, and maintained that the number of families squatting in the camps is inflated by the MST, and is actually closer to 70,000.

Speedier, more effective land reform was one of the commitments undertaken by the Lula administration when it took office in January 2003.

As in much of Latin America, the “latifundium”, or large landed estate, dominates the Brazilian countryside. According to the Catholic Church Pastoral Land Commission, just 50,000 people own half of the farmland in this country of 184 million.

At the start of his four-year term, President Lula promised to ensure land, decent living standards and the conditions needed for production for a total of 400,000 rural families.

In the first two years – 2003 and 2004 – the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) announced that it had settled 117,555 families. Even if this year’s target has been met, as claimed by Cassel, that would leave 160,000 families to be settled next year – a major undertaking.

In the eight years that former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003) governed Brazil, 524,000 families were officially settled – a figure that is questioned by the MST, the country’s biggest rural movement.

Activists had expected the Lula administration to make a more decisive effort to redistribute land and provide a boost to family farming, and have felt let down, said the Forum for Agrarian Reform in its report, released Monday.

The government has failed to carry out real land reform because it has placed greater importance on export agribusiness, has submitted itself to the country’s powerful large landowners, and has followed economic policies that benefit the financial sector, transnational corporations and monoculture farming, Stédile argued.

In the current cabinet, there are at least three ministries in favour of these economic policies, while only the Ministry of Agrarian Development defends family farms, he complained.

In the Brazilian countryside, there is a conflict between agribusiness – whose top priorities are exports and the incorporation of technology in the countryside, which expands profits while driving up unemployment – and small family farms, which supply the domestic market with food and employ more than 85 percent of rural labour power, stated the Forum for Agrarian Reform.

Cassel said it was “absurd” to cast doubt on the statistics provided by the government, because all of the families who have been settled have been fully identified by name and by their legal documents – information that has been provided to the MST and other rural movements.

Noting that 40 percent of families have been settled in Brazil’s northern Amazon jungle region, the official explained that this is the area with the largest proportion of public land, and said “land reform is a better use of the land than illegal appropriation by large landowners.”

He was referring to a phenomenon by which large landowners in Brazil illegally occupy public land and claim it as their own.

In order to obtain land in the more developed parts of the country, like the south, the government would first have to update the “productivity index” that shows whether rural property is unproductive and thus subject to expropriation by the State for agrarian reform purposes, under the Brazilian constitution.

The index is based on criteria from 1975, when a rural estate was considered productive if it was used to raise half a head of cattle per hectare on average. But today, new technology makes it possible to raise three or four head of cattle per hectare and to produce nearly double the 1975 output of soybeans or grains, said Stédile.

In this, the activist coincides with the Ministry of Agrarian Development against the Agriculture Ministry, which is opposed to modifying the way productivity is measured.

Cassel responded to the criticism from activists by pointing out that besides awarding land to “the largest number of families in any single year,” the government had quadrupled the soft credits provided by the “national programme to strengthen family agriculture”.

The loans granted climbed from 2.3 billion reals (1.0 billion dollars) in 2002 to 9.0 billion reals (3.9 billion dollars) this year. Government investment in purchasing and expropriating land also set a new record, the vice minister added.

Nevertheless, the rural movements are disappointed in the progress made by the government, and are planning major mobilisations for next year, especially in March, Stédile told IPS.

Their protests will coincide with the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development, to be organised by the government and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) from Mar. 7-10 in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

In addition, the Eighth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity will take place Mar. 20-31 in Curitiba, another city in southern Brazil.

On that occasion, two issues will be discussed that directly concern small farmers: the acceptance or rejection of crops engineered with “terminator technology” that makes seeds or pollen sterile, thus forcing farmers to buy new seeds every planting season, and the demand for labels on exported food products to clearly indicate whether or not they contain transgenic elements.

 
Republish | | Print |


cfa exam prep book