Brazilian agrarian reform: Latin America's landless reclaim their-soil

Catholic New Times, Nov 16, 2003 by Kevin Spurgaitis

In the northeastern part of Brazil, at the Encruzilhada Natalino encampment, large families sit in a high-roofed community hall, at long trestle tables, indulging in beef steaks, chicken legs and spicy sausages.

Those who previously knew only hunger now occupy a spacious sugar plantation, in one in a series of lots equally divided amongst hundreds of families. Despite intensive surveillance by military police at the foot of the plantation and in low-flying helicopters, thousands of Brazilians' hopes for land redistribution are raised here.

These campesinos have taken up "peaceful action" in Rio Grande do Sul, northeast of Porto Alegre--their modest settlements have superseded 'white elephant' estates. However, although there is plenty of room for small-scale agriculture projects such as these, they are considered unlawful.

Depicted as mere squatters and banditos in Latin America's mainstream press, vilified by right-wing politicians as "enemies of the poor," the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sere Terra (MST), or the Landless Rural Workers Movement has become one of the continent's most powerful social movements. For nearly 20 years, the million-member organization has empowered dispossessed farmers through education and the reconstruction of a cooperative, agrarian culture--their grassroots approach to alleviating world poverty.

Acclaimed writer and professor, Noam Chomsky, recently called the MST "the most important and exciting people's movement in the world." The Guardian Newspaper described their action as a "radical solution" to the problems in Brazil--one of the world's major food producers, where nearly a third of the population goes hungry. In addition to the support of an extensive, international network of human rights groups, religious organizations and labour unions, it has received a number of international honours, including The Right Livelihood Award and UNICEF's education award.

In a Toronto address in October, MST spokesperson Joao Pedro Stedile, spoke freely about the grassroots mobilization that is entrenched in the South American countryside. The event, organized by the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development (CASID) and the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace, was part of Stedile's public speaking tour to build international solidarity against corporatedriven globalization.

"The MST started as a struggle for land. When we began our struggle we believed that land alone would be enough to get people out of poverty.

We were wrong. We learned that the enemy was not just the large estates. We learned that there are other fences besides the ones that kept campesinos off of the land. We learned that the lack of capital is a fence. We learned that ignorance, a lack of knowledge, is a fence. We learned that international capitalism and its multinational corporations are fences as well."

Considered to be a principal founder of the MST, Stedile is a leading international figure in the anti-corporate globalization movement--an activist in the Via Campesina movement and an organizer of the World Social Forum in Sao Paulo, Brazil. His musings on agrarian reform, rural development and globalization have been widely published.

Stedile, born on a small farm in Rio Grande do Sul, obtained a degree in Economics before becoming active in rural struggles, first as part of the regional commission of grape producers. Since 1979, the 50-year-old has been active in land reform. Co-founding the MST in 1984, he quickly became one of its most "articulate and visionary spokespersons." Though Stedile, the grandson of an underprivileged, illiterate farmer, confesses he is a mere "chatter box," and not necessarily the most important figure in the movement.

The campesino struggle for land

"The MST came about as an expression of the will of the campesino to struggle for the land. We had to rebuild all of this because a dictatorship had destroyed all of the social organizations," he says. This climate of "violence and desperation" was the catalyst for the Latin American movement.

With more than 400 years of agroexport development, Brazil's economic model produced a "tremendous amount of wealth," Stedile says. Unfortunately, the country's foray into the industrialized world left most Brazilians behind in abject poverty. Historically, war has ravaged Brazil's vast interior, pitting peasant farmers, small holders, and sharecroppers against cattle ranchers and landowners, as well as road and dam builders.

The country's 1970s economic policy led to the displacement of nearly five million people in three southern states. The "sem terra"--or landless, either migrated to urban centres, to overrun shantytowns, or fled to Amazonian colonies set up by the government, where malaria is rampant and schools and hospitals are conspicuously absent.

The Latin America Press reports that 26,000 landowners now control 178 million hectares of land--an average of 7,000 hectares per estate--leaving more than 20 million rural workers without their own plots. Fewer than 50,000 landowners are entitled to estates measuring 1,000 hectares and control half of the country's arable land. With 400 million hectares of titled land privatized, the remaining 60 million hectares of real estate are often left fallow. More than 4.8 million families are now landless in Brazil, according to MST figures. Millions of peasants subsist day-to-day in transitory, agricultural jobs.