New Chance, New Challenge for Brazil's Landless Movement
Brandford, Sue
"We" will carry out an ambitious program of agrarian reform that will make land available to thousands and thousands of excluded Brazilians so that they can pull themSue Branford is co-author,...
...and, with Bernardo Kucinski, of Politics Transformed-Lula and the Brazilian Workers' Party, (Latin America Bureau...
...To satisfy in the short term the enormous popular expectation of far-reaching change, Lula plans to be radical on the social front...
...I know I s how many ilians have ll their lives g a plot of nd...
...Lula is walking on a tight rope in his effort to respond to the extraordinary expectations his election has aroused without frightening foreign creditors, who could do great damage to the fragile Brazilian economy if they start pulling out their money...
...Lula has adopted a dual strategy for the first year of his government...
...Although some U.S...
...The Lula government needs to promote vided with unsubsidised agricultural exports, most of which are produced by ed to gear their produc- big farmers, if it is to earn the billions of dollars ket by the big farmers...
...5, March-April 2002 <http://www.nacla.org/artdisplay.php?art=1896...
...can't betray the dreams of the millions and millions of Brazilians who are backing me...
...This stems to a large extent from the very real change in political culture that has taken place with the Lula victory...
...selves out of grinding poverty, become family farmers and have a decent standard of life," said Miguel Rossetto to thunderous applause, as he took office as Minister of Agrarian Reform in January...
...narket-oriented agrarian Yet it will be hard for Rossetto to promote agroamilies paid the market ecology...
...Over the last decade Brazilian agriculture has been through a harsh process of rapid change, as trade barriers have been slashed and the country has been integrated into the globalized world food industry...
...Lula intends to run the government as he ran the f impoverished peasant fractious PT in the past: Decisions will be taken collectively, after a full discussion in the cabinet, and ministers will be expected to defend the governs the MST's dislike of a ment's policy, even if personally they disagree with ed agriculture, in which it...
...After a few years the settlers...
...t was largely under pressure from the MST that the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso settled 260,000 families in the land between 1995 and 1999 (though the MST claims that this figure is an exaggeration...
...The environment minister, Marina Silva, who herself was born into a family of poor rubber-tappers deep in the Amazon forest, has already brought many of Brazil's most active environmentalists into her ministry and is preparing brand new policies for many controversial issues...
...Exasperated by the failure of successive presidents to deliver the wide-ranging agrarian reform they had promised during their electoral campaigns, the MST families had resorted to direct action, occupying the country's unproductive latifAindios (big estates...
...XXXV, No...
...This led Francisco Graziano, a land reform expert and former Cardoso adviser, to comment bitterly at the time that Brazil had carried out "the largest and the worst agrarian reform program in the world...
...corn, so in Brazil hundreds of thousands of peasant families unable to compete with a flood of low-priced foreign food have been forced off the land...
...settlements should have been "emancipated," that is, the families should have started paying for the land over a 20-year period...
...That is to halt-or, better still, reverse-the current process of expropriation of peasant families who do have at least a small piece of land...
...If it behaves courageously, the Brazilian state could make 100 poor Braz million hectares of land available dreamed a for agrarian reform," he said...
...During the 14 years he waited to be elected president, Lula travelled extensively throughout Brazil, a country that is almost as big as the United States...
...Amid great publicity, he set up the Land Bank, a program of r reform in which peasant fa price for their land, were pro bank loans and were expect tion to niches left in the marl the end the Land Bank faile Bank, which had enthusias beginning, reluctantly adm resources and technical e beyond the possibilities ol families...
...So can Rossetto finally deliver the radical redistribution of land that poor rural Brazilians have been demanding for over a century...
...We believe we can create both these conditions...
...During his electoral campaign, he spoke to a huge crowd of poor supporters in Fortaleza, a city in the northeast: "When I arrived, several men and women came up to me, crying and saying that I am their last hope...
...About one third of them are members of the MST...
...In practice, this rarely happened, because the families did not have a big enough income to make it feasible...
...About a million peasant families-four times the number settled on the land in the agrarian reform program-went bankrupt between 1995 and 1999...
...Any other President of the Republic can be elected and do nothing...
...Rossetto himself share deregulated, globalizi farmers around the w food at ever cheaper prices...
...Better than anyone else, he knows how many poor Brazilians, old and young, have dreamed all their lives of owning a plot of land [See "Portrait of an MST settler," p.34 and below...
...Yet this does not mean that the new government will be able to deliver the social reforms it has promised...
...By the end of the year Lula wants to have ended Brazil's agreement with the International Monetary Fund and to have gained the autonomy to make major shifts in the country's macro-economic strategy, moving Brazil away from neoliberalism towards expansionist, Keynesian policies in which the state once again has a key role in economic planning...
...But I don't have that right, for there are people out there in the crowd who have been supporting me for ten, 20, 30 years...
...During the Cardoso years very few of these families received adequate financial or technical assistance from the authorities...
...The MST believes of ownin that the families on the agrarian reform settlements can play a key la role in the social revolution that Lula is promising...
...farmers recently started purchasing land in central Brazil for soybean farming and pig rearing, foreign influence is as yet concentrated in the marketing of the produce...
...Yet, because the oldfashioned and unproductive latifiindio has been losing political influence, St6dile believes that social movements could get most of this land distributed to the country's four million landless peasant fam- Lula know, ilies...
...Today there are about half a million families living on the country's 3,800 land settlement projects...
...In required to service the foreign debt...
...The families want reliable, subsidized credit, geared to their needs, and a guaranteed market for their crops, saying that Zero Hunger, the government's flagship program for ending hunger, provides a wonderful opportunity for the authorities to incorporate them into the market...
...Brazil is today a leading agricultural producer, exporting soybeans, orange juice, coffee, beef and other commodities...
...New Chance, New Challenge for Brazil's Landless Movement 1. See "For An Agriculture that Doesn't Get Rid of Farmers: An Interview with Miguel Altieri," NACLA Report, Vol...
...Many of these families are members of the MST and won their land in the 1980s and 1990s as the movement, founded in the southerly state of Rio Grande do Sul, spread all over the country...
...Even for a skillful political operator like Lula, it orld compete to produce will be a difficult balancing act...
...We" will carry out an ambitious program of agrarian reform that will make land available to thousands and thousands of excluded Brazilians so that they can pull themSue Branford is co-author, with Jan Rocha, of Cutting the Wire-the Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil, (Latin America Bureau, U.K...
...Minister Rossetto has promised to take urgent action to find land for the estimated 80,000 landless families currently squatting in makeshift tents beside federal highways...
...All those campaigning for agrarian reform know that they face immense difficulties yet many are cautiously optimistic...
...Rossetto is well aware of the scale of the problem, for he referred in his inauguration speech to the "millions and millions of families who are struggling to stay on the land, faced with prospect of scratching out a living in violent shanty-towns on the outskirts of Brazil's cities...
...It will not be easy to convince the government, operating under tight IMF constraints, to provide enough cheap farm credit and technical assistance Vol )(XXVI, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 200333 Vol XXXVI, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 2003 33REPORT ON BRAZIL for the families, yet this is less daunting than the other task facing Rossetto...
...Today Rossetto will be under great pressure, not only to expand dramatically the scale of agrarian reform, but also to provide the families on the settlements with much greater support...
...The latifindio still covers a huge area of land in Brazil: The combined properties of just 27,000 landowners cover 178 million hectares, an area well over twice the size of Texas...
...And ular on MST settlements, second, there must be an organized peasant movecologia...
...In the end, to defuse the social tension, INCRA would agrarian often forcibly purchase the land from the landowner and settle the to give more families...
...It is not by chance that Brazil's left-wing president, Luiz Inicio Lula da Silva, selected Rossetto-the only committed socialist in the government-for the politically sensitive Ministry of Agrarian Reform...
...On the macro-economic front, he intends to be orthodox and cautious, respecting the tight limits on public spending agreed with the International Monetary Fund and honoring foreign debt payments...
...Instead, he said: "I think the biggest danger comes from possible maneuvers from international capital and the Bush administration...
...They see the next four market, but as a space for years as an opportunity--perhaps the best opportu'ay of life and for culti- nity they will ever get-to mobilize a huge national thy, pesticide-free, non- campaign in favor of agrarian reform...
...to promote an environmental ant farming in which familie as a means of production f cheap cash crops for the m; developing an alternative w vating a wide range of heal genetically modified crops themselves and sell in small kets...
...He has already expropriated 203,000 hectares of unproductive land in 17 states for distribution to 5,500 families...
...Agrarian that they will consume reform has happened all over the world when two Quantities in local mar- conditions are present," said Jodo Pedro St6dile, the vhich the MST refuses to best-known MST leader...
...The education minister, Cristovam Buarque, is a highly respected left-wing intellectual, who is promising a radical overhaul of the country's whole education system, currently heavily skewed in favor of middle-class children...
...lWCIA REPORT ON THE AMER S 34REPORT ON BRAZIL Seventeen international trading companies control 43 percent of Brazil's agricultural exports...
...The families often spent many years in the struggle for the land, repeatedly re-occupying the ernment will estates after violent eviction by ressure to gunmen...
...The only room for small family producers in this modem export-oriented agricultural sector is as dependent, poorly paid contract farmers raising factory-farmed chickens for Sadia, Brazil's largest poultry exporter, or cultivating tobacco for Souza Cruz, the Brazilian subsidiary of British American Tobacco...
...First, there must be a , they say, "that implies mass-based government in power that wants to carry ,this kind of farming is out agrarian reform and to abolish the latifindio...
...It is interesting to note that when St6dile was asked what he considered to be the main obstacle to agrarian reform, he did not reply "the political power of the landowners," as many would have expected...
...Just as in Mexico, where the local market has been swamped with imports of cheap U.S...
...This kind of farming, v call "subsistence"-because 'sub-existing' when, in fact vastly superior," is very popi where it is known as agro-e MST marchers in the state of Sio Paolo in 1997...
...Like the MST, he wants Astute as always in their analysis of the balance of Ily-friendly kind of peas- political forces, the MST leaders know that, with s regard the land not just such a correlation of forces, they need to fight for the 'or efficiently producing agrarian reform they dream of...
...Raul Jungmann, minister for agrarian development under the Cardoso government, believed strongly that agrarian reform would fail unless it accepted the logic of the marketplace...
...The appointment of Rossetto, a veteran activist from the left-wing Democracia Socialista faction of the Workers' Party (PT), was greeted with delight by Brazil's powerful social movements, particularly the million-strong Landless Rural Workers' Movement 32 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 32REPORT ON BRAZIL (MST), which has won international acclaim for its success in organizing landless families and conquering land...
...1 ment, with a high level of political awareness and a Vol XXXVI, No 5 MARCHIAPRIL 2003 35 Vol XXXVI, No 5 MARCHIAPRIL 2003 35REPORT ON BRAZIL great capacity for mobilization...
...So, along with ed, after even the World Rossetto, Lula has appointed a conservative agricultically backed it in the ture minister, Roberto Rodrigues, who will be itted that it demanded defending the interests of big farmers within the cabxpertise that lay way inet...
...Because he believes that confrontation with foreign creditors would do enormous damage to the vulnerable economy, he has opted for a nonconfrontational policy of gradually weaning the economy off its heavy reliance on short-term money that gives foreign crediThe new gov be under p expand the reform-and 1 support tc tors such leverage over economic decision-making...
...The Brazilian people are used to this...
...He also plans to provide much better support for the families already settled on the land settlement projects set up by INCRA (National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform...
...Kumarian Press, U.S...
...It's a lot of land...
...As a first step, it wants the government to buy from the settlements the food it needs for the nine million under-nourished families to be targeted in the Zero Hunger program...
...But most daring of all, given the passions aroused by the whole question of agrarian reform, was Lula's appointment of Miguel Rossetto...
Vol. 36 • March 2003 • No. 5
