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Brazilian Agrarian Reform Under Lula—MST to March
Hannah Wittman & Dawn Plummer

On April 22, 2005, members of the Friends of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) gathered at the Brazilian embassy in Washington, DC and consulates around the country to underscore human rights abuses and rampant environmental destruction in Brazil's countryside while highlighting the need for true land reform. These mobilizations were in solidarity with the historic MST march of 10,000 landless that kicked off on May 1 and will arrive in the capital of Brasilia on May 17.

MST is demanding President Luís Inácio “Lula” da Silva carry out his promise on agrarian reform, as guaranteed by the constitution. More than half the land is held by just four percent of the population, while Brazil’s income distribution is among the most unequal in the world. MST has suffered assassinations of hundreds of peasants and rural activists, while Amazon deforestation rates have risen sharply. Sister Dorothy Stang, an American nun whose assassination on February 12 was ordered by large landholders, highlights the determination of the rural elite to maintain their historic dominance through force.

When Lula, a long-time Brazilian grassroots leader, ran for president in 1994, he promised that if elected, he would settle 800,000 families in four years. Almost a decade later, during his fourth election campaign in 2002, agrarian reform was again a major part of his campaign platform. By 2002 there were almost ?ve million landless families throughout Brazil, and over 150,000 families camped in landless workers’ occupations on roadsides, abandoned estates, and on the patios of beleaguered Federal Land Reform Agencies in almost every state.

When Lula was elected with more than 60% of the popular vote in October of 2002, there was a collective sense of relief and victory on the part of many rural and worker’s rights movements, who that they would ?nally realize their grassroots call for social justice through agrarian reform. Lula immediately appointed a top-notch team of public intellectuals and rural development experts to develop the National Plan for Agrarian Reform II (PNRA II).

In 2003, 85% of farms occupied just 20% of land in Brazil, while large landowners with more than 1000 hectares were just 1.7 percent of farms but occupied almost 44% of land. Analyzing the historical impact of such land concentration for ongoing social exclusion and poverty, the commission produced data endorsing a program that would settle 1,000,000 families over a period of eight years, in addition to restructuring Brazil’s agricultural policy to provide more support to family farmers.

The Agribusiness Threat
With Lula’s election as part of a center-left coalition government, however, rural social movements found renewed opposition from their historical adversaries. The landholding elite now felt especially threatened by the institutionalization of what they called “populist rhetoric” that advocated social justice through land redistribution, and began to form rural militias and increase lobbying efforts to show that smallholder agriculture was “bad for Brazil.” Their growing alliance with transnational capital, especially agribusiness corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, along with record-breaking soybean harvests, helped cement their in?uence with the neoliberal sector of the Lula administration, especially the Minister of Agriculture, Roberto Rodrigues, the Finance Minister Antonio Palocci, and Luiz Furlan, the Minister of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade. With their support, the media declared agribusiness Brazil’s savior, responsible for resolving financial issues and literally paving a pathway through the Amazon region towards a developed future.

But this “progress” came at a price. In the central and western regions of Brazil, where agribusiness interests have advanced most rapidly in the last decade, social con?ict is also increasing. This con?ict is fundamentally about the agricultural model and the failure to implement agrarian reform. The highest yields in the world for soybean and cotton have been reported in the region, while favorable climatic conditions allow several crops per year of corn, sorghum, and sugarcane. The accolades forget, however, the true cost of these agricultural exports.

Today’s agribusiness is bent on reproducing the same exploitative and oppressive set of social relations that have been hanging around since the Colonial Period – rural slavery, social exclusion, hunger, and environmental devastation. Consider the state of Mato Grosso, which achieved world records in soybean productivity and is responsible for almost 40 percent of Brazil’s grain production, but also experienced 27 percent of Brazil’s total land con?icts in 2003 and 36 percent of evictions. These numbers are especially grave given the region’s fairly sparse population. In 2003, 41 percent of the rural population in the state was involved in some sort of documented rural con?ict, according to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), and it has the highest per-capita ratio of rural assassinations. Currently, over 20,000 families there are camped along roadsides, watching soybeans getting trucked out of the state and poverty getting trucked back in.

The 2003 March to Brasilia—Enact the PNRA!
The First National Plan for Land Reform (PNRA) was developed in 1985 as a project of the new democratic movement. It aimed to use land reform as a rural modernization strategy to break the economic stranglehold on the countryside applied by the concentrated land tenure. However, emaciated by the resistance of the rural elite to land expropriation, frontier colonization emerged as the major component of state-led land reform during that period. By the end of President Jose Sarney’s regime in 1990, only six percent of the PNRA had been carried out and fewer than 120,000 families settled.

Following Lula’s election in 2002, rural social movements, including Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), the Small Farmers Movement (MPA), Movement of those Displaced by Dams (MAB) and the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) set out to ensure that the PNRA II would not suffer the same fate of the ?rst one. More than 45 social movement organizations, rural unions, pastoral commissions and research agencies signed A Letter from the Land, which defended land reform and family agriculture. This letter demanded policies that would radically alter the current predatory model of agricultural development which “concentrated land, income, and power.” In particular, the letter demanded the expropriation of the largest estates, regardless of productivity; a constitutional amendment limiting landholdings; and initiatives promoting a regionally diverse, self-suf?cient, family-based agricultural model that would ensure food security for the Brazilian nation while protecting the environment. The alternative agro-ecological model proposed by the MST, CPT and other rural social movements is modeled on small-farmer production, supplying local and national markets with a suf?cient supply of healthy food in order to ensure a system of food sovereignty.

By the end of 2003, the PNRA II had not yet entered into law and rural movements were getting restless. Occupations and rural conflicts increased sharply; according to the CPT, Brazil experienced the greatest number of rural conflicts since the mid 1980s in 2003, with 73 rural leaders assassinated (a 70 percent increase over 2002). The landed classes and agribusiness increased pressure on the judicial sector, which increasingly sided with large landholders in land disputes and ordered more evictions than at any other time since CPT has begun documentation. 175,485 people were evicted in 2003, an increase of 263 percent since 2002.

In November 2003, more than 1,000 members of the MST and other movements marched over 350 kilometers over 10 days between Goiânia and Brasilia in support of the National Plan for Agrarian Reform. Once in Brasilia, they joined with thousands of other rural workers for an audience with Lula, who declared that he would “die defending agrarian reform” and launched the legal implementation of the PNRA II.
Although less than half of the recommended proposal was included in the actual PNRA II, Lula promised to re-settle 400,000 families during his ?rst term and regularize the land tenure situation of another 130,000. Far fewer people than expected have been settled so far. In 2003, not even 30,000 families, of the proposed 115,000, were settled, and between January and December 2004 the government expropriated only enough land to settle 25,000 families, although they insist that they settled more than 68,000 out of the 115,000 also budgeted for 2004.

The Road Ahead
Despite current setbacks, some progress is being made. The 2004 agrarian reform budget was relatively large (although much went unspent), and established a precedent for including substantial resources for land reform in the budget for 2005. Some last-ditch spending in December of 2004 brought numbers up slightly, and a Provisional Measure was passed in December of 2004 requiring all landowners with over 400 hectares to submit to a governmental geo-referencing of their land areas and validation of land titles. This is expected to liberate signi?cant acreage of ‘grabbed’ land for expropriation. At the same time, new studies have detailed the important role that family agriculture plays in Brazil’s economy, information necessary to counter media stereotypes that portray land reform as out-of-date and harmful to Brazil’s economy. A FIPE study (Economic Research Foundation) for the Ministry of Agrarian Development showed that family agriculture was responsible for 10.1% of the GNP in 2003, valued at about $55 billion.

The 2005 March
The struggle for land reform seems to be at a crossroads in Brazil. During the 1990s, the MST and other rural social movements enjoyed widespread social solidarity, especially after a series of highly publicized massacres and the continued repression of peaceful mobilizations. The elite-controlled media has now collaborated with agribusiness and the neoliberal wing of the Lula administration to counteract that solidarity, arguing that an export-centric agricultural model focused on genetically modi?ed organisms and monoculture will bring social and economic development to Brazil. And they are slowly winning over society with glitzy advertisements and publications showcasing the modernized and wealthy agribusiness-dominated corners of Brazil. For example, soybean boom towns and high-profile export expeditions to China now dominate the rural social scene in the evening news.

The confusion wrought by the multiple messages and directions emanating from the Lula government has served to fragment and dilute the solidarity of progressive social movements in Brazil. As Plinio da Arruda Sampiao (a founder of the PT and long-time public intellectual around agrarian development issues) points out, the Lula government does not repress popular movements, but neither has it supported them with concrete action. Thus the movements are faced with a dilemma: oppose the only government in recent decades to attempt to meet the demands of rural social movements, or retreat in order to not criticize.

In response to this historic moment, the MST and allied rural social movements are now focused on a 2005 March and social mobilization to meter societal support for land reform and alternative economic and agricultural development in Brazil. Members of the MST and other movements march for two weeks between Goiania and Brasilia, following the path that led to the passage of the II PNRA in 2003. This time, however, over 10,000 people will march and conduct social education and media campaigns along the way. The march will depart on April 17, the International Day of Peasant Rights, and arrive to Brasilia on May 1, in conjunction with the Labor Day celebration organized by Brazil’s major labor organizations.

For more information on the Friends of the MST or the MST itself, please visit www.mstbrazil.org.

Dawn Plummer is a student in the PhD program in Political Science.