Seminars and Symposia
New Directions in the Study of Agrarian Reform and the Landless
Rural Worker’s Movement (MST) in Brazil
Marilda Aparecida de Menezes
Professor, Department of Sociology, Universidade Federal de Paraiba
Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Agrarian Studies Institute, Yale University
Wendy Wolford
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill
Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Agrarian Studies Institute, Yale University
Land Reform Settlements in the Sugar Cane Area of Northeast
Brazil: The Economic, Social and Political Impacts
Marilda Aparecida de Menezes
This presentation will analyze the impact that land reform settlements
in the sugarcane area of Northeast Brazil have had on land structure
and production diversification during the 1990s. This area has been
historically characterized by large properties, monoculture and high
levels of labor exploitation. In the 1990s with the liberalization of
the state, there was a cut in the subsidies and some sugar cane mill
have collapsed, leaving many workers unemployed. The workers organized
some mobilizations in order to fight for land. The creation of land
reform settlements since the 1980s has not come as part of a National
Agrarian Reform Plan but rather in response to the pressure applied
by social movements that fight for land. This paper has four main objectives:
first, to analyse the so-called “crisis of sugar cane mills”
with the emergence of land movements; second, to analyse the very diverse
impact of the settlements on land structure (estrutura fundiária)
in the sugar cane area; third, to show that land reform settlements
have contributed to the expansion of subsistence products; finally,
to argue that although sugar cane is still the dominant crop being produced
in the Zona da Mata land reform settlements have introduced significant
changes into the workers’ life trajectories, converting them from
wage workers, sharecroppers, squatters, and landless into peasants who
own their land as well as into new political actors within the rural
space of sugarcane.
Every Monkey has its Own Head: Rural Sugarcane Workers and
the Politics of Agrarian Reform in Northeastern Brazil
Wendy Wolford
Sugarcane has been produced in the zona da mata of Pernambuco along
the northeastern coast of Brazil since the early 1500s. Although the
market for sugarcane is highly variable, plantation owners in the region
have weathered cyclical economic crises by manipulating local land use
and labor arrangements. During the most recent economic crisis in the
sugarcane region (1990 – 2000), grassroots activists with the
largest social movement in Brazilian history, O Movimento dos Trabalhadores
Rurais Sem Terra (The Movement of Rural Landless Workers, commonly known
as the MST) demanded an end to the exploitation and immiseration that
characterized sugarcane production. Sugarcane workers in the municipality
of Água Preta joined the MST because they felt they had few other
economic options and because the MST established a position of influence
with local political leaders. Over the course of several years, however,
most of the workers who had joined the movement left, planting sugarcane
on their own land or working for nearby distilleries as the international
price of sugarcane recovered. In this paper, I argue that the MST had
a difficult time maintaining its presence in Água Preta because
the sugarcane workers’ identity and political consciousness were
constituted in a relationship between land use and labor rights that
differed significantly from the peasant ideology promoted by the MST.
The clash in political cultures is illustrated through an ethnographic
examination of production, privacy and patronage politics on two settlements
organized by the MST in Água Preta, Pernambuco.
When: Wednesday, December 1, 4:30 PM
Where: Room 9205
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
(between 34th and 35th St.)
To reserve please send e-mail to brazilproject@gc.cuny.edu
