NEWS
FROM BRAZIL
supplied by Brazil Justice Net
Number 578, October 10, 2007
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In this week's News from Brazil:
The Dilemma of Agrarian Reform
by Claudemiro Godoy do Nascimento
The
concentration of lands in the hands of a few farmers, an ownership
system called latifundio, has been a major obstacle to social justice
in the country. This complex issue is intertwined with primitive
farming techniques, the patriarchal formation of the family, and the
substitution of communal property for private ownership.
Agrarian
reform is the term used to refer to the body of legal and economic
measures that aim at the de-concentration of private ownership of
cultivatable lands with the goal of them becoming productive. Its
implantation has for intended results the increase of agricultural
production, the expansion of the internal market of the nation and an
improved quality of life for the rural population.
Brazil has an
agrarian structure in which there are large estates that remain
unproductive, big monoculture for export and millions of rural workers
who do not own or have access to any land. An average area of the
small properties does not surpass twenty hectares; and the rural
population lives in terrible conditions of hygiene and nutrition, which
results in elevated levels of mortality. There are rural regions in
which the methods to irrigate, fertilize and recover the soil are
unknown, illiteracy is prevalent and there are practically no
technical-agricultural schools.
One reason why ownership of
property is not absolute, is that it seals off access to the land for
the rural worker and provides a formation of a caste of landowners who
possess rural Brazilian lands. At the bottom of the social pyramid, a
vast class of marginalized people are relegated to the most extreme
misery and they have their demands systematically repressed with
violence. Therefore, the concentration of rural property in Brazil
gives rise to a multitude of workers without land which points to a
profound political dilemma because the model of agrarian reform of the
country is likely to fail.
There are occasions when this layer
of rural workers reappears organized by social movements of the rural
area. Engaging in taking tolls, occupations of public buildings and
looting food trucks are fine examples of Saint Thomas Aquinas' maxim,
if you are hungry, take from the one who has in abundance. In these
collective actions there is a strong criticism of the government, from
Fernando Henrique Cardoso to Lula, for their slowness in promoting the
expropriation of land for the creation of projects for the
establishment of agrarian reform.
After a period of respite when
[the opponents of reform] are turning out ridiculous news from Rede
Globo and from Veja magazine which does not even distinguish the
differences of concept between land invasion and land occupation, those
without land return to the political scene with the same problems, in
spite of which we recognize that some progress has been obtained in the
last years on the side of the government. But the last two governments
treated the landless almost the same way, with indifference, as the
model of agrarian reform is the same.
According to the most
detailed research on this topic, the system defended by the MST (the
Landless Movement) is not the one adopted by the government. The
government adopted the concept of agrarian reform that is the opposite
of the one championed by the MST. In general terms, the adopted one is
the model of the trade union, a departure from the interests of CONTAG
(National Confederation of Workers in Agriculture) which is based on
expropriation and distribution of land in small establishments which
are shared in individual parcels. Thus moving from the large
latifundio estate to a small plot or mini-estate. Already the MST,
even though in some cases it would be obligated to assume this model
due to cultural factors, has the other model of agrarian reform based
in cooperativism and in associativism.
Such mini-estate
foundations possess small chance of survival, since they proceed in the
opposite direction of the history that legitimizes the capitalist model
of individual ownership of private property. Without competition in
the market or even the structure to increase production, the small
established farmers who earn their lands after such social struggle are
destined to failure and to the return to the line of the excluded.
Then comes the elitist media saying: so you see; they are lazy bums,
not willing to work. With that they form the social imagination of the
Brazilians with such prejudices. The government, at the service of the
big monopolies of capital, the representatives of the farming industry,
continues believing that this model of agrarian reform is ideal, since
it does not question the existence of private ownership as the CPT (the
Church's Land Commission) and the MST do.
The current Brazilian
agrarian reform, which has been in existence for more than twenty
years, has been used in large part to send or to return to the field
the urban unemployed and legions of those excluded from rural activity
by so-called modernization processes of agriculture. This was well
demonstrated in the 2006 TV Globo documentary defending the "Rural
Brasil." In truth, it was the Rural Brazil of the big transgenic soy
companies and of farmers with their thousands of heads of cattle
grazing in lands which truly could be used for planting and for the
other model of agrarian reform which would abolish private ownership.
Several
studies site examples of land occupations with workers who have various
professional backgrounds. Recently at a pre-occupation site in the
region of Araguaia, I met a chemist educated at the Federal University
of Goias who was in the struggle for land. On these occupation sites,
there are people with various urban professions, such as tailors,
professors, soldiers, plumbers, bank employees, truck drivers, among
others, often they do not possess agricultural knowledge and no
training is offered to them which will enable them to learn new ways of
managing the land. Another situation which we observe by experience
together in the occupations of agrarian reform is a matter of which a
majority of the occupiers possess more than forty years of age,
exceeding, therefore, that limit which used to be considered a perverse
mark of exclusion from manual labor, principally in the big city. The
other interesting situation is that the large part of the squatters
previously were leasers, owners, sharecroppers or partners in
agricultural work
There are other concrete signals that
Brazilian agrarian reform is on the wrong track. For example: just 1/5
of those that receive land get to generate enough income to keep their
fields. Others abandon the land within at most ten years. The
phenomenon of the de-population in the county side, however, is
absolutely normal and makes up part of the history of the majority of
the developed countries of the past century. In the United States,
just 1.5% of the population remains working in the countryside. In
France, 6%. But this costs a great deal in terms of subsidies. In the
case of Brazil, the mass of people defeated by technology earns the
label of excluded and end up supplying initiatives which seem to demand
that the planet spin the other way. For example, the proper agrarian
reform thinking in order to realize the social inclusion of people
winds up transforming occupations in a growing process of rural
impoverishment.
I find only one advantage in the actual model of
struggle for land and for agrarian reform, the action of resistance of
the MST which continues acting to organize the people to demand, to
occupy, to resist and to produce in communion, in the spirit of
sharing. In addition to the difficulties encountered in the projects
of agrarian reform, there does exist in Brazil, principally in the
states of the South (for cultural reasons) the success of the model of
cooperatives of the MST. In some cases, the cooperatives are
accountable for more than 40% of the national production of certain
crops. The big problem is that to connect one thing with the other,
depends on the familiarity and of the suitability of the settler for
the work in unity. This we perceive to be difficult to make happen in
the occupations of the North, Northeast and Central West regions. For
this reason, I believe, the agrarian reform will be successful only
with a total elimination of private ownership.
Claudemiro Godoy
do Nascimento is a philosopher and theologian. He holds a master’s
degree in education from Unicamp and a doctorate in education from
UnB. He is a researcher at the Multi-disciplinary Center of Education
of the Country and Rural Development.
Source: Adital, September 4, 2007
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