“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 themselves 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. 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 (MST), which has won international acclaim for its success in organizing landless families and conquering land. So can Rossetto finally deliver the radical redistribution of land that poor rural Brazilians have been demanding for over a century?
It is not by chance that Brazil’s left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, selected Rossetto—the only committed socialist in the government—for the politically sensitive Ministry of Agrarian Reform. Lula has adopted a dual strategy for the first year of his government. 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. Because he believes that confrontation with foreign creditors would do enormous damage to the vulnerable economy, he has opted for a non-confrontational policy of gradually weaning the economy off its heavy reliance on short-term money that gives foreign creditors such leverage over economic decision-making. 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.
To satisfy in the short term the enormous popular expectation of far-reaching change, Lula plans to be radical on the social front. 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. 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. But most daring of all, given the passions aroused by the whole question of agrarian reform, was Lula’s appointment of Miguel Rossetto.
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. He has already expropriated 203,000 hectares of unproductive land in 17 states for distribution to 5,500 families. 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). 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.
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 latifúndios (big estates). The families often spent many years in the struggle for the land, repeatedly re-occupying the estates after violent eviction by gunmen. In the end, to defuse the social tension, INCRA would often forcibly purchase the land from the landowner and settle the families. After a few years the settlements should have been “emancipated,” that is, the families should have started paying for the land over a 20-year period. In practice, this rarely happened, because the families did not have a big enough income to make it feasible.
It 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). Today there are about half a million families living on the country’s 3,800 land settlement projects. About one third of them are members of the MST. During the Cardoso years very few of these families received adequate financial or technical assistance from the authorities. 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.”
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 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.
It will not be easy to convince the government, operating under tight IMF constraints, to provide enough cheap farm credit and technical assistance for the families, yet this is less daunting than the other task facing Rossetto. 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.
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. Just as in Mexico, where the local market has been swamped with imports of cheap U.S. 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. About a million peasant families—four times the number settled on the land in the agrarian reform program—went bankrupt between 1995 and 1999. 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.”
Brazil is today a leading agricultural producer, exporting soybeans, orange juice, coffee, beef and other commodities. Although some U.S. 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. Seventeen international trading companies control 43 percent of Brazil’s agricultural exports. The only room for small family producers in this modern 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.
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. Amid great publicity, he set up the Land Bank, a program of market-oriented agrarian reform in which peasant families paid the market price for their land, were provided with unsubsidised bank loans and were expected to gear their production to niches left in the market by the big farmers. In the end the Land Bank failed, after even the World Bank, which had enthusiastically backed it in the beginning, reluctantly admitted that it demanded resources and technical expertise that lay way beyond the possibilities of impoverished peasant families.
Rossetto himself shares the MST’s dislike of a deregulated, globalized agriculture, in which farmers around the world compete to produce food at ever cheaper prices. Like the MST, he wants to promote an environmentally-friendly kind of peasant farming in which families regard the land not just as a means of production for efficiently producing cheap cash crops for the market, but as a space for developing an alternative way of life and for cultivating a wide range of healthy, pesticide-free, non-genetically modified crops that they will consume themselves and sell in small quantities in local markets. This kind of farming, which the MST refuses to call “subsistence”—because, they say, “that implies ‘sub-existing’ when, in fact, this kind of farming is vastly superior,” is very popular on MST settlements, where it is known as agro-ecologia.[1]
Yet it will be hard for Rossetto to promote agro-ecology. The Lula government needs to promote agricultural exports, most of which are produced by big farmers, if it is to earn the billions of dollars required to service the foreign debt. So, along with Rossetto, Lula has appointed a conservative agriculture minister, Roberto Rodrigues, who will be defending the interests of big farmers within the cabinet. Lula intends to run the government as he ran the 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 government’s policy, even if personally they disagree with it. Even for a skillful political operator like Lula, it will be a difficult balancing act.
Astute as always in their analysis of the balance of political forces, the MST leaders know that, with such a correlation of forces, they need to fight for the agrarian reform they dream of. They see the next four years as an opportunity—perhaps the best opportunity they will ever get—to mobilize a huge national campaign in favor of agrarian reform. “Agrarian reform has happened all over the world when two conditions are present,” said João Pedro Stédile, the best-known MST leader. “First, there must be a mass-based government in power that wants to carry out agrarian reform and to abolish the latifúndio. And second, there must be an organized peasant movement, with a high level of political awareness and a great capacity for mobilization. We believe we can create both these conditions.”
The latifúndio 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. Yet, because the old-fashioned and unproductive latifúndio has been losing political influence, Stédile believes that social movements could get most of this land distributed to the country’s four million landless peasant families. “If it behaves courageously, the Brazilian state could make 100 million hectares of land available for agrarian reform,” he said. “It’s a lot of land.” The MST believes that the families on the agrarian reform settlements can play a key role in the social revolution that Lula is promising. 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.
All those campaigning for agrarian reform know that they face immense difficulties yet many are cautiously optimistic. This stems to a large extent from the very real change in political culture that has taken place with the Lula victory. 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. 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,” this issue]. 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. I know I can’t betray the dreams of the millions and millions of Brazilians who are backing me. Any other President of the Republic can be elected and do nothing. The Brazilian people are used to this. 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.”
Yet this does not mean that the new government will be able to deliver the social reforms it has promised. 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. It is interesting to note that when Stédile 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. Instead, he said: “I think the biggest danger comes from possible maneuvers from international capital and the Bush administration.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sue Branford is co-author, with Jan Rocha, of Cutting the Wire—the Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil, (Latin America Bureau, U.K; Kumarian Press, U.S.), and, with Bernardo Kucinski, of Politics Transformed—Lula and the Brazilian Workers’ Party, (Latin America Bureau).
NOTES
1. See “For An Agriculture that Doesn’t Get Rid of Farmers: An Interview with Miguel Altieri,” NACLA Report, Vol. XXXV, No. 5, March-April 2002 http://www.nacla.org/art_display.php?art=1896
