The Crime of the Latifundio
October 02, 2003
Historically the violence in the Brazilian countryside has been caused by the enormous concentration of land by the few. As a result, hundreds of rural workers have been murdered; the land monopoly generates poverty, unemployment, and the exclusion from political life while preserving the power of rural oligarchs.
| Alai-Amlatina |
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| Rio De Janeiro, Brazil |
Translated by Michael Courville*
Historically the violence in the countryside has been caused by the enormous concentration of land by the few. As a result, hundreds of rural workers have been murdered; the land monopoly generates poverty, unemployment, and the exclusion from political life while preserving the power of rural oligarchs who seek to maintain the colonial structure of the country.
Information from the report entitled, Crimes of the Latifundio, was presented on 26 August by the Pastoral Commission on Land, The Social Network for Justice and Human Rights, Center for Human Rights and the Carioca institute of Crimininology.
Statistics on Rural Violence
Between January and August 2003, the Pastoral Commission on Land documented 44 assassinations of rural workers. Between 1985 and 2002, they documented 1,280 murders of campesinos (peasants), lawyers, citizens, union leaders and religious supporters involved in the struggle for land.
Impunity is the general rule for the perpetrators in all these cases. Of the 1,280 murders, only 121 cases were tried in court. Within the group of contractors for the crimes, 14 went to court, and only seven of them were condemned. Of the 96 executors judged, only 58 were condemned.
In the time span from 1985-2002, 6,300 rural workers have been arbitrarily imprisoned. During the same period, 715 cases of torture were documented along with 19,349 acts of physical aggression/assault. In 2002 alone, there have been 43 assassinations, 20 attempted assassinations, and 73 death threats directed towards rural workers, as well as 44 acts of aggravated assault and 20 acts of torture.
The Land Monopoly
The concentration of land holdings in Brazil is one of the most concentrated in the world. Less than 50 thousand rural landowners possess a thousand hectares of the most desirable land and they control 50% of all the land that is arable. About 1% of the rural landowners hold around 46% of the total available land in Brazil. Of the approximately 400 millions of hectares held as private property, only 60 million hectares are utilized for farming and cultivation of crops. The rest of the land is barren, unfertile, or used for cattle grazing. Data from INCRA (Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform) finds that there are 4.8 million landless families in Brazil.
Professor Manuel Domingo of the Federal University of Ceara affirms that, “The statistics on arable land reveal a persistent concentration of private land holdings. According to INCRA, between 1992 and 1998, the largest occupied area of 2,000 hectares, is itself extensive, given the 56 million of the hectares, which represents three times more than the 18 million hectares that the government of Fernando Enrique Cardoso promised to have appropriated during six years. The occupied area makes up only 10% of the largest land holdings of the country, which consisted of 77.1% to 78.6% of the total land area at that time."
The best land is designated for the cultivation of monoculture crops for export: cocoa, coffee, cotton, soy and oranges. At the same time, 40 million people go hungry in the country, with the largest part of those who are hungry residing in rural areas.
Continue the IBGE, the units of agricultural production are divided as follows:
-4.3 million with smaller areas than100 hectares each
-470 million with areas between 100 hectares to less than 1000 hectares
-47 million with areas between 1000 hectares to less than 10,000 hectares
-2.2 million with areas from 10,000 hectares and the rest being undeclared
The levels of production are divided as follows:
-The units between with less than 100 hectares account for 47% of the value of the total agricultural production
-The units between 100 hectares to less that 1000 hectares account for 32% of the value of the total agricultural production
-The units between 1000 hectares to10,000 hectares account for only 17% of the total value.
-The units with over 10,000 hectares account for 4% of the total value.
With relation to the amount of labor we come up with the following numbers:
-The units with less than 100 hectares account for 40.7% of the agricultural production
-The units with 100 to 1000 hectares account for 39.9% of the agricultural production
-The units with 1000 hectares or more account for 4.2% of the agricultural production
This data demonstrates that the small farmers are the ones responsible for the production of the largest part of consumable food and the generation of the most work/employment in rural areas.
Agrarian Reform and the Constitutional Right
Article 184 of the Brazilian Constitution establishes that: “It is assigned to the Union [the government] the expropriation of property for social welfare, with the purpose of achieving land reform. Rural property that is not serving a social cause [will be expropriated] through previous and just payment of the titles of agrarian debt under the clauses of the preservation of its real value, to be paid in up to twenty years after the second year of its emission and its usage will be determined by the law.”
“Therefore, the expropriation of land that it is not fulfilling its social function is not punishable, since compensation mechanisms are being put in place even for those that appropriate public property for pure speculation. The social function of the land is determined according to the productivity level beyond the criteria that includes labor rights and environmental protection.”
*Michael Courville is an intern at the Institute for Food and Development Policy ###
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