Two Models of Land Reform and Development
November 27, 2002
Guided by the slogan "Occupy, Resist and Produce," the MST initiated a direct action model of land reform
wherein landless peasants occupy an unproductive parcel
of land, petition the Brazilian government for land
rights, and operate the settlement as a collective
enterprise.
Located on green rolling hills, the farm with its fields of grain, milking barn, chicken hatcheries, pig barns, storage sheds, and granaries could be located in any Midwestern state. Even its location, near Porto Alegre, Brazil would not differentiate this farm from a typical family farm in the United States. However, this farm is different as it was founded by occupying and expropriating, through a decade of struggle against both the Brazilian federal government and one of the largest land owners in Brazil, a portion of one of the largest landed estates in Brazil by brave men and women led by the Movimento do Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Movement of Rural Landless Workers or MST).
Guided by the slogan "Occupy, Resist and Produce," the
MST initiated a direct action model of land reform
wherein landless peasants occupy an unproductive parcel
of land, petition the Brazilian government for land
rights, and operate the settlement as a collective
enterprise. This model of land reform is now being
challenged by the World Bank's attempts to solve the
immense landless problem in Brazil by using "market
mechanisms" to purchase land directly from the owners
by the landless and then to force peasant families to
survive in the global agricultural market. The outcome
of the struggle between these two models of land reform
is not at all certain. What is certain is that the
result will impact Brazilian land reform for many years
to come.
Need for Land Reform
At the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, Brazil
adopted a constitution that allows for the
expropriation of large land holdings that either do not
fulfill a social function or are considered
unproductive. With the election of the first civilian
government in 20 years, there was substantial hope for
land reform in keeping with the new constitution's
expropriation provisions. However, such hopes were soon
dashed as the government, beholden to large land
owners, failed to enforce the law. Wanusa Pereira dos
Santos, a member of the MST's National Political
Education Committee states, "While this law [the
constitution] does not give land reform in the way the
social movements want or Brazil needs, it would be a
big step if the government just upheld the law."
No party-the Brazilian government, social movements,
politicians of every political tenet-seriously contests
the need for land reform. Brazil has the second highest
concentration of land ownership in the world.
Furthermore, land concentration has increased as the
number of small farms has been reduced from three
million in 1985 to less than one million today. The MST
estimates that over 60 percent of the farm land in
Brazil is idle, while 25 million peasants struggle to
survive.
Origins of the Movement
Due to the intransigence of the Brazilian government,
it has been the task of the social movements to force
the government to observe its legal obligations
regarding land reform. According to Peter Rosset,
co-director of the Institute for Food and Development
Policy (Food First), "Land expropriation is something
the government would be unlikely to do on its own, but
with a well organized social movement, by finding land
that meets those conditions [required by the Brazilian
constitution] and occupying it to force the government
to act, [land reform] works quite well."
The MST was formed in 1984 and, with activists from
other land reform organizations, soon began land
occupations in southern Brazil. In conjunction with
allied organizations, the MST has led land occupations
where more than 350,000 families have gained access to
land consisting of over 15 million acres.
MST's militancy in land reform has not come without a
price. During the period from 1985 to 1999, 1,158 MST
and other rural activists were assassinated. During the
period from 1985 to 1996, the Catholic Church's
Pastoral Land Commission also documented 820 additional
assassination attempts and 2,412 death threats against
MST activists and rural workers. Through 1999, only 56
people were ever charged with respect to these crimes
and only ten have been convicted.
The violence directed against land reform activists is
largely the result of actions by the federal police and
thugs hired by large land owners with the support of
the Ruralista Party (the land owners' party) and the
current Brazilian government of Fernando Henrique
Cardoso. The relative impunity of those engaging in
these violent acts, due to the support of the Brazilian
elites, has only encouraged more violence.
MST Model
The MST encampment is located off the main highway
running from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, on a rutted,
dirt road, known by its inhabitants as Terra Prometida
(Promised Land). The settlement consists of various
homes, an open-sided community center/dining hall,
communal kitchen with a fire pit used to cook food in
large metal pots and a table made of tree limbs, a
"pantry" holding the dietary staples of rice, beans,
dried manioc root, and a "pharmacy" holding basic
medical supplies such as bandages and disinfectants and
a few herbal and traditional medicines. The structures,
with roofs and walls made of black plastic framed with
tree branches, cut from the nearby woods, and dirt
floors, are typical of an MST encampment. Antonio
Jamero, one of the camp leaders, tells the story of the
camp's 94 families. This process of occupying land has
been repeated hundreds of times throughout Brazil. In
the case of the Promised Land, most families had been
farm workers who lost their jobs and drifted into the
slums of Rio de Janeiro.
The MST met with them and began approximately six
months of education in farming techniques, cooperative
organization and marketing, and health and sanitation,
as well as fundamental literacy. The initial occupation
of a parcel near the Promised Land ended when the
National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform
(INCRA), the federal agency responsible for land reform
in Brazil, determined that the land did not qualify for
expropriation because its lack of productivity could
not be proven. The land owner, in order to avoid
expropriation, trucked in cattle the night prior to
each INCRA inspection to prove the land's productive
use. After being forced from the first camp, INCRA
moved the group to a roadside ditch for six months
without adequate food, shelter, sanitation or drinking
water. Subsequently, the group was brought to the
Promised Land, where they have lived for over a year.
Until the land has been expropriated in a court
proceeding, they are not allowed to farm. Even though
hunger is a constant problem, the fields next to them
are empty of crops. The landless settlers anticipate
being in this distressed condition for some time while
their case winds though the courts. Even a victory in
court would not allow expropriation of the land if
INCRA does not have funds for land purchases or
agricultural development.
Typically, a land occupation is preceded by a
substantial amount of preparation including
agricultural training. Once the occupation begins, the
MST applies to INCRA to certify that the land qualifies
for expropriation. According to Sérgio Sauer, a former
coordinator and advisor for the Pastoral Land
Commission and currently an aide to a federal senator
of the Partido Trabalhadores (Workers Party), once a
decision is made to expropriate a parcel of land, INCRA
is responsible for everything-all legal and economic
procedures. INCRA issues a 20-year bond to the land
owner, as the MST model is not without compensation,
although the purchase price is usually set below market
price. INCRA also funds production credits once the
landless have won land rights. Rosset cautions that
"the INCRA model would not work without the MST. Before
the MST, INCRA did nothing."
The Porto Alegre settlement, begun much like the
Promised Land encampment, was first occupied in 1989.
The occupation met fierce resistance from the land
owner who sent in crop duster airplanes to spray the
occupiers with chemicals, resulting in the deaths of
three children. The police and hired thugs attacked the
settlers with bayonets, tear gas, and firearms, and
even tied several of the settlers to the tops of ant
hills. These battles culminated in the death of a
landless settler when the federal police attacked a
peaceful demonstration for land rights in Porto Alegre.
Thereafter, the settlers attained the right to settle
on and farm the land.Occupying the land and resisting
the federal government and the power of the large land
owners only partially fulfill the MST slogan: "Occupy,
Resist and Produce." The settlement in Porto Alegre,
like most MST settlements, is structured to survive in
the market conditions imposed on Brazil by the
neo-liberal economic model adopted by the Cardoso
administration.
Cooperative Production: Typical of an MST settlement, the Porto
Alegre settlement is organized on a cooperative basis
with families sharing resources. The farm work is
shared, as well as other tasks such as child care,
education, and communal cooking. Additionally, most of
the agricultural produce not consumed by the settlement
is marketed through MST cooperatives. The settlement
contributes 2 percent of its profits to the national
MST to help fund other MST occupations and activities.
The MST currently maintains 400 cooperative
associations for production, trade, and related
services in the settlements. Through the National
Association of Cooperatives (created by the MST), the
MST has also established 49 cooperatives, employing
20,000 families, for meat, dairy, and other
agricultural products. The MST has also established 32
service cooperatives, two regional marketing
cooperatives, and two credit cooperatives. The
cooperatives had sufficient earnings to finance 167
land appropriations in 1996.
Education: Immediately after constructing housing, the
Porto Alegre settlement established a school for their
children. The settlement school teaches values
important to the members, which they describe as
humanist values-development of the person as a whole
rather than just particular aspects and skills. The MST
settlements currently maintain 1,200 elementary schools
with 3,800 teachers and an enrollment of 150,000
children and over 250 day care centers. Additionally,
1,200 MST educators teach literacy classes to 25,000
adults. The MST also maintains an institute for
training teachers and assists individual students in
entering universities.
Division of Labor: The settlement strives toward equality of
the sexes and avoids a division of labor based on sex.
Men and women work in all sectors of production,
including the communal kitchen and day care. The MST
has tackled what it calls the gender issue on all
levels of its organization. At the national level, 10
of the 22 members of the national coordinating
committee are women.
Environment and Ecology: The members of the Porto Alegre
settlement seek to maintain the MST principle of using
farming techniques that won't spoil the land. For
example, they produce about 1,500 tons of rice per
year. In the past, they have used pesticides in order
to increase production, but now grow about 50 percent
of the rice organically. The settlement is in the
process of debating whether to continue using
pesticides in order to produce more rice or produce
smaller quantities of organic rice. Nationally, the
MST, in response to the widespread pollution and
environmental devastation in Brazil, created the
National Collective on the Environment to advance MST
policies and programs on sustainable organic
agriculture. Additional Programs: The MST settlements also
have health care programs (training health care agents,
programs for the prevention of AIDS and sexually
transmitted diseases and for medicinal herb), cultural
programs (music, dance, poetry, and literature) and
communications (newspapers, community radio stations,
and websites).
It is apparent from the Porto Alegre settlement that
the inhabitants enjoy a higher standard of living than
Brazil's millions of landless peasants or urban slum
dwellers. Research from the United Nation's Food and
Agricultural Committee indicates that, after two years,
a settled worker's standard of living increases 350
times over that of a landless worker. The infant
mortality rates in settlements in the southeast of
Brazil are comparable to those in developed countries.
New Rural World
The Cardoso government, faced with the reality of the
MST model of land reform, announced its own, new
agrarian policy titled Novo Mundo Rural (New Rural
World) in 1998. The aims of this new policy are to
change land reform into a compensatory policy rather
than develop an all-encompassing land reform model,
decentralize land reform by shifting responsibility
from the federal to the state governments, and change
land reform from a people's movement to an exchange of
commodities by instituting market-based land reform
(MBLR). In reality, the New Rural World is drawn
directly from the World Bank's play book.
The MBLR programs do not allow the landless to purchase
land directly. In theory, the landless and small
farmers form an association, which then negotiates the
purchase of a parcel of land. If a government review of
the land purchase price, land conditions, and the
families in the association is positive, a private
Brazilian bank will pay the owner, using funds provided
by the World Bank, Brazilian federal government, and
other sources to the MBLR program. However, the reality
is substantially different from this theoretical model.
According to Klaus Deininger, a principal World Bank
land reform official, in remarks to a recent
Washington, DC seminar on the negative impacts of World
Bank market-based land reform, the stated goal of the
MBLR is to reduce rural poverty, which the World Bank
believes "is the result of land concentration due to
the inefficiencies of the land markets." According to
the report "A Ticket to Land," authored by Sauer and
prepared for the seminar, "The agrarian problem is not
seen as one of access to land but of market security
and effectiveness...."
Deininger claims that the MBLR model (1) replaces
central bureaucracies with local authorities by
decentralizing land reform, (2) is demand rather than
supply driven, (3) is faster, (4) is less
confrontational than the MST model, and (5) is cheaper,
as its beneficiaries have the capacity to negotiate
land prices.
Impact on Agriculture
Any analysis of MBLR must be made in the context of the
wholesale adoption of neo-liberal economic policies by
the Cardoso government. According to the MST, these
neo-liberal policies include opening Brazilian markets
to imports; attracting foreign capital by maintaining
high interest rates; privatizing government enterprises
such as oil and natural gas production; and dismantling
the role of the government in the economy and
eliminating, scaling back or privatizing social
services such as education, transportation, and health.
The neo-liberal economic policies and structural
adjustments have had a particularly devastating impact
on Brazilian agriculture. While these adjustments have
impacted all segments of agriculture, small farmers
have been inordinately affected. According to Rosset,
"beginning in the 1980s, the structural adjustments for
Brazil included opening the Brazil markets to cheap
imports from abroad, which means that the prices
farmers get for crops had gone lower so they can't make
a living, privatize extension, privatize
commercialization of small products that farmers
produce, and privatize credit so that [farmers] can no
longer get subsidized credit from commercial banks."
The Brazilian government, as part of structural
adjustment, has been forced to substantially reduce
agricultural subsidies just as the developed world has
increased governmental agricultural support through
tariffs and price subsidies. The recently enacted U.S.
farm bill provides total subsidies for price support of
$190 billion over a 10-year period, an increase of
approximately 80 percent over the prior period. These
subsidies primarily benefit corporate agri-businesses
and large farmers.
The MST has summarized the effect of the neo-liberal
policies on Brazilian agriculture as a decrease in
agricultural spending from $19 billion per annum to $4
billion per annum; a decrease in agricultural subsidies
to nothing; bankruptcy of 400,000 farmers in the first
two years of the Cardoso administration; exodus of four
million rural Brazilians to the cities; rural credit
default increases of 182 percent in the 1997 to 1999
period; and zero growth in agricultural production from
1994 to 1999.
These IMF-mandated adjustments will continue even if
the Workers Party candidate, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
(Lula), wins the October Brazilian presidential
election. The IMF required, as a condition to a $30
billion emergency loan, the presidential candidates
agree to continue the imposed structural adjustments.
Market Based Land Reform
Members of land reform organizations from around the
world gathered for the seminar to present case studies
on the performance of MBLR in Brazil, Guatemala,
Columbia, Thailand, and South Africa. The Brazilian
case studies, independent of both the Brazilian
government and the World Bank, were conducted by
scholars and university professors in the five states
where the World Bank initiated MBLR programs.
The MBLR model posits that the land reform process is
under the control of the landless. However, independent
case studies clearly indicate that associations are not
voluntarily formed by the landless, but are rather the
product of local governmental authorities and land
owners wishing to sell land. Leaders are often imposed
on the associations from the outside. A majority of the
persons interviewed said they had little participation
in decisions such as what crops to grow or investments
in equipment or animals.
Independent studies also found that most of the
negotiations for land purchases were between land
owners and local and state authorities, who are
substantially more susceptible to influence and
corruption, particularly in rural areas dominated by
large land owners. The Ruralista Party, a creation of
the large land owners and a principal ally of Cardoso's
political party, discourages authentic negotiations
through its influence on local and state officials.
Finally, since the land market in Brazil is
underdeveloped there are few sales to determine market
prices. The independent studies concluded, as a result
of these factors, that 100 percent of the negotiations
to purchase land were conducted by government employees
rather than the landless.
All of the studies indicated that the participants also
had little or no knowledge of how the MBLR programs
functioned. Not one of the participants interviewed
knew all the terms of the loans they had incurred to
purchase the land. Fewer than one percent knew the
interest rate of their loans, and fewer than 10 percent
knew the land was security for the loan.
The studies also found that the land put on the market
is frequently poor quality land that the owner has been
trying to dump for years. Often the participants (or
their "representatives") will take the first parcel
offered to them, notwithstanding price or quality.
Those associations that operate the farms as
collectives actually pay the "members" a daily wage,
undermining the entire purpose of land ownership. Since
the associations are typically run by government
officials and directly influenced by large land owners,
using association funds to pay labor thereby reproduces
the same type of rural exploitation of landless workers
that land reform is supposed to correct. The
independent studies indicate that the process does not
develop the landless workers' abilities to manage their
lives or develop the necessary skills to successfully
compete or even survive in the neo-liberal marketplace.
MBLR is also supposed to decentralize the process of
land reform. In reality, the process is
"defederalized," with responsibility shifting from the
federal to the state and local governments, which are
more susceptible to control and pressure by the large
land owners directly and through the Ruralista Party.
MBLR becomes a program that is not "market based" in
any sense of the concept. The associations, land
purchase negotiations, investment decisions as to land
to purchase, crops to grow, infrastructure to develop,
and terms of the loans to acquire land are all
controlled by state and local government employees
subject to influence and manipulation by local elites.
What has been the result of MBLR? First, all of the
surveys indicate that 100 percent of the persons
interviewed will be unable to make their first loan
payment. As Rosset explains it, "You have poor people
taking out huge loans to buy over appraised land of
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