The Agrarian Counter-Reform of the World Bank
February 13, 2006
The World Bank is celebrating 60 years. Meanwhile, social movements worldwide organize demonstrations against the impact of the policies and ideology of this institution.
The World Bank influences the development strategies and the economic policies of Southern countries by making them compromise their budgets with projects that benefit large corporations. Under the pretense of “economical assistance”, the World Bank programs have a great impact on the external debt because they establish a counterpart for the governments.
The Agrarian Counter- Reform of the World Bank
Marcelo Resende and Maria Luisa Mendonça
Translated by Licia Shintzato-Fischer
The World Bank is celebrating 60 years. Meanwhile, social movements worldwide organize demonstrations against the impact of the policies and ideology of this institution.
The World Bank influences the development strategies and the economic policies of Southern countries by making them compromise their budgets with projects that benefit large corporations. Under the pretense of “economical assistance”, the World Bank programs have a great impact on the external debt because they establish a counterpart for the governments.
Mostly, the United States government establishes the priorities of the World Bank, has a prerogative of veto and appoints its president, who is usually a member of the financial sector. Following the ideology called “Washington Consensus”, the World Bank promotes structural adjustment policies.
These policies have been reproduced in the countryside, where the World Bank concentrates the majority of its projects by promoting the land privatization through market-based rules. According to this idea, the peasants should look for “efficiency” by integrating their production to the agribusiness sector.
In the last decades, the idea that the rural territory was not significant for economic development has increased in many parts of the world. The processes of rural exodus are based on the image of the urban centers as the main producers of income and economical opportunities.
It is not at random that the main World Bank projects are targeting the countryside. The largest regions where natural resources are concentrated—as water, minerals and biodiversity—are in these areas.
In Brazil, the Bank’s ideology started to have a greater impact during the government president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who established an agrarian policy called “New Rural World”. This model was centered in three basic principles: (1) the settlement of landless families as a social indemnity policy; (2) the transfer of the federal responsibility to implement agrarian reform to states and counties; (3) the substitution of the constitutional agrarian reform instrument by the advertisement of a “land market”.
During the Cardoso government, the World Bank started three programs that followed this model: ”Cédula da Terra” (Land Bill), Land Bank and Land Trust to Fight Poverty. These programs benefit the unproductive large landowners by paying in cash for the land, and by acquiring idle land, which is mostly of bad quality and overpriced. The associations created to receive credit from the Bank are often organized by the large state owners themselves, and much of the acquired land could have been subject to expropriation.
In Brazil, the Constitution determines that idle land can be expropriated by the government, and the financial compensation is done in form of “agrarian bonds” paid within a period of 20 years.
On the other hand, the conditions of these projects make it impossible for rural workers to pay the loans. These small farmers have no conditions to produce, even for the subsistence of their families.
In the beginning of the Lula government, the social actors in a whole were hopeful to reverse this process. The expectation was that the agrarian reform would be in the center of the political agenda, as an important way to generate jobs, to guarantee food sovereignty and to be a base for a new model of development.
On the contrary, what we saw was a continuation of the policies of the World Bank for the countryside. In November of 2003, the Ministry of Agrarian Development announced the “National Plan of Agrarian Reform: Peace, Production and Quality of Life in the Countryside”. One of the main goals of the plan, which forecast is to reach 130,000 families, is the continuation of the program of Land Credit to Fight Rural Poverty, following the logic of the “land market”. This project weakens the power of the State, competes with its instruments and the public resources based on the social function of the land and legitimates the rural oligarchy.
Another goal of the plan that tries to facilitate the implementation of the “land market” is the cadastre and the geographical coordinates of the national territory, with the regulation of 2.2 millions of rural properties, granting the land title to 500,000 squatters. This program ends with the concept of public and community land and may contribute to the increase of land concentration. Through the sale of the ownership, the titles would benefit the owners of large estates and the “grileiros” (crickets: people who appropriate and register land illegally). In addition, it strengthens the state governments in regards to conceding public and idle land to the lumber industry and large agribusinesses. In the Amazon region and in the “cerrado” (savanna), there is the expansion of the single-crop farming of soy that can be facilitated by the privatization of these geographic areas. The project also allows the World Bank to have access to strategic data about the network of Brazilian land.
Despite the fact that the National Plan of Agrarian Reform prioritizes the policies of the World Bank, the social organizations expect that Lula’s government will fulfill its compromises of an extensive agrarian reform in constitutional terms. For that, some of the necessary steps should be the annulment of the interim measure that prevents the expropriation of the occupied land, the establishment of the maximum limit of properties in Brazil and the expropriation of all real properties that do not fulfill their social function.
In regard to the proposal of geographical coordinates of the rural territory, it would be easier and less expensive for the federal state to establish a deadline, so that all owners of large estates would present a report of productivity, the registry of the property and the geographical coordinates. In this way, the burden of proof would be inverted, and would become the responsibility of the landowners.
The Brazilian rural territory has an immense cultural and social diversity, which includes communities of camped out people and squatters, rural workers, family based farmers (partners, sharecroppers, “posseiros”: ones who hold legal title to properties, and leaseholders), small land owners, traditional population (“population who lives by the river, fisher artisans, former slaves”), prospectors, indigenous people, people whose lives were influenced by dams, extractive communities (coconut breakers, rubber gatherers), among others.
In this context, it is not understandable that the responsibility to formulate policies for the rural areas, including the use and occupation of the territory, would be delegated to an international financial institution as the World Bank. It is necessary that the country have public policies that are compatible with the complexities of the historical needs, of the experiences and expression of the main social movements of this territory, which struggles for the democratization of the land and sovereignty.
Marcelo Resende is a geographer, ex-president of Incra (National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform) and member of the Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (Social Network of Justice and Human Rights).
Maria Luisa Mendonça is a journalist and member of Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (Social Network of Justice and Human Rights).
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