Agrarian Reform
Farmers’ well-being and productivity are the foundation for pretty much everything else. Land and development experts Shalmali Guttal, Maria Luisa Mendonça, and Peter Rosset write that “Fair and equitable access to land and other resources like water, forests, and biodiversity is perhaps the most fundamental prerequisite for… nations to provide all of their citizens with a decent standard of living and make possible more ecologically sustainable management of natural resources.”
Nevertheless, unfair and inequitable land access is the norm, thanks to multinational corporations, policies of pro-elite governments, and trade and financial institutions and treaties. Never have such a high percentage of the world’s population been displaced from their ancestral lands and left without a vocation, a secure home, or the ability to feed themselves.
But the past two decades have witnessed a parallel phenomenon. A global movement of landless and small farmers are out to break the nexus between land, agriculture, power, and profits. From South Africans ousted from their ancestral homelands by decree of the Apartheid regime, to Colombians forced out by U.S.-funded aerial spraying of deadly herbicides, to Indonesians whose crops are being destroyed by multinational plantations, today people are furiously fighting for their little plot on the planet and for the integrity of agriculture itself.
Also new are two additional voices in the mix. One is indigenous peoples claiming their territory via autonomy struggles, and the other is women challenging the gender bias in land tenure patterns, in policies and programs, and in the land movements themselves. The movements are developing not just in size but, thanks to unity, sharp strategy, improved communication, and organization, in effectiveness also. Among all landless movements, one shines like a beacon: the Movement of Landless Rural Workers of Brazil, or MST.
At the most basic level, the MST’s struggle is for land tenure rights. The MST’s first solution to poverty, hunger, and landlessness is to put agriculturally rich land back into production in the hands of small farmers. It does this by organizing landless and unemployed people and slum-dwellers to legally claim swaths of the nation’s vast unused land. Landless people can challenge ownership of land tracts over a certain size in the courts; if the land title is found to be faulty, or if the land does not fulfill its “social function” according to the constitution, it is deeded over to the claimants.
Two and a half million people have claimed tens of thousands of acres of Brazil’s vast unused land. They have created on them cooperatively run, democratic, productive communities in 2,000 land reform settlements, plus almost 800 squatter communities on contested land. Together the members have built new models of self-government, self-produced media, agroecology, collective production, law, social relations, cultural expression, and education.
The MST’s experiences and lessons are spreading. A powerful vehicle for this has been the World Social Forum, which has met in Brazil four of the first eight years and on whose international council the MST sits, thus affording it abundant exposure. In Venezuela, the MST serves as official advisor to the Chávez government in training small farmer organizations and the Ministry of Agriculture. Together with Via Campesina and the Latin American Coordination of Rural Worker Organizations (CLOC), the MST is also setting up a farmers’ university in Venezuela to share successful strategies.
At the same time, they are working with other sectors of a broad-based social movement to change radically Brazil’s political economy, creating a more just and equitable nation. Even without having accomplished that last feat, the MST has already changed the lives of millions of people who now have land to live on and farm, dignity, rights, and the ability to self-govern. The MST shows that solutions to landlessness, homelessness, and social exclusion are available; it has created them thousands of times over.
