• Thursday, April 28, 2011
• Inter Press Service

A process of 'agrarian counter-reform' is taking place in Brazil, according to activist João Pedro Stédile, a leader of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). Stédile said Brazil's land reform efforts faltered in the last few years of the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), while land ownership became more concentrated.

In the final stretch of President Lula's second term, many legal expropriations of idle land on large estates were blocked in court. In addition, the international financial crisis 'had the opposite effect in Brazil, because in order to protect their funds, international capitalists ran to Brazil to invest in land and energy projects,' the activist said.

That led to a 'perverse logic' in agriculture, in which purchases of unproductive land by the government were disputed and ownership became more concentrated, as part of 'an agrarian counter-reform process,' he said.

The most recent official figures are from 2006. The Agricultural Census of that year, published in 2009 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), shows that the concentration of rural land has remained virtually unaltered in the last two decades.

In Brazil, one of the countries in the world with the most uneven distributions of land, around 3.5 percent of landowners hold 56 percent of the arable land while the poorest 40 percent own barely one percent. According to the IBGE, properties larger than 1,000 hectares cover 46 percent of Brazil's farmland, while properties smaller than 10 hectares occupy barely 2.7 percent.

'The concentration is worse now than in 1920, when we were just getting over slavery (which was abolished in 1888),' Stédile told IPS. 'We hope the government of Dilma (Rousseff) will change the agrarian policy, starting with INCRA,' Brazil's National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform.

Every year, 'red April' marks the anniversary of the Apr. 17, 1996 massacre in Eldorado de Carajás, in the northern Amazon jungle state of Pará, when the military police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration by some 1,500 unarmed landless rural workers protesting the slow pace of land reform. Nineteen members of the MST were killed.

Every April, the MST seeks to put the question of agrarian reform back on the political agenda. The issue was ignored in the 2010 campaign, which culminated in the election of Rousseff, a member of the leftwing Workers Party (PT), like her predecessor Lula.

As in previous years, the MST launched a campaign pressing for the faster distribution of land, including protests in at least 20 of Brazil's 26 states, and 100 occupations of idle portions of large landholdings.

The MST reports a total of 1.6 million members across Brazil, and some 100,000 families are living in its squatter camps around the country, pressing for the redistribution of land. Celso Lisboa de Lacerda was named president of INCRA, the federal agency in charge of land distribution, this month.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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