Inter-Press Service (IPS)
By Walter Sotomayor

BRASILIA, Apr 17 (IPS) - An urgent call to speed up the land reform process in Latin America was issued Thursday by rural activists at the 30th FAO Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean, who also sharply criticised agribusiness interests and large estates in the region.

"We are carrying out occupations of land, marches and protests to demand the settlement of 150,000 families living in camps and greater investment in rural development," said a communiqué released by Brazil’s Landless Movement (MST).

The MST has held demonstrations this week in memory of the 19 peasant farmers massacred by police 12 years ago in Eldorado dos Carajás, in the northern Brazilian state of Pará.

RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) — Rural landless workers in Brazil stepped up their campaign for agricultural reform Thursday by holding several demonstrations and occupying a hydroelectric plant and freeway toll stations, their organization said.

The protests were part of the Landless Farmworkers Movement's "Red April" operation to force the government to give them land grants and easier access to public loans for some 150,000 dispossessed families living in shantytowns around the country.

Demonstrations took place in the states of Ceara, Pernambuco, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, Parana, Sao Paulo, Sergipe, Paraiba and Para.

Dear Friends of the MST,

Agrarian Reform is blocked in our country. The concentration of land is growing, the settlements are not receiving effective support, violence against the landless is on the rise and the estate owners and agribusinesses are operating with impunity. The massacre of Eldorado dos Carajas is the main symbol of the State’s indifference to rural workers and the Brazilian people. After 12 years since the massacre that killed 19 rural workers in the municipality of Eldorado dos Carajas in Pará on April 17, 1996, little has changed for the landless.

Dear friend of the MST,

Forty-eight year old Almerinda Marques says that he has begun to understand the world. Vilma Pereira da Silva, 50 years old, says that she now has the opportunity to do what she couldn’t do before: study. Both are landless workers. Both live in encampments, one in Minas Gerais and the other in Paraná. Both envision new perspectives and credit the MST for this.

By Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 24 (IPS) - It is a question of "national sovereignty, not xenophobia," said the president of Brazil’s land reform agency, INCRA, explaining the need to regulate foreign land ownership in Brazil.

The biofuel frenzy has driven growing purchases of land in Brazil in the last few years, by local and foreign investors alike. Global financier George Soros, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, the owners of Google and former U.S. president Bill Clinton (1993-2001) have all bought land or are partners in companies dedicated to the development of bioenergy in this country.

by Isabella Kenfield
Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP)

On March 7th—International Women's Day—dozens of Brazilian women occupied a research site of the U.S.-based agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, destroying the greenhouse and experimental plots of genetically-modified (GM) corn. Participants, members of the international farmers' organization La Vía Campesina, stated in a note that the act was to protest the Brazilian government's decision in February to legalize Monsanto's GM Guardian® corn, which came just weeks after the French government prohibited the corn due to environment and human health risks.