Seventeen years have passed since that fateful April 17. On that day in 1996, a march of rural workers organized by the MST was blockaded and attacked by military police in the city of Eldorado dos Carajás, Pará state. 19 people were killed on the spot and 2 others died days afterwards. The day of the Eldorado dos...
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Occupy Brazil: The Landless Dig In
Brazilian Government | Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | General | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | Worldwide Peasant Struggles | Agrarian Reform | MST Campaigns | MST News and Events | MST Informas
by Wesley Lima
On April 8, the MST in Bahia started a state march fighting for Agrarian Reform. The march, which had close to five thousand rural workers without land from nine regions of the state, started in the municipality of Camaçari and continued in the direction of Salvador.
The march was named “The Fábio Santos Silva State March”, paying...
Brazilian Government | General | Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | Plans and Theories | Agrarian Reform
The Friends of the MST has translated three recent interviews with MST leaders on the state of agrarian reform in the face of the intrangience of the Brazilian government and the onslaught of international capital and agri-business.
João Pedro Stédile, a founder and coordinator of the MST estimates that the current moment is an ebb of the popular movement.First, an interview with João Pedro Stédile with ABCD Maior. Read the full interview...
Agribusiness | Agritoxins | Brazilian Government | General | Monoculture | Neoliberalism | Agrarian Reform
Br
azilian society faces, in the rural milieu, distinct problems needing different solutions. We have serious problems and emergencies that require urgent action. There are about 150,000 families of landless laborers living under black tarps, camping, fighting for the rights that are in the Constitution to have land to work. For this problem, the...
Agribusiness | Brazilian Government | Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | General | Agrarian Reform | Brazilian Politics Society and Economy
The Brazil Rainforest Movement launched an internet petition against the appointment of Senator Katia Abreu (PSD - TO) for the 
agriculture ministry of President Dilma Rousseff.
"The appointment of Katia Abreu would represent another step toward the interests of landowners and multinational agribusiness. If this action is confirmed it would be construed by us...
The rural social movements that gathered this week at the Unity Meeting of Workers and Peoples of the Countryside, Waters, and Forests
in Brasilia released a joint statement...
A federal court in Brazil has ordered the immediate suspension of work on the huge Belo Monte hydro-electric dam in the 
Amazon.
The court says local indigenous people have not been properly consulted. Officials point...
Brazilian Government | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | Agrarian Reform | Oppression of MST and Social Movements | MST Urgent Actions
Representatives of the State Secretariat for Human Rights, the State Program for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and the Ombudsman of the Department of Social Defense visited, on Tuesday (July 3, 2012), the Gregório Bezerra encampment in the city of Altinho, rural...
Agribusiness | Agritoxins | Brazilian Government | General | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | GMOs | Monoculture | Neoliberalism | Agrarian Reform
By Jose Coutinho Junior
The Minister of Agrarian Development (MDA), Pepe Vargas, in an interview with Carta Maior declared the decrease in the coming years of the number of families settled pursuant to agrarian reform.
The minister also claims that the number of families living in the encampments has decreased. For Alexandre Conceição, from the National Coordination of the MST, the statements mask the reality of the Brazilian countryside.
Check out the...
Agribusiness | Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | Plans and Theories | Neoliberalism | Worldwide Peasant Struggles | Agrarian Reform | MST Informas
FINAL DECLARATION OF THE PEOPLES’ SUMMIT AT RIO+20 FOR SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE IN DEFENSE OF THE COMMONS, AGAINST THE COMMODIFICATION OF LIFE
Social and popular movements, unions, peoples and organizations of civil society from all over the world who were present at the Peoples Summit...
by Luiz Zarref
Leader of La Via Campesina Brasil
The bill that amends the Brazilian Forest Code, voted on this week in the Chamber of Deputies, represents the maximum agenda of the ruralists. The caucus that supports agribusiness and defends those who commit environmental crimes showed their unity and succeeded in approving language so...
By Felipe Milanez in Washington
The Embassy of Brazil in Washington, a modernist building that contrasts with the classical properties of the beautiful Embassy Row, the sector of embassies of the U.S. capital, hosted on Monday April 9th a march that brought together about one...
The rural social movements, which held a meeting earlier this week in Brasilia, launched a manifesto in defense of agrarian reform, rural development with the end of inequality, production and access to healthy foods, for agro-ecology and ensuring expansion of social rights for rural workers.
...
Transcription of the talk by João Pedro Stedile, of the MST, in the meeting between Dilma and representatives of civil society held on January 26 2012 during the Thematic Social Forum in Porto Alegre.
While visiting the MST Agrarian Reform Store in the public market of Porto Allegre (RS), Jose Graziano da Silva, General Director of the United Nations Organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO) saw the successful products derived from settlements for agrarian reform and family farming.
Amid the more than 250 products sold by the...
Agribusiness | Agritoxins | GMOs | Monoculture | Plans and Theories | Neoliberalism | Agrarian Reform | Brazilian Politics Society and Economy
By Luiz Felipe Albuquerque
Agriculture has undergone a major transformation in Brazil over the past 10 years, with the advancement of the agribusiness model. This model is based on: the production of monocultures on large estates; in an alliance of capitalist farmers, transnational corporations and financial capital; a mechanization that promotes expelling...
Agribusiness | Agritoxins | Brazilian Government | General | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | MST Victories | Plans and Theories | Agrarian Reform | MST Campaigns | MST Informas
The year is ending and again we have the feeling of accomplishment for all the struggles, activities, and alliances that we’ve built and engaged in with all the various sectors of the working class. In another difficult year we had to carry out great struggles against agribusiness that continues its offensive against our lands,...
Brazilian Government | Agrarian Reform | Brazilian Politics Society and Economy | MST News and Events
La Via Campesina (a sister organization of MST) presents a political platform to the federal government of Brazil which includes emergency measures, medium term measures, and strategies for the development and strengthening of family-based and peasant agriculture. The proposals are listed below.
...
The report amending the Forest Code, presented by congressman Aldo Rebelo (Communist Party of Brazil [PCdoB]) and approved by the House of Representatives Special Commission benefits the large landholders of Agribusiness.
Even more worrisome for Agrarian Reform is the amnesty granted to all rural...
By Rafael Soriano
President Dilma Rouseff came to Alagoas to launch the program “Water for everyone” and an agroindustry producing manioc flour. The day took a political tone when the social movements linked to the fight for the land – the MST, the Pastoral Land Commission (Comissão Pastoral da...
Agribusiness | Brazilian Government | GMOs | Monoculture | Seed Control | Agrarian Reform | Oppression of MST and Social Movements
At 88 years of age, the bishop emeritus of Goiás, Dom Tomas Balduíno, lives in the Dominican Monastery of St. Jude Thaddeus in Goiânia, but travels throughout the world at the invitation of groups who ask him to speak about the latifúndio, monoculture, and water....
by Cliff Welch
[Ed. Note: This article is from NACLA Report on the Americas, March/April 2011 and is part of a special issue on Lula’s legacy.]
Until Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victorious 2002 campaign for...
MST occupies an area of 1,000 hectares on the border of Ceará and Paraíba
April 7, 2011
By Marcelo Matos
Fortaleza, Ceará
Da Página do MST
About 80 families organized by the MST encampments in Ceará and...
By Vanessa Ramos
An additional survey from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) suggests that food insecurity is higher in rural than in urban areas.
While 6.2% and 4.6% of households in urban areas had moderate or severe levels of food insecurity, respectively, in rural areas the figures were 8.6% and 7%.
The survey was released last week by the...
Brazilian Government | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | Agrarian Reform | Oppression of MST and Social Movements
In the early hours of Wednesday, about 200 police officers took a violent action and raided the camp Antônio Irmão in Itaquiraí, Mato Grosso do Sul (MS).
The police had no warrant, but invaded the camp and entered the homes of the encampment, searched families and seized material for working in the fields.
The camp has 670 families, including 'brasiguaios' who were expelled from their lands by large landowners in Paraguay and Brazil and who live on the border of both countries...
Four hundred landless families occupied, early on Monday (March 21), the Fazenda Palermo, in the city of São Borja, Rio Grande do Sul. The landless require that the state government finalize the expropriation of the area to settle 54 camped families. They also demand that the federal and state governments immediately settle all of the thousand landless families camped in the state.
In 2008, during the march of the MST to the Fazenda Guerra (northern Rio Grande do Sul), the...
by Jovana Cestille
A health program based on the popular herbal medicine in settlements of Agrarian Reform, held in the municipalities of Querência do Norte and Santa Cruz de Monte Castelo, northwest region of Paraná, was selected to receive the 2010Culture and Health award of the Ministry of Culture .
The production...
Agribusiness | Agritoxins | Food Sovereignty and Sustainability | MST Occupations and Demonstrations | Agrarian Reform | MST Informas
The women of Via Campesina held a National Day of Women’s Struggle in light of March 8 - International Women’s Day – to denounce the
extreme gravity of...
Magali Moser's Blog 
Santa Catarina
At the entrance of the settlement, the placard gives a welcome to the visitor: "The future is in organic production." Next to the phrase, the symbol of the Landless Workers...
By Maria Aparecida
In continuation of the National Day of Struggle of Women, in São Paulo, about 600 women that paralyzed the highway Cônego Domênico Rangoni, have occupied on the afternoon of Thursday (March 3), the headquarters of the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) in São Paulo.
The...