The Landless of yesterday, of today and of tomorrow
11th of February 2014
By Marina dos Santos
from Carta Capital
Just as with many land occupations, the Landless Workers Movement was born at the end of a long dark night. The dawn of workers strikes, the campaign for general and unrestricted amnesty, the new urban social movements and “Rights-Now” that enclosed the military dictatorship, also permitted the retaking of the struggle for land and for agrarian reform in Brazil.
They were leaseholders, workers affected by dams, migrants, sharecroppers, partners, small farmers. Rural landless workers, without the right to produce food. Expelled from the countryside by an authoritarian project, which announced ‘modernization’ – when, in truth, it stimulated the mass usage of agricultural toxins and mechanization – based on plentiful (and exclusive to large-land owners) rural credit; at the same time in which control over agriculture was concentrated in the hands of great agro-industrial conglomerates. These contradictions and the 500 years of a society based on large landholdings is what founded, in 1984, an autonomous social movement, which struggled for the land, for agrarian reform, and for the necessary social transformations of our country.
Now, after 30 years, we have become the most long-lived peasant social movement in the history of Brazil. This in itself would be a feat: to resist decades of political and economic power of the large-landowners, which extends from the rural bloc in the federal capital to gunmen in rural towns, and to survive the blatant complicity of the media with the most archaic form of power in our country.
But there are other merits which elevate our resistance: in three decades, we have conquered land for more than 350,000 families. Land liberated from large land-owners and which stimulated local development. In each large land-holding, where few people lived, now there live 100, 200, 300, with the dignity which they were previously denied.
With this, new forms of organization and of struggles are required, such as in the more than 400 associations and cooperatives that work collectively to produce foodstuffs without transgenics and without pesticides. Or in the 96 agro-industries which improve the wealth and working conditions of the countryside, offering quality foodstuffs at a lower price in the cities. Just to give one example, a little more than a thousand families settled in the region of Porto Alegre (RS) are responsible for the feeding of more than 40,000 people each day, by means of the programs for School Nourishment and Food Acquisition.
Other conquests, however, cannot be measured in numbers. In a country where the countryside has always been relegated to backwardness, to material, aesthetic and intellectual poverty, we are proud to have formed more than “small landowners”: our struggle created men and women that reconquered their citizenship as subjects of their history and not as subalterns.
This commitment to human formation is expressed in over 2,000 public schools in encampments and settlements which guarantee access to education for more than 160,000 landless children and adolescents, beyond the 50,000 adults and youths made literate in recent years. This is without mentioning our over 100 graduate courses in partnership with universities across the whole of Brazil.
This expression of our pride says that no child goes hungry in the agrarian reform settlements.
If we have already done a lot, we dream of putting the following challenges before us. Agriculture has suffered drastic changes as a result of neoliberal politics in the 1990s. The State mechanisms for agriculture have been dismantled one by one: price controls, supplies, research and technical assistance. If previously there were only accessible to a few, today they do not even exist. Neoliberalism in agriculture opened the road by which a few foreign businesses came to control our agriculture, from seeds to marketing.
In the place of foodstuffs, the land is occupied by sugarcane to become biofuel in the United States, soya to become animal feed in Europe and cellulose to become paper for the whole world. These monocultures take and redivide our territory, inflate the price of land, reduce the production of foodstuffs and generate a great global food crisis.
In this manner, for a true agrarian reform to take place in our country it is necessary to confront agribusiness and the interests of international capital. However, if the large landholding changed its nature, associating itself with international financial capital, the nature of the struggle for land and for agrarian reform has also changed. It is not enough for it to be a classical agrarian reform, which merely divides ownership of the land and integrates the peasants as furnishers of primary materials and foodstuffs for urban-industrial society.
The struggle for land requires that we confront capital and its model of agriculture, dispute lands and territories, as well as the control of seeds, of agroindustry, of technology, of natural goods, of biodiversity, of water and the forests.
Therefore, the popular agrarian reform which we defend is based on the defence of sovereignty, on respect and on combatting the marketization of natural goods, and on the production of healthy foodstuffs for the population. By this, it should be the fruit of an alliance between peasants, urban and rural workers that need to accumulate force in order to produce the necessary changes in the countryside and the whole of Brazilian society.
All of this is possible with one of the characteristics which the Movement has kept since the beginning: the struggle! And it is in this form which, during out 6th Congress, the MST reaffirms its political direction for the next period: “Struggle, to construct Popular Agrarian Reform”!
To complete 30 years and to become the most long-lived peasant movement in the country, organized in 24 states, brings with it several meanings: the reaffirmation of the values of solidarity; the commitment to a more just and egalitarian society; to keep alight the legacy of thousands of those who fight for the people, to exert daily the capacity to become incensed and to act for transformation; not to lose the value of study and always to learn. And, fundamentally, to reaffirm our commitment to organize the people of the countryside.
*Marina dos Santos is a member of the National co-ordination of the MST
English Translation by Philip Roberts, University of Sydney