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By Ramona DeNies
The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, Latin America’s largest social movement, has fought endemic poverty, gender inequality and neoliberalism for almost 30 years.
Andreia Borges Ferreira, a representative of Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (MST) spoke March 5,during Portland International Women’s Day at Portland State University’s Smith Center. In solidarity with International Women’s Day, Ferreira’s speech highlighted the role of women in what is now Latin America’s largest social movement.
Ferreira spoke twice more while in Portland, at Lewis and Clark College and Liberty Hall. Her Liberty Hall speech was preceded by a film, The Landless: On the Paths of America, depicting the birth, path and struggles of the MST for land distribution, human rights and food sovereignty over the last 20 years.
The MST, which today claims an estimated 1.5 million members organized in 23 of Brazil’s 27 states, developed in the late 1970s from a peasant organization effort by the Catholic Church. At that time, said Ms. Ferreira, speaking through an interpreter, approximately “one percent of the land owners controlled 50 percent of Brazil’s agriculture.”
According to the Land Action Research Network (LACR), South Africa and Brazil share the distinction of being the countries with the most unequal distribution of land.
The LACR, quoting Stephan Schwartzman of Washington’s organization Environmental Defense, states that “between 1995 and 1998 the Brazilian government settled more landless families on expropriated land than it had in the previous 30 years, an effort that would not have been possible without ‘the continual, large-scale public pressure applied by the MST strategy of land occupations.’”
Ferreira emphasized that the MST does not advocate against property ownership but rather against entrenched inequality of land distribution. The MST’s principal method for combating this inequality is through the peaceful occupation of unused land. Since 1985, the MST has won land titles for more than 250,000 families in 1,600 settlements as a result of MST actions, and 200,000 encamped families currently await government recognition.
Land occupations are rooted in the Brazilian Constitution, which says land that remains unproductive should be used for a “larger social function.”
Land occupied by the MST has been used to establish cooperative farms, construct houses and schools for both children and adults as well as health clinics. Through its community building efforts, the MST emphasizes the promotion of indigenous cultures, a healthy and sustainable environment and gender equality.
Women and the MST
According to Ferreira, women play an increasingly important role in the MST. The MST’s Gender Sector, one of eight work areas or “collectives” including health and human rights, developed with MST’s expansion to facilitate discussion of gender relations within MST and encourage women to engage with and direct the movement.
“MST does not have a president or general coordinators,” said Ferreira. “ We have groups of people that organize at national and local levels, and 50 percent of participants must be women. Women have begun to fill leadership roles, and all MST events have childcare so women can participate.”
Ferreira noted that even though legal and social change is not likely to occur rapidly, MST continues to seek ways to empower women, who are often the primary drivers working land to support their families.
Current MST campaigns impacting women include efforts to secure retirement benefits for housewives and a national drive to ensure that rural working Brazilian women possess the documentation necessary to be counted, such as birth certificates and citizenship papers. Ms. Ferreira said that MST is currently supporting a bill to combat profiteering and exploitation of a woman’s body, ie, via advertising to sells cars or beer.
Ferreira noted that the MST has won a recent victory on behalf of Brazilian women in securing women’s right to joint land titles. “I do feel that we have made an impact,” she said, “reflected in the number of women participating in the Movement and especially in decision-making.”
“Progress and Order” — Neoliberalism v. the MST
Despite more than 20 years of mass mobilization for agrarian reform, the transference of land titles to a quarter of a million poor Brazilian families, and accessibility of MST technical support programs to ensure income and sustainable living for settlers, Ms. Ferreira feels that the MST cannot yet claim success.
“The MST has not yet altered the basic distribution of land in Brazil,” she said.
In Brazil, as in Latin America in general, colonialism’s legacy of latifúndios — vast single-owner land tracts worked by slaves or disenfranchised poor workers — has been reinforced by first-world pressure in the 1980s and ‘90s to develop “efficient,” export-driven economies in many poorer nations. Brazilian agribusiness boomed, making the nation the world’s largest producer of sugarcane and coffee, but rapid mechanization and consolidation of the industry left millions of rural Brazilians unemployed and landless.
Over the past three decades Brazil’s agribusiness has continued to grow and consolidate. Today the industry accounts for more than 35 percent of Brazil’s export activity and is a lightning rod for controversy and popular discontent, as multinational corporations, notoriously Monsanto, have made Brazil a testing ground for new engineered crop technologies.
Ferreira attributes the institutionalization of the neoliberal economic policies of former Brazilian President Cardoso’s Real Plan (based on the Washington Consensus) as why current Workers’ Party President Lula Inácio da Silva (“Lula”) has had little space to maneuver on behalf of the MST. The MST supported Lula’s successful candidacy and continues to count him as an ideological ally.
“Because of the globalized practices of agribusiness there is no space for agricultural reform,” she said. “The federal government is very fragile in front of world economics policies.”
“Poverty and unemployment have increased dramatically in Brazil recently,” she continued. “MST has made it clear to Lula that it would criticize anything that he does not in our favor — we criticize his policies, not Lula himself.”
Thus far, the MST has achieved remarkable progress despite empty, hostile, and even lethal government policies and actions. Through current programs such as Bionatur Network for Agro-ecological Seeds, through which the MST produces — largely by former MST landless workers — its own organic seeds for distribution, its growing international solidarity program “Via Campesina,” and ongoing struggles against increased trade liberalization such as the proposed FTAA, the MST continues its efforts to combat endemic poverty and human rights abuses in Brazil.
As with any successful social movement, organic is always best, from roots to harvest.
More information about the MST and the Friends of the MST Program can be found online at www.mstbrazil.org.
Ramona DeNies is the film editor for The Portland Alliance.
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The Portland Alliance
2807 SE Stark Portland,OR 97214 Last Updated: April 8, 2006 |