Throughout one week, the Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST, in Portuguese) occupied 28 large estates scattered across 11 Brazilian states. The actions are part of the traditional national day of struggle held in April to remember the Eldorado do Carajás massacre. It is in this context of pressure that, last Monday (15), the Lula government launched the Terra da Gente Program (“Our Land”, in a rough translation).
The decree provides alternatives for the federal government to acquire rural properties to be used for agrarian reform. Among the options are the use of land that already belongs to the state, the negotiation of state debts in exchange for land, the purchase of properties from banks and public companies, the acquisition of pledged properties and adjudicated land (when landowners exchange land for settling debts).
According to the MST and the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT, in Portuguese), the program is important because it is a "step forward" by the government in response to the demand for advancing land reform and presents "interesting" options for land acquisition in the mid-term.
However, the organizations also stress that the measures do not affect the country's concentration of land ownership and do not end urgent short-term issues, such as reducing the bureaucracy of small farmers' access to credit and the settlement of 105,000 families living in encampments throughout Brazil.
"It's social compensation, not agrarian reform"
"In general, Brazil presents good ideas for acquiring land," highlighted Gilmar Mauro, from the national coordination of the MST. "However, I don't see a concrete solution in the short-term to one of the main problems, which is the number of people encamping in the country,” he added.
"Funding for settler farmers wasn’t discussed either. It's always good to remember that there are almost four million small farmers [in Brazil] and that the amount of credit released [this year] for family farming was one million [reais]. These are the farmers who are economically viable," said the MST leader.
"We have no concrete policy for the rural poor population. We need a kind of 'Desenrola' [a federal program that supports indebted people to pay off debts] aimed at these people who produce food in this country," proposes Gilmar Mauro.
For Isolete Wichinieski, from CPT's national coordination, the federal government has been tackling social problems, "but at a slow pace." "We advocate for the deconcentration of land ownership – something we're not seeing in the current Lula government," she said. "[The government] is trying to combat hunger with a very welfare-oriented approach without attacking the root of the problem, which has land as one of its main issues," he says.
"We've seen improvements in food production programs recently reintroduced, such as the Food Acquisition Program (PAA, in Portuguese) and credit for productive gardens. But basic issues persist. We need to restructure agriculture and agrarian policy for the countryside, which this government has yet to show what it's come for," Isolete points out.
In the same vein, Gilmar Mauro believes that Terra da Gente "is a kind of social compensation, a settlement program born from struggle, which is obviously important. But it doesn't tackle the concentration of land ownership in our country. That's why it isn't an agrarian reform program."
"Without fighting too much"
The systematization of rural properties that can be acquired "without fighting too much", as President Lula (PT) said at the announcement, dubbed it "land shelf".
In the decree, the ways of acquiring these lands include desapropriação (when the government buys the land from the owner to use it for social purposes) and expropriação (when the area is taken by the state for failing to comply, for instance, with labor or environmental laws). Both tackle the concentration of land ownership in Brazil. However, there are no signs that these resources will be used as a priority.
Firstly, because of the low budget for expropriations: the investment in land reform foreseen in the 2024 Annual Budget Law is BRL659 million, the lowest amount planned for the area of all previous Workers’ Party administrations. Between 2003 and 2016, there was no year in which this budget was below BRL2.5 billion.
Secondly, Brazil’s Minister for Agrarian Development and Family Farming, Paulo Teixeira, said on Wednesday (17) at a press conference that the strategy is to avoid conflicts and apply "more innovative" methods than expropriation.
"In the past, we used to have an expropriation system in which, after going to court, there was intense debate. The issue would be analyzed by several courts. After about 10 years, the land was acquired. We're changing that," said Paulo Teixeira.
"In the previous period, how did you settle families? You did it by law because the land was unproductive. The areas were expropriated for land reform purposes. But that's a lengthy process and you're always going to allocate unproductive land. It's like giving those families an old car, so to speak, something we are changing," said the minister.
In his speech launching the program at the Planalto Palace, Lula stressed that the survey of land available for settlements "does not invalidate the continuity of the agrarian reform struggle. However, we want to show Brazil that we can do it without too much fighting. It doesn’t mean asking people to stop fighting."
In Gilmar's opinion, the government has been trying to "appease conflicts" since the beginning of the administration, in January 2023. "As if, in case there was no pressure from grassroots movements, landowners would stay quiet, right? That doesn't happen, of course. You have to pressure them. If the MST were to adopt the 'now sit down and we'll do something about it' talk, it would mean settling for a historically archaic land structure,” he points out.
Edited by: Nicolau Soares
