Agrarian reform in Brazil

Slow start or wrong course?

The government of the new President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva has big plans: "In four years' time there will be no more hunger in Brazil," declared José Graziano, Minister for Food Security. Lula's ambitious Hunger Zero (Fome Zero) programme has met with unanimous approval around the world, at least verbally. However, a great number of contradictions during the first months of his government have raised doubts among Brazilian civil society about whether he will keep his promise. Above all, the slow start to agrarian reform, the promotion of an industrialised and export-oriented agricultural model, including the release of cultivation of genetically modified soya bean varieties, are troubling organisations of the landless and smallholders. Starting problems or the wrong course? This question is at present a matter of heated debate in civil society.

At the same time, the problem of the landless remains the same as ever. A recent court decision makes that clear. Sugar baron João Santos in Engenho Prado, in the Brazilian federal state of Pernambuco, had for a long time not used a large part of his land. So in 1997 some 300 landless families decided to occupy a section of it and build up a living for themselves there. The government expropriated the land one year later. Santos, however, went to court and succeeded in preventing the transfer of the property to the landless families. He claimed that the land had not lain fallow, but been replanted with bamboo. A compliant court sustained his suit, and on July 3 this year the police raided the settlement, destroyed houses, schools and churches and drove out the families. The squatters returned to the land the next day. However, the government of Pernambuco has been presented with a court order to clear the settlement again. The human rights organisation FIAN has called on the state governor to observe the right to food of the people affected and not go ahead with a clearance. The agrarian reform authority (INCRA) has confirmed yet again that the big landowner is not using the land for productive purposes. On October 7 it submitted a new expropriation decree to President Lula for signing. All hopes now rest with him. He is under pressure to act, and not only in the Engenho Prado case.


Ambitious programme

The Hunger Zero programme by which Lula aims to reduce the number of Brazil's hungry from an official 44 million to zero within four years, encompasses local, specific and structural elements.(1) The local and specific measures include, for example, setting up 'people's kitchens', promoting smallholdings and urban farming, allocating magnetic-strip cards for buying food, and providing school meals. However, the structural measures aimed at overcoming hunger in the long term are especially significant. They include, besides strengthening social rights in general and increasing incomes, the agrarian reform as a central feature. An estimated five million farming families in Brazil possess no arable land. They are compelled to hire themselves out for a pittance as farm workers on big plantations. Others drift to the slums of the big cities, where mostly they fail to find work and contribute to a worsening of poverty and social conflicts. At the same time, 166 million hectares, or 44 per cent of Brazil's arable land, are not used productively. According to the Constitution, they could be expropriated on payment of compensation and distributed to the landless. Yet it is on this central point above all that Lula has so far disappointed his longstanding companions of the MST landless movement and many other organisations.


Slow start or wrong course?

According to a survey by the Institute for Socio-Economic Studies (INESC), the speed of land redistribution during the first five months of the Lula government has slowed distinctly compared with the previous administration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso.(2) During his term of office, the INESC says, an average of almost 80,000 families per year attained a title to land. Lula aims this year to provide only 60,000 families with land, and will hardly achieve even this modest target. In the first five months (to June 1), no more than 2,500 families were settled. At the same time there is a huge demand for land. Horácio Martins de Carvalho, an MST advisor, says about 170,000 families are now waiting in camps (acampamentos) for their settlement, and another 170,000 families will be added to them this year alone. Against this background, it is hardly surprising that in the first half of this year there was a slight increase in land occupations compared with the same period in 2002. According to the Brazilian Land Pastoral Commission (CPT), there has also been a sharp increase in the number of attacks on the landless by landowners' private militias. The CPT says that to the end of September, 60 people had been killed. The total death toll in 2002 was 43.

Just under a year after Lula took office on January 1, it would certainly be premature to give up hope. The results of the first months do not say much, and in part are to be explained by the new administration's lack of experience. On the other hand, the government's modest goals for the next few years are a reason for serious concern. According to the Multiple-Year Plan (Plano Plurianual, PPA), the budget planning for the next few years, the government aims to settle a not more than 140,000 families by the end of its current term of office (end-2006), significantly fewer than under Cardoso. Much indicates that Lula, too, intends to steer clear of a conflict with the landowning oligarchy. For instance, about 700,000 hectares of State land are earmarked for the distribution, which could mean a further shifting of the agrarian frontier to the cost of the Amazon Basin. The continuation of the disputed 'market-assisted' Crédito Fundiário land reform programme also leads to the conclusion that the government lacks the will to quarrel with the old elites. The programme, designed and co-financed by the World Bank, is based on the voluntary purchase and sale of land and renounces expropriations. When Agrarian Reform Minister Miguel Rossetto fired the President of the Agrarian Reform Agency INCRA, Marcelo Resende, last July, the Land Pastoral CPT linked it with Resende's opposition to the market-assisted land reform. However, the true motives for his dismissal are unclear.


External constraints and internal contradictions

In a bid to win over the majority of the Brazilians in his fourth run for the Presidency, Lula had made far-reaching compromises even before the elections. His main ones were vis-à-vis the international finance institutions, in order not to put their financial support at risk. When last year it appeared the labour leader might possibly win the elections, the price of Brazilian bonds and the value of the real plunged drastically. Lula thereupon moved as quickly as possible to counter the fears of the financial world with a "Letter to the Brazilian People" in which he assured that he would abide by all contracts of the previous governments. He said he planned neither a moratorium on sovereign debt nor an anti-capitalist revolution.(3) The financial markets then recovered, and in September 2002 the IMF pledged Brazil a record loan of US$ 30 billion. Of that sum, US$ 24 billion was not to be available until 2003, after the swearing-in of the future President. After his election Lula did not disappoint the IMF's faith in him. He promised to increase the public sector's primary surplus (i. e. before debt service payments) from 3.75 per cent to 4.25 per cent. His obliging step had its price: the concomitant cuts in public spending are not least to the cost of social reforms and the agrarian reform. The budget of the Hunger Zero programme (US$ 1.3 billion) corresponds to all of one-tenth of the annual interest on Brazil's foreign debt.

Another obstacle to agrarian reform is also linked closely to the country's foreign debt: the basic favouring of the export-oriented and monoculture-based agroindustry. In 2002, Brazil earned US$ 6 billion from soya bean exports alone, foreign exchange which is indispensable for debt servicing.(4) That is an important argument for Agriculture Minister Roberto Rodriguez, a sugar baron and representative of the agroindustry, to maintain and even expand the promotion of soya bean and sugar production. There is no doubt that this policy goes against the goals of rainforest protection and food security. Expansion of soya bean-growing areas from 10.6 million hectares in 1993 to 18.5 million hectares in 2002 meant a significant reduction over the last 10 years of the cultivation areas for the important foods of rice, beans, manioc (cassava) and wheat. Only the maize-growing area remained the same. Soya bean cultivation has led to many conflicts in rural areas, displacement of smallholders and a further concentration of land ownership. Supporters of this trend see in agrarian reform mainly an obstacle to development and a threat to their interests. The news in September of the release of GM soya bean cultivation (initially limited to one year) came as a shock. Lula had managed to do in eight months what Cardoso shrank from for eight years, although Lula's Workers' Party (PT) had until then been regarded as a resolute opponent of genetically modified organisms.


The principle of hope

There is great confusion at present among the organisations of the landless, smallholders and activists for environmental protection and human rights. Traditionally, they are among Lula's closest allies, and gave him massive support in the election campaign. Many see themselves as having been deceived in their hopes for a renunciation of Brazil's neoliberal economic policy, greater independence from the IMF and World Bank, a comprehensive agrarian reform and sustainable farming. However, organisations such as the MST and CPT have so far shied away from a real break with their allies of many years. They are attempting to strengthen the progressive forces in the heterogeneous government by means of public relations work and increasing the number of land occupations. Opinions are divided on which side of this tug-of-war Lula stands. That applies also to the subject of agrarian reform. Lula recently commissioned Plínio Arruda Sampaio, an academic who has close links with the MST, with drafting an agrarian reform plan: a turning point? As in the Engenho Prado case, all hopes rest in Lula.

(1) Ingo Melchers: Der Skandal des Hungers.
Das Menschenrecht auf angemessene Ernährung wird in Brasilien unter neuen Vorzeichen diskutiert, in: INKOTA-Brief 125 (September 2003), p. 28 f.
2) Edelcia Vigna: A reforma agrária no governo Lula: nova perspectiva?, Nota Técnica No. 79 (July 2003), Instituto de Estudos Socioeconomicos (INESC)
3) Martin Ling: Auf schmalem Grat. Argentinien und Brasilien haben wirtschaftspolitisch kaum Alternativen,
in: INKOTA-Brief 125 (September 2003), p. 8 f.
4) Ulrike Bickel: Sojaboom in Brasilien – eine unendliche Geschichte? www.loccum.de/aktuell/soja, August 2003