One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  I can’t understand a word he’s saying. I don’t speak Portuguese, and he doesn’t speak English. So for all I know he could be shouting at someone else. Or he might just be saying hello. Or asking me the time. Or singing. I keep walking towards the fence. Being an ignorant foreigner has its uses.

  On the other side of the fence, dozens of peasant farmers are gathered, watching me. They’re only about six feet away. The policeman is still shouting; louder now. I still can’t understand a word of it. All I have to do is keep walking, keep walking, keep . . .

  Two feet away from the wire, just as I think I’ve made it, the policeman’s hand lands firmly on my shoulder. He marches me back to where I started from, next to the three patrol cars that are parked outside the blockaded country estate that is being occupied by the people on the other side of the fence. The policeman is shouting at me and gesturing at the white carrier bag I have in my hand. I open it and show him the contents: bacuri fruit, a local delicacy in this part of northern Brazil. He shakes his head and takes the bag from me. Daniella, my translator, arrives.

  ‘Tell him the fruit’s just for me,’ I say.

  ‘There are ten of them in the bag,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t think your appetite’s that big. And he doesn’t believe that you don’t speak any Portuguese. I’m explaining to him that English people don’t bother learning anyone else’s languages because they’re lazy.’

  ‘Thanks very much.’

  As Daniella negotiates with the cop, I look over at the people gathered on the other side of the fence, who are still watching the spectacle. They are leaning on the wire, following my progress: wrinkled old men in straw hats, women in flip-flops nursing babies, barefoot kids with worm-swollen stomachs, young, dark-skinned topless men in jeans and sandals. I shrug my shoulders in their direction and some of them grin. Since they invaded this land, claiming it for themselves, saying they had nowhere else to go, the police have been (illegally) trying to starve them out, and won’t let anybody take any food in. Even, as it turns out, a few bacuri.

  Daniella has finished negotiating with the policeman.

  ‘They’re not going to arrest you,’ she says, ‘but they don’t like you.’

  ‘That’s OK. I don’t like them either.’

  ‘You might have made some new friends, though,’ she says, gesturing at the onlookers. We walk back towards them, over to the fence, minus my bag of bacuri. People nod at me, smiling. An old man insists on shaking my hand. Someone parts the wires for us, and we squeeze through.

  The north-eastern state of Maranhão is one of the poorest and most corrupt in Brazil, and the land that these families are occupying, like much land in the state, is part of a latifundio – a vast landholding owned by an absentee landlord. This land, say the occupying families, has not been used for years. They, meanwhile, are poor and landless. So why shouldn’t they have this land? And if they take it, is it theft, or is it justice?

  The people occupying this estate are not alone in asking this question. All over Brazil it has been asked, with increasing regularity, for the last twenty years. And all over Brazil, for the last twenty years, people like these have answered it for themselves. These families are all members of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, or MST. The MST began life in 1984, as a reaction to the plight of Brazil’s increasing numbers of landless people. Almost two decades on, the MST has resettled over 300,000 poor, often destitute, families on over 21 million hectares of land. Its model of land reform from below has turned it into the biggest social movement in Latin America.

  One reason for the remarkable rise of the MST is straightforward. In this enormous nation, bigger than the USA and covering nearly half of South America, less than 1 per cent of the population owns almost half of the land. Much of this is owned by absentee landowners, who rarely, if ever, actually farm it.1 According to the MST, 60 per cent of Brazilian farmland lies idle while 25 million peasants scrape by in temporary agricultural jobs and millions more go hungry in the slums of Brazil’s teeming cities.2 Brazil is pipped to the post – just – by Paraguay as the country with the most unequal land distribution in the world. And globalisation, it seems, is making it worse.

  The MST seeks to change all this. And it long ago gave up asking anyone’s permission.

  Daniella and I arrive at the newly occupied farm in a convoy of cars and vans which left the MST’s local office in the state capital of São Luís an hour or so before. The convoy has come to bring food and support to the people who occupied this land twelve days ago, in the face of a local government which is keen to see them gone.

  We pull up at the main farm gates in a cloud of red dust. The landscape is vast and empty: flat, wide open country; wire fences, scrub grass, unbounded fields and tall, elegant babasul palms reaching into a huge sky. A cluster of black and yellow police cars are parked on the dirt road. The main track to the farm buildings has been blocked by the settlers, who have strung barbed wire across it and built a temporary shelter of poles and black tarpaulin, which crackles slightly in an almost imperceptible breeze. Across the blockaded gate hangs the MST’s emblem – a red flag adorned with a rough map of Brazil and a man and woman holding a machete aloft in a gesture of rural defiance.

  Arriving in the convoy with us, among others, is Helena Burros Heluy, the only representative of the Workers’ Party (PT) in the Maranhão state assembly. In this state, at least, the PT – in the sole form of Helena – are the only politicians prepared to take the MST and their concerns seriously. ‘There are three attitudes among state politicians to the MST,’ she tells me later. ‘One, make a point of ignoring them. Two, vehemently oppose them. Three, deliberately show them in a bad light to the public at large – call them thieves, terrorists, that sort of thing. Landowner control here is almost total. But the MST is a serious movement, with serious national concerns, and real credibility, and this will not do.’

  Helena gets out of her car and moves across the red dust road towards one of the policemen guarding the entrance. He is wearing, like his colleagues, a black bullet-proof vest. A small gaggle of local journalists gathers around her. I join them.

  ‘I want to go on to this land, to see how the people are,’ she tells the policeman. ‘Will you allow me in?’ The policeman looks nervous. Helena is a well-dressed, determined, middle-aged woman with authority, and she is not about to be fobbed off.

  ‘I’ll have to radio my commander,’ he says. ‘After all, you are a deputy in the state assembly, so we don’t want to infringe your civil rights.’

  ‘So if I wasn’t a state deputy it would be acceptable to infringe my civil rights?’

  The policeman smiles, wanly.

  ‘And tell me something,’ says Helena, pressing home her advantage, ‘why won’t you allow food in to these people? You do realise this is illegal?’ He shuffles a bit in the dust.

  ‘Just my orders,’ he says. ‘From the commander.’

  ‘The police commander has no authority to give such orders,’ insists the deputy. ‘Tell me who really gave the orders.’ The policeman looks at the ground and stops shuffling. He knows when he’s beaten.

  ‘They came from over his head,’ he mutters. ‘From the state government.’

  After that, the policeman is only too happy to take out some of his impotence on me, when I decide to see how strict the food blockade is, and whether an ignorant foreign visitor can get away with breaching it. The answer turns out to be no. But within a few hours of our arrival – and, more significantly, of Helena’s intercession – it turns out not to matter. The food blockade is suddenly and mysteriously lifted, and we are allowed to take the food we have brought with us on to the settlement.

  Inside the estate, a collection of white farm buildings with tiled roofs and blue wooden porches are bustling with activity. People are out exploring the land, testing its readiness for planting, exploring the extent of their new domain. Old men sit on chairs under the open skies, ch
atting. A radio plays to a woman sewing on one of the porches. Children, shoeless and topless and smiling, throw dust at each other, or follow me around curiously, demanding that I take their photos. People keep slapping me on the back, or grinning at me as they pass, and saying things that, according to Daniella, translate virtually every time as something like, ‘Hey, friend, got any bacuri?’

  At the centre of the complex of buildings, inside an open-sided enclosure with a neat thatched roof, apparently built as a cattle market but never used, hammocks are strung up from every available beam. A line of people snakes around the edge of the building, holding plates and forks, queuing to reach the two steaming iron pots of beans and rice that contain their lunch. Several people invite us to eat, but they have little enough as it is without me taking it.

  Half an hour later I find myself sitting on one of the porches, in a wickerwork chair, surrounded by people. Children are crawling around the floor scribbling on the tiles with chalk at the direction of a young woman who is apparently childminding for much of the camp. Another woman sits on a chair at the edge of the porch, breastfeeding, wearing a red MST cap backwards. In front of the porch is a dirt track that runs from the blockaded entrance off into the depths of the farm. The white and blue fenceposts that edge it are strung with MST flags, staking their claim to this liberated land; this republic of the poor.

  On the porch with me sits Anildo de Morais, one of the MST’s state co-ordinators. He has dark stubble and dark skin, and wears what most people here are wearing; flip-flops, shorts, a T-shirt and the ubiquitous MST cap.

  ‘We have been waiting eight months for the government to tell us which of the farms in this area were not productive, and whether any of them would be given to us,’ he tells me. ‘For eight months, three hundred landless families were camped on a roadside nearby waiting to be given land, and the government gave nothing. So we decided not to wait any longer, and to take this land ourselves. The occupation was quite simple. The families got on to lorries and buses, and we all came here. There was one night watchman on duty, and he just opened the gate and let us in. It was all peaceful. Next day, the farm manager arrived from the city with about fifty heavily armed police. They started pushing us around and pointing their guns at our children and old people, but we didn’t react. The manager came in and went to his house and took out some suitcases with things in and left. Then we built the barbed wire fence to stop them driving their police cars in, so they just sat outside all day and night to intimidate us.’ Around us, on the porch, people begin to nod.

  ‘On the third night we were here,’ interjects a woman, ‘they spent the whole night with their sirens on! Very loudly, so we couldn’t sleep!’ There are more nods.

  ‘Anyway,’ says Anildo, ‘the farm owner went to the local courts, and yesterday the judge said that within fifteen days, we have to leave this land, by court order. Which means fifteen days to challenge the court order. We have a lawyer working on it. We are hopeful. We will tell the court what we told the police: if you throw these people off this land, where will they go?’

  A white-haired man leaning on a fencepost a few yards from the porch doesn’t know where he would go, but he’s glad he came here. His name, he tells me, is Arnoldo, and he’s forty-seven. He was a farmer until 1983, when a bigger farm bought his land, and he was forced to move to the city in search of work. He hated it.

  ‘I work the land,’ he says. ‘That’s all I have ever done. I have never had a boss, I have always been my own person. I worried all the time when I was in the city. I never had a job there and I don’t understand the city. Ever since we left our land we suffered. And then we came here.’

  It looks hard here, I say. What if you’re thrown off? What about the police? Is it worth it?

  ‘It is risky,’ says Arnoldo, ‘but I don’t have any worries. It’s a hard life, but it’s what I know. And one day we will win over these people who don’t want us to work peacefully on our land; who take it away so we can’t work. If we all unite, then we will be able to avoid any problems.’ He talks quietly, matter-of-factly. Curious boys skulk at his elbow, staring at me then looking away, giggling, when I catch their eye.

  ‘Here,’ continues Arnoldo, ‘there is a lot of solidarity. If there is anybody in need, we help them. We have already planted some vegetable gardens, and some rice and corn. I have left my wife and children in town until it is safe here; then they can come too, and we can be a family. My wife is worried, she knows I could even lose my life. But I tell her it is worth it. Ever since I was thrown off my land I haven’t been able to find real peace.’ His lined, brown face breaks into a smile under his wide-brimmed straw hat.

  ‘Here,’ he says, ‘I have found peace again.’

  Land – what it produces, who lives on it, how it is organised, how it is owned, the cultures that spring from it – is one of the fundamental pillars of human society. An estimated 53 per cent of the world’s population is rural – though within a decade it is predicted that, for the first time in human history, the numbers living on the land will begin to be eclipsed by the numbers living in cities and towns.3 Even when this happens, though, the world’s urbanites will be as dependent on the land and what it produces as they ever were.

  For those who live outside the rapidly expanding urban sprawl, now as in the past, access to enough land to feed your family, and/or to produce food for sale, has always been one of the most effective ways to enable people to live secure, independent lives. Loss of, and lack of access to, land, on the other hand, has always been and remains one of the biggest causes of poverty.

  Peter Rosset, co-director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, based in California, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on land and land reform. He currently lives and works in Chiapas, where the struggle for land was central to both the original Mexican Revolution and the Zapatista uprising. Back in San Cristobal, five months before I got to Brazil, I had talked to him about the global context of land access, land reform, and land rights.

  ‘We’ve been saying for decades that you can’t have any kind of sustainable or broad-based development that will really address issues of poverty or political democracy if you have an extremely inequitable distribution of land,’ he told me. ‘In rural areas, people who are landless or land-poor – people who have land that’s too small to support their families – are basically marginalised from the national economy. Firstly they don’t have the resources available to feed themselves or their family. Secondly, that forces a level of poverty on them that’s so severe that they’re not a part of the market. And if they’re not a part of the market then nobody addresses their concerns. It’s inequality that leads to that situation. The poor have no significant political or economic power.’

  On the other hand, said Rosset, ensuring that land is fairly distributed – and undertaking radical land reform, if necessary, to make it that way – can be one of the best ways to improve people’s lives.

  ‘Historically,’ he went on, ‘countries that have had more equitable land distribution than others have developed faster and in a more broad-based and inclusive way over the long term – over hundreds of years. In the shorter term, say from the end of World War Two to now, the very few countries that really did accomplish expropriation and redistribution of quality farmland for most of the very poor people are the countries that have had economic miracles; Japan, for example, or Taiwan, or South Korea.’

  Brazil never had the sort of revolution that brought land reform to so many Mexicans, and never underwent the traumatic post-war upheavals that led the Japanese or Korean governments to begin handing land back to their people. Partly as a result, it is still run to a large extent by a landholding elite, and has the second-most unequal land distribution on Earth. This is nothing new; the country’s heavily concentrated land-ownership pattern is a legacy from the days of the Portuguese Empire. But the rush to join the global market is exacerbating the situation.

  Brazil opened
up its agricultural markets to competition in the 1990s. The Zapatistas, for one, would have recognised what happened next. In came the subsidised products from foreign agribusiness farms, out went much of the Brazilian government’s support for its own agriculture, and into the city slums went a steady stream of small farmers, unable to compete with some of the wealthiest and most voracious agribusiness corporations on the planet. Between 1985 and 1995, the number of small family farms in Brazil dropped by a fifth, and the number of people employed in agriculture fell from 23 million to 18 million – the biggest decline ever in such a short time.4

  Taking advantage of the new regime, multinational corporations began moving in on the fundamental basis of farming: seed. Seed production is crucial to agriculture and any company that can control it has its competitors – not to mention farmers – over a barrel. It also has an opportunity to focus production on a few key species and introduce new technologies – genetic modification, for example. Sure enough, in came Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, AgrEvo and other biotechnology giants: by 1999, they controlled 90 per cent of Brazil’s seed market. ‘We are going back to colonial times,’ noted Brazilian economist Horacio Martins, ‘when our economy was controlled from abroad.’5

  President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s man-at-the-helm from 1994 to 2002, liked to see himself, along with Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, as one of the creators of the ‘Third Way’, that slippery political attempt to triangulate between an increasingly rampant market and the needs of society. There was, said Cardoso, no alternative to globalisation. ‘It’s the law of the market,’ he told a farmers’ leader who came to plead with him to do something about the country’s rural collapse; ‘it’s inexorable.’6 Brazil’s rural future would be to specialise in a few export crops, grown on large, cost-efficient farms: soya, coffee, sugar cane, cotton. This would bring in the foreign currency which would allow Brazil to service its debt and develop. By 1999, with this policy in full swing, Brazil was earning itself around $5 billion from soya exports alone. Unfortunately it was spending another $7.5 billion importing food – mostly rice, beans and maize – that it had traditionally grown itself.