One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  ‘We want the landless to have their bit of land,’ he says. ‘That was the reason for the birth of the MST. But the problem is that within the current economic model there is simply no need for small farmers – no need for most farmers. Small farmers are being penalised by the market, and this has got a lot worse since 1995, when the government really began to introduce neoliberal measures into the countryside. Even during the military dictatorship, agriculture was supported by the government – the annual budget was about $18 billion. Under Cardoso’s government, it’s gone down to less than half that amount.’ The results, he explains, have been an attack on small farmers and small landowners from virtually every side.

  ‘There has been a big advance in agribusiness control,’ he says. ‘Four or five big companies control almost all of our agro-industries. How can our settlements compete? We are told that we must enter the market – even if we want to, we can’t. Three big companies control the whole dairy market, for example. Three of our bigger settlements went into dairy production for a while but there was no way they could compete. If the dairy companies that controlled the market didn’t like their prices, they would just go elsewhere and there was no alternative. Prices are so low, and there are no subsidies, that much of agriculture is simply unviable. Now we are importing everything in this country – potatoes from Belgium, coconuts from Malaysia, animal feed – all things that we can grow, that we don’t need to import. Neoliberalism in the countryside has done all this.’

  Cardoso’s government was more than aware of this problem, and its claim to have done something about it makes Brazil’s land problem more complex, and more interesting. Cardoso and his combative agrarian development minister, Raul Jungmann, boasted for years that they had instituted ‘the world’s biggest programme of agrarian reform’. Government figures – contested and argued over on all sides – claim that the Cardoso government, between 1994 and 2001, settled over 500,000 families on around 18 million hectares of land, much of it requisitioned from big landlords.9 It cost the government an estimated $6.5 billion. The result, according to Cardoso’s former adviser on land reform, Francisco Grazino, was ‘the largest and the worst land reform programme in the world’.10

  There are many criticisms of the government’s policy. The MST, according to Neuri, has two crucial ones. First, he says, the numbers are deeply suspect. Those 500,000 families, he tells me, are previously landless people who were granted land titles by the government – but they include many of the people settled on occupied land by the MST, and then granted titles by the government. In other words, many of the people that the government claims to have given land, were actually given land by the MST.

  ‘Some people in government,’ says Neuri, ‘used these figures to argue that the MST should not exist – that we are not needed, the government was handing out land. The opposite is true – if we had not pressured the government through our occupations, their land reform would not be happening. And much of what they say they have done has been done by the MST.’

  The wider criticism, though, is shared not just by radical reformers like the MST, but by critics on all sides of the debate. It is, simply, that giving people land, even in a halting, imperfect and far from comprehensive way, becomes almost meaningless when your economic policies make it practically impossible to survive on it. This is the government’s problem. But it is also the MST’s.

  ‘Yes,’ concedes Neuri, ‘this economic model doesn’t need land reform – it can do without it. So we help someone fight to get a piece of land, and two years later he realises it’s economically unviable and he can’t stay on it. The psychological blow to people is huge. So what can be done in the face of this system? What does land reform mean in this world – in this system? How can Cardoso talk of land for the landless when his policies remove more people from the land every year than the MST and the government combined can give land to? We need to address this confrontation of models. This is the MST’s challenge at the moment.’ He takes a deep breath, and emits a very audible sigh.

  ‘It is a very, very big challenge,’ he says, ‘but we must try and meet it. We have to keep organising the rural population to demand land reform, but we are also working with other organisations on what we call a “popular project” for Brazil. Together we are looking at this crucial question – how can we organise the country so that the basic needs of the population are met?’

  This ‘popular project’ could turn out to be a significant leap forward for the MST. First announced at their fourth national congress, in 2000, it proclaims the MST’s ambition to be a national, political force – and, effectively, its realisation that constructive land reform without wider social, political and economic change is an impossibility. It is the organisation’s biggest challenge to date.

  ‘The popular project is in its infancy,’ says Neuri, ‘but its aims are to get to the roots of the current problems, to elaborate solutions, and to advance mass organisation of people to pursue those solutions. To do this, we are allying with other popular movements, with trade unions, with progressive parts of the Church, with leading individuals and with others who wish to join. We are building a national mass movement for change.’

  As yet, there is no manifesto; but there are some stated goals, some of which the MST laid out at the 2000 congress at which the project was announced. There, 11,000 delegates from twenty-three states called for the suspension of foreign debt repayments, refocusing of the public budget on health, education and agriculture and defaulting on a recent IMF loan, given to Cardoso’s government to help it through a financial crisis, to allow Brazilians to ‘retake the reins of economic policy’. These actions, say the MST, would allow for an ambitious reworking of Brazil’s agricultural model.

  First, of course, the MST wants meaningful land reform. But, understanding that this would not be enough in itself, it looks to a refocusing of agriculture based on providing for the country’s needs before focusing on export. Family agriculture should be strengthened through guaranteed prices and rural credits, agricultural co-ops promoted to make market access easier for small farmers and government bodies dealing with rural affairs restructured. Research into agricultural technology should be shifted away from biotechnology and other such corporate fixes, towards developing technologies compatible with Brazil’s soil, landscape and family farms.

  The overall effect, runs the theory, at least, will be to stimulate a model of agriculture based on small and medium-sized farms, which will in turn stimulate national food security and poverty relief. This, says Neuri, is known as ‘food sovereignty’.

  ‘Every nation,’ he says, ‘has the right to grow food for itself, to decide how it will farm, what it will grow, what it will import and export. Food is not just another commodity, like training shoes or cars – it is part of what makes societies grow and survive. Food sovereignty is a vital principle. So, for example, agriculture should be removed from the WTO, removed from all free-trade agreements, and the people should decide their own farming models, based on their cultures and needs.’ The MST is far from alone here – food sovereignty is a concept that is increasingly promoted by farmers and activists all over the world. At the World Social Forum, a half-day conference was held on the subject, at which delegates agreed it was a principle with global application, and a human right. This, too, was evidence of the landless movement’s wider political ambitions – the MST was one of the founders of the World Social Forum.

  These are the MST’s long-term ambitions – ambitions which it hopes its popular project can build support for and ambitions which, it seems to me, demonstrate an interesting combination of practicality and strategic thinking. Wherever I have seen the MST at work, this has been the case – impressive, on-the-ground organisation, spurring its members on to think bigger, and think beyond what they have already achieved. There is a lot more to be done, but the process is under way.

  On the ground, some results are already clear. Beyond the obvious achievement of givin
g land, and a living, to millions who had nothing, the MST has, for example, instituted health-care projects across its settlements, training health agents, creating AIDS education projects and promoting medicinal herb projects like that at Itapeva. It also has an ambitious programme of popular education going on in its settlements. An initial demand that government provide schools on settlements for MST children has blossomed into a semi-autonomous education project, in which the MST trains its own teachers, and institutes mass popular education and literacy programmes for both children and adults. The systems are far from comprehensive or perfect, but the MST is making strides in forging a new type of popular education, with some government help. The MST claims that 150,000 children attend elementary classes thanks to this work, and that 1,200 MST-trained educators have taught 25,000 landless adults to read and write. The next step, they say, is the creation of an ‘MST university’.

  It is precisely such work that highlights the MST’s broader aims – aims they now hope to transfer to the national stage.

  ‘In Brazil,’ says Neuri, ‘it is quite possible for all people’s needs to be met if we can organise together and create a system that works for all. We put those needs into four big categories: land, work, housing and education, and we say that we must democratise all of these needs, and make them available to all the people. We need to democratise the land, democratise capital and democratise education. We have to tear down the fences that surround all these three things. This is a huge challenge, and we do not yet have all the answers we need. But we must organise to face it – organise families to take part in the task of transforming the model.’

  ‘Every man,’ says Osmar Brandaó, ‘should have a piece of land.’ He looks across the broad cornfield that rolls down the hill from his garden towards his pumpkin patch on the other side of the hill. The sun is coursing across the shifting yellow stalks.

  ‘A man without land is incomplete,’ he says. ‘But how you treat it determines whether it makes you happy.’ Osmar, like so many other people I have met on MST settlements, smiles a lot; he is clearly, obviously, openly content. I have seen this everywhere and it has been, for me, an eye-opening sight. Osmar is a blond, blue-eyed man in his thirties. We are sitting talking in battered cane chairs under the shade of tall trees in his garden, while his children and his manic black dog play around us. Osmar has come in from working in his beanfield to talk to me.

  ‘I don’t use poison on my land,’ explains Osmar. ‘I don’t use chemicals. Before I came here I used to, but then I started talking to the technicians from the MST and learning what it actually meant for the land. And I asked myself: do I actually want this poison washing into my rivers? Do I want my children to eat the food I am growing with chemicals or do I want to do it the natural way? So now I have gone organic.’ He says he doesn’t regret the decision.

  ‘I do find organic farming is harder work,’ he says. ‘A lot more weeding, for example. But I also find this is more worthwhile, and I spend a lot less money on buying chemicals. A lot of things change when you go organic. I am much more conscious about the land and how it works than I was when I used sprays for everything – about the micro-organisms in the soil, about the birds and creatures and human relationships with the soil. Where I used to live, people used a lot of poison – you didn’t see one bee, you didn’t see any birds singing, and a lot of my friends had health problems . . . here it is different. All of us here – we can see the results.’

  Osmar is not alone: all his neighbours in the MST settlement of Hulha Negra, in Rio Grande do Sul, not far from the border with Uruguay, farm organically. I have already been given a tour of the settlement: the co-operative farm shop; the warehouse, stacked with huge straw bales, home to a roaring threshing machine; the wide fields bounded by slippery mud roads; the packaging room, where a small group of teenagers are glueing seed packets. Other farmers have explained to me how they sell their vegetables at a new MST farmers’ market in the nearby town of Bagé; how they are learning to treat their cows with home-grown herbal medicine; how their health has improved since they gave up using pesticides. Like Osmar, they are part of a relatively new attempt within the MST to find a new type of solution to the economic – and the ecological – problems that farmers in Brazil face.

  In his low, square, concrete office, half an hour or so up the road, Artemio Parcianello is explaining why. Artemio is a seed co-ordinator for the MST’s regional seed co-operative, Cooperal. He has already shown me the vast and chaotic collection of plastic bottles crammed with every conceivable type of seed which takes up most of the space in his office, and a set of painful-looking tubey devices which, he proudly informed me, are used for inseminating cows.

  The MST settlements in the Hulha Negra region nestle in the middle of some of the best land in Brazil. All the biggest national seed companies, and many multinationals, grow seeds in the region, and when MST settlers first arrived here in the 1980s, they began growing seeds for the big companies to tide them through. But it didn’t take long for them to encounter familiar problems.

  ‘After a couple of years,’ explains Artemio, ‘we realised that the seed companies’ way of working clashed with our values – they selected certain families to work with over others, played people off against each other, discarded certain workers. This did not fit with what the MST stands for. And there were other problems. Even if we wanted to, we could not compete in the markets with our produce, and we were at the mercy of the companies.’

  Enter João Rockett. I met Rockett at his house in Bagé, before I visited Hulha Negra. He is a talkative, enthusiastic agronomist, who may yet help to transform the MST; he is the man who introduced the settlers in Hulha Negra to organic farming.

  ‘I believe the MST’s best chance is to go organic,’ he said. ‘There is a growing market for it, it is inexpensive, it is healthier, and it allows them to have control over their own production that the seed companies will not allow. But they are slow. Many people on many settlements want to go organic. The leadership, though, is slower. They are being pushed by the people on the ground. Many people in the top levels of the MST are old political warriors. There is something of a division between some of the people in head office and those on the ground. They think that land reform and political change, nationally, is more important than sustainable agriculture. But there is no contradiction. And the interesting thing is that the young people are a lot more interested in organic farming than many of the older ones, and the settlements are pushing the leadership towards it. So I think things will change.’

  What João and Artemio both agree on is that going organic could, potentially, solve a number of problems for the MST. First, it provides them with a unique product to sell – a niche market, as an economist would call it. They can never compete with the multinational corporations in terms of volume, technology, cheap labour or sheer muscle; maybe, instead, they can produce what people increasingly want: organic seeds and organic food. This economic solution is also an ecological solution; one which rejuvenates the environment and people’s health, and costs a lot less in inputs for farmers. Agro-ecologia, as it is known, could provide a decentralised, ecological and non-corporate alternative model for many of Brazil’s farmers.

  The MST’s seed company, Cooperal, broke its contract with the big multinationals a few years ago, Artemio tells me, and instead set up a deal with a new company that the MST had set up and developed – Bionatur. Bionatur is an organic seed company, created, owned and controlled by the MST. It produces organic seeds grown by settlers, and sells them to the world’s growing legion of organic farmers. When Rockett helped set up Bionatur, twelve farmers began by growing a few carrots and onions, as an experiment. Today, over fifty families grow more than twenty seed varieties, which are sold nationally and internationally.11 And the project is growing.

  There is another side, too, to the MST’s ecological progress at Hulha Negra. Many of the people in Artemio’s office wear caps or T-shirts with ‘No tr
ansgenics’ and ‘I am not a lab rat’ printed on them. Like so many others around the world, MST activists are increasingly engaged in a campaign against genetically modified foods. Since 1999, the Brazilian supreme court has maintained a ban on the growing of GM foods in Brazil, pending studies into their safety – a ban that the Cardoso government, lobbied hard by Monsanto and other biotechnology companies, long wanted overturned. Ironically for the government, the ban has actually been rather good for Brazil, even in conventional economic terms. Brazil is the world’s second-biggest soya exporter, and since the first and third biggest – the USA and Argentina – both grow GM soya, Brazil has been able to cater for growing European and world demand for non-GM food. Its share of the world’s soya trade has increased from 24 per cent to 36 per cent since the ban.12

  For the MST – which, with Greenpeace and other environmentalists, has taken part in the destruction of GM crops – the main concern is, again, corporate control. Quite apart from the possible health and environmental dangers of GM crops, they are, as any farmer can tell you, a key means by which corporations can gain control over farmers – selling them GM ‘packages’ of seeds and pesticides which they will need to buy every year, creating dependency and using seeds, in Artemio’s words, as ‘a means of controlling farmers’. It is yet another reason that many MST farmers are keen on going organic; and it is something else that connects them to a global movement within which ecological and economic concerns are intertwined.

  Just before I left Hulha Negra I had been sitting under a shady tree with an old farmer called Natalino. He was lean, tanned and bearded, with a cataract in one eye. We were sipping maté, a Brazilian national drink, from the hollowed-out gourds that are used to contain it. Natalino was telling me how much happier he was here than before he arrived, telling me how he milked his cows, what he grew, how he was learning to read and what his hopes were for the future. As he did so, he used a word I had heard from many lips recently: ‘contentment’. Contentment, said Natalino, was what he had gained since he had occupied this land.