culturas da minha terra*: March 2014

Lutar! Construir Reforma Agraria Popular

Notes from the 6^th National Congress of Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST)

For sociocultural anthropologists, familiar with the historical roots of agriculture and its entanglements with social stratification, disease, war, and state-making projects (see Scott 2009)— perhaps the notion of uniting sedentary family farming with a project of socialist liberation may seem a little strange, or impossible.

A short video I made of the march. Where some 16,000+ participants formed 3 kilometer-long single file lines to demand the people's agrarian reform (explained below).

Beyond this, for those of us familiar with histories of agrarian reform policies undertaken in the Americas, Asia, and Eastern Europe in particular, such political experiments warn us that state-led land redistribution may not always entail socially progressive motives or outcomes. Yet Latin America’s largest and most organized social movement, the MST, is asking us to reconsider the potentialities of agrarian reform—in a form that differs from such “classic” (or bourgeoisie) programs that utilized land redistribution to generate surpluses for capitalist industrial development, while providing land for the reproduction of the peasantry, inserted into the market as a source of cheap food for urban populations. This functional dualism has been discussed in length by de Janvry, for example.

minas gerais

While the radical actions of the Brazilian peasantry transformed the struggle for land redistribution into one of a struggle for work, dignity, and decent employment—a more equal society, assaults on family farming, involved in the neoliberalization of the nation’s agriculture, have created new and more difficult conditions of struggle for peasant families. The neoliberal offensive, as the MST states, was consolidated under FHC’s government in the 2000s, which implemented a new model of rural development—devoted to the external market. Today, such a model of capitalist agriculture is aligned with, and indebted to, international financial capital (largely due to high input prices and monocultural production).

Carol, Sleepover Morning 1

Mistica, MST PR, DAY 1

Waking up with Denilson and friends, Morning 1

Anderson, Dancing Forró, Night 1

As a result, the movement’s newest platform, celebrated and discussed in February of 2014’s National Congress is called “The People’s Agrarian Reform,” has been designed to address the conditions and reality of agriculture today, dominated by the project of capital: agribusiness. Promoting basic structural changes in the use of natural resources, which organize productive relations in the countryside, is a project that contests the forces of capital. Such changes, the movement stresses, would promote a snowball effect—producing a more just, egalitarian, and fraternal society.
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Artistic depiction of agribiz

Mistica, MST-PR, Day 1

Thus, as spelled out in their pamphlet, distributed to all participants in the 2014 Congress, the MST dreams of the implementation of a program that addresses a spectrum of demands—from land and water access, the organization of farming, technological and distributional mechanisms, a new type of rural industrialization, farming policies, autonomous rural educational programs, the development of adequate infrastructure in rural communities (particularly in terms of energy, transport, and healthcare), and finally, and here is the kicker—all of such changes are predicated on fundamental transformations in the nature of the bourgeois state.

Their dreams

Audience at Plenarias

1) Land: the democratization of land access, the goods of nature, and the means of agrarian production to all peasants; guarantee that land and the goods of nature are used for social, economic, and cultural purposes—specifically tailored to the needs and politics of peasant communities, as well as the Brazilian population; guarantee the right of all workers to land to live and work; guarantee the right of all indigenous, quilombolas, traditional communities, fishermen, river-people the use lands; prioritize the expropriation of the largest farms, especially those under foreign control and of the secondary and terciary sectors (industries, banks, commerce); expropriate all properties immediately that do not fulfill their social function, based on the definitions in the constitution; establish a maximum limit on agrarian property ownership; eliminate the renting of agrarian lands; create favorable conditions for encamped families to access land (eliminate bureaucratic hurdles); expropriate all properties with slave labor, drug trafficking, and contraband markets—these should be used for agrarian reform; also, include the public lands that have been falsely claimed and occupied by farmers and businesses; pressure the government to consult all families affected by public works projects; ensure all people in settlements get inheritance rights to land, including women—and these cannot be sold; mineral activities should not be developed within agrarian reform settlements—mines should benefit all of society.

Mística, MST-PR Day 1

Aline e Parceiro, Dancing Forró-zão, Night 1

2) Water: To fight against the commodification of water, including dams, hydroelectric projects, and so forth; protection of fresh water aquifiers; adequate water supplies in all rural and urban communities; the development of projects to assist people in times of drought; capture rainwater for daily use, farming, communities, and agroindustries.

Artesanatos, MST-Amazonica

Anderson, MST-SP, Plenarias, Day 2

3) In terms of the organization of agricultural production, they seek to: prioritize food sovereignty and production for the domestic market—with pesticide-free and GMO-free forms of farming; organize agroindustries (small scale operations, for packaging and food processing) proximate to peasant-controlled areas; organize cooperative forms of marketing—drawing from traditional and novel rural practices (mutual aid, community organizations, associations, cooperatives, public and socially-oriented businesses); develop forms of energetic sovereignty in all rural communities in Brazil, based in renewable sources (solar, water, wind); pressure the state to provide and distribute energy to the rural population; implement irrigation programs accessible to all peasants for the production of food; and finally, the State should guarantee access to CONAB for the purchase of all peasant products.

Janaina,MST-SP, who doesn't dance, Night 1

No sleep, 2 days... The anthropologist and Fi, MST-SP/VH2

4) A new technological matrix that changes the mode of production and distribution of the riches of agriculture. There is a need for the government to incentivize agroecological techniques and knowledge; provide technology and tools to peasants in accordance with regional realities and environmental preservation; develop (through the state), programs to preserve seeds of Brazilian foods, ensuring food sovereignty; develop a national reforestry plan, with native trees, fruits, and so forth—especially in areas degreaded by agribusiness; fight against private intellectual property—especially in terms of seeds, animals, natural resources, biodiversity, and productive systems; urge the state to fight against the production and commercialization of pesticides and GMOs.

MST-PR Mistica, Day 1

5) Industrialization. The People’s Agrarian Reform Program should be an instrument to bring industrialization to the interior of the country, in order to: promote equal development between regions; create technically qualified employment in the countryside; generate increased incomes for peasants; eliminate socioeconomic inequalities between city and country populations; strengthen and incentivize cooperative production between peasants. Beyond this, there is a need to develop more agroindustries, to guarantee prices, warehouses, and distribution of products of peasant foods. They seek to create lines of credits and financing, with less bureaucracy, in order to industrialize peasant production specifically. Finally, the create centers of research, with exchange programs, to develop activities of agroindustries and environmental preservation.

6) Agricultural Policies. The state has a key role in each of the objectives here, and must be pressured to: guarantee prices for family farmers, technical assistance, rural security, storage, rural credits, and so on, as well as certify organics and incentivize agroecological peasant production. The state should also increase its funding for agroecological training programs throughout the nation. Finally, the peasants should be active participants in the formulation of agrarian policies.

7) Rural education. Education is a fundamental right of all people, and should be tailored to reflect where they live, in conjunction with human and social needs. Education access is a basic foundation of the people’s agrarian reform—especially for rural people. This education should be related to various forms of knowledge and cultural heritage, formation for work and for political participation, a way to produce and to organize, and to learn to eat in a healthy way, also it should instill the practice of humanist and socialist values that we defend.

We struggle for public schools that are free—and satisfy the needs of all workers in the country and the city, with sufficient material conditions to satisfy the educational objectives. At the same time, we struggle against the pedagogy of the bourgeois state—which subjects all to its educational forms.

Autonomous education will allow us to: a) strengthen our connection between schools, in settlements and encampments, to the MST; b) debate and create new demands for the construction of the people’s agrarian reform.

3RD NATIONAL GATHERING OF SEM TERRA YOUTH, NIGHT 1

Our plan of public political projects in rural education is our priority in the struggle, and we prioritize: 1) literacy campaigns for all youth and adults in the countryside, 2) universalize access to public basic education, free, and high quality in all agrarian reform areas, with access to adequate transformation, good infrastructure in schools (like libraries, laboratories, sports facilities, internet access, equipments for agrarian experiments, materials to learn languages, art supplies); access to special education in the countryside; courses specifically geared to train rural school teachers, guaranteed 40 hour work weeks in one school, and adequate transport and living conditions; ongoing courses and training for educators. 3) To increase the access of youth and adult peasants to college and post-graduate study in numerous disciplines, and guaranteeing, when necessary access to the regime of alternancia, with housing arrangements and meals, provided by public resources. The networks of federal public post-secondary education should be expanded in agrarian reform regions. 4) To implement agroecological-research/implementation programs in agrarian reform settlements; 5) promote scholarships for peasant youth to have international exchange programs, with experiences in peasant production and agroecology; 6) support of networks of researches that prioritize investigations in agrarian reform areas.

Diego Zamura gettin' down.

8) Development of social infrastructure rural and peasant communities. Rural communities should have adequate living conditions (including water, access to alternative energy, transport, and decent roads). Rural communities need access to libraries, informatic services, cultural spaces, and leisure—including sports teams, culture, arts, and so forth. The rural population needs decent roads, and access to public health—free and of decent quality. In agrarian reform settlements, the people need health centers and to cultivate medicinal herbs. There is a need to democratize the means of communication, and create conditions so that the people have community radios in settlements, and perhaps television, the press, and so forth.

Gritos de Ordem, Youth Meeting

9. The need to change the nature of the State in its administrative structure. To have the people’s agrarian reform, there needs to be serious changes in the form of organization and functioning of the bourgeois state, which is in nature, antidemocratic. It bureaucratic structure impedes public policies that are favorable to the working classes in general and the advance of our conquests to benefit the peasants in the countryside (the large majority of the rural population). We can only advance if we confront and change the nature of the bourgeois state.

Luana, National Collective of Youth, MST-MS

At the same time, we realize that struggles and social pressures for the democratization of services, governmental agencies responsible for funding, and the functioning of all spheres of the federal, state, and city governments, as well as the judicial, executive, and legislative powers.

Transforming the way that the use of natural resources and Brazilian agriculture is only possible if there is an alliance between a people’s government, that controls the state and serves the majority, with the vigorous movement of the masses, that place the workers as political subjects, in the creation of these changes.

Only through this, could there be a possibility for a state and government that would favor a people’s agrarian reform, organized in villages, communities, groups, or agrovilas—according to regional cultures.

FOR MORE PHOTOS, VIDEOS, AND A GLIMPSE OF THE CONGRESS, SEE BELOW, OTHERWISE.... For the rest, you'll have to wait for the dissertation. ;) STAY TUNED....