Chapter 5 Learning from the international land reform experience
3 Country reviews
3.1 Brazil
3.1.3 Social movements
While the Brazilian State has its own land reform machinery and institutional arrangements in place, a key impetus for land reform and requisite settlement support has come from the rural social movements. Pressure from social movements of the landless has prompted the State to accelerate its land reform programme since the early 1990s. The emergence and social action of large, militant social movements of the landless has impacted directly on the content and pace of land reform and the nature of support provided to beneficiaries.

Two key rural worker organisations stand out among the social movements that are attempting to democratise land and to improve rural working and living conditions: MST, founded in 1985, and Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura (National Confederation of Agricultural Workers) (CONTAG). Other organisations that focus on the needs of the landless include Movimento de Luta pela Terra (Struggle for Land Movement) (MLT), and Comissão Pastoral da Terra (Pastoral Land Commission) (CPT), which is a unit of the Catholic Church with ties to the National Conference of the Bishops of Brazil.

MST's strategy is to occupy unused land and force the State to expropriate it in terms of the ‘social function' clause of the Constitution. Between 1995 and 1999, largely as a result of the pressure from rural organisations, the federal government provided over 8 million hectares of land to 370 000 families.

According to Schwartzman (2000:2–3, cited in Kenfield, undated), between 1995 and 1998 the Brazilian government settled more landless families on expropriated land than it had in the previous 30 years, an effort that would not have been possible without ‘the continual, large-scale public pressure applied by the MST strategy of land occupations'.

The figures indicate that over half of the settlements in Brazil received land as a direct result of social pressure... This suggests that the mobilization of the rural and urban poor in the pursuit of land reform is a fundamental determinant of success (Wolford 2001:311, quoted in Kenfield, undated).



Not only has the mobilisation of the MST quickened the pace of land reform in Brazil, it has allowed the rural poor to articulate and implement their vision of rural life on the land once they have acquired it, and to demand and access the necessary support during the post-acquisition phase (Kenfield, undated). MST's campaign has brought pressure on the State to invest significant investments in financing land expropriation and PSS, delivered through the State land reform agency Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (INCRA).

Because the MST views agrarian reform in a multidimensional way, post-acquisition support that is directed at agricultural production is viewed not simply in terms of creating economic efficiency and potential in the global marketplace, but in terms of the production of healthy food for poor, rural Brazilians. Aspects such as food security, food sovereignty and how these relate to individual sovereignty, social justice, local economies and the protection of local environments define how the MST decides on its agricultural production systems (Kenfield, undated). This approach to agrarian reform thus brings with it a particular approach to the nature, scope and content of support programmes associated with land reform.