The lack of an effective agrarian reform policy feeds the violence in Brazil. What is the difference between the landowner who ordered the killing of landless peasants in Felisburgo, Minas Gerais, and those who ordered the killing of the employees of the Ministry of Labor in Unai?  What is the difference between the mill owners in Sao Paulo who, through their administrators, daily work rural laborers to death cutting sugarcane, and members of the “consortium” who paid to have Sister Dorothy Stang killed? In other words, what is the difference between the so-called “modern agribusiness” and the old rural oligarchy?

Agrarian Policy in the Lula Government: the Hollowing of Agrarian Reform

Jose Juliano de Carvalho Filho*

“The program of the government incorporates broad, massive, quality agrarian reform as a fundamental part  of a new project of national development....” 1

The epigraph above was taken from the document “Program of Sustainable Development for a Dignified Life in the Countryside” official text of Lula's government program, introduced to the nation in the 2006 elections. 

When the 2003 government mandate was nearing completion, the president promised “broad, massive, quality agrarian reform”.  Do the facts warrant this promise?  What reforms have taken place during the period?  As for rural violence - has anything changed?

The first mandate of the Lula government was marked by the stripping of the proposal and of the conception of agrarian reform.  An examination of the content of the principal documents on the subject shows that the intention to implement a process of change in the countryside has dwindled to insignificance. 

There is no better support for this assertion than the word of the organized rural workers. 

After three years of the beginning of Lula`s administration, on March 6, 2006, in the city of Porto Alegre, six organizations connected with the struggle of the peasants for Agrarian reform2 - MPA, MST, MAB, MMC, CPT and ABRA – put out the text “Record of the Lula Government on Peasant Agriculture and Agrarian Reform in  Brazil”.

The document presented a “brief description of the many and varied measures that were taken throughout Lula administration”.  It describes 39 of these, of which ten were considered gains for peasant agriculture and agrarian reform, and 29 as defeats for peasants.  The measures considered positive were the following:

1. Implantation of rural security benefits, which has been extended also to cover rural workers and to guarantee the income of small farmers, in case of losses due to natural causes.  The document recognizes that the coverage is still partial, since farmers must contract a bank loan to access the security program.  As a result, of the five million peasant families, only 1.2 million would be able to access the program. 
2. Increase in the volume of rural credit made available to small farmers – from three billion to eight billion reais per year.
3. The “Light for All” program, the aim of which is to bring electrical energy in subsidized form to almost all families living in rural areas.  The document considers that only families living in the extreme north of the country have not been reached.
4. Amplification of the construction program and housing improvement for farmers.
5. Change in attitude toward peasant struggles.  The federal government has not repressed the social movements, although repression continues on the part of various states, through their military police. However, in the case of indigenous movements, the document maintains that the central government has not had the same attitude.  The Federal Police have repressed indigenous protests in several states. 
6. Amplification of resources for education programs in the countryside.
7. Demarcation of the indigenous area of Raposa Serra do Sol, in Roraima state.
8. Implantation of the biodiesel program which projects the addition of 2% vegetable-based oil to diesel oil with the participation of peasant farming in the production of this fuel.
9. Increased resources for technical assistance in the settlements.  In this respect, the partners highlight that this service is neither universal nor public, insofar as it prioritizes accords with entities rather than democratizing the public system of technical assistance and rural extension.
10. Support, although still weak and short of what is needed, for the program of cistern installation (household water capture) in the semi-arid northeast.

As is clear, aside from the change of attitude toward peasant struggles, the other provisions – notwithstanding their importance – are disjointed.  As such, they do not signify formalization of the agrarian reform foreseen in the official documents and expected by the social movements. 

The above conclusion is corroborated by an examination of the measures – or lack of measures – which the peasant organizations consider to be defeats.  Highlighting a few of these is sufficient to show the narrowing and debilitation of effective agrarian reform.  By this we mean the public actions are fundamental for unlocking a process of agrarian reform capable of facing 'agribusiness' – a euphemism for the current phase of capitalism in the countryside, marked by an increase in the level of exploitation of labor, through exclusion, through violence, through land concentration, and through environmental degradation.

The points which follow speak for themselves: lack of attention to a commitment to prioritize settlement of families involved in encampments; failure to update the indices used to evaluate the productivity of properties for expropriation; maintenance of World Bank policies – Land Bank or land credit programs, the basis of the so-called 'market-led agrarian reform'; failure of the government’s parliamentary base to mobilize in order to approve the law which expropriates farms that use slave labor; lack of mobilization by the same parliamentary base to impede the Congressional Committee of Inquiry on Land Issues (CPMI) and the defeat of the reporter's document, with the consequent approval of a separate report which exclusively served the interests of the rural elite – among other absurdities, this report considers the occupation of lands as an act of terrorism; lack of persistence in pressuring the judiciary system on the judgment and punishment of those responsible for various rural massacres, such as Corumbiara (1995), Carajás (1996), and Felisburgo (2004); liberalization of the planting and commercialization of genetically modified soybean; lack of government, parliamentary and administrative initiative to remove the laws and measures of previous governments that hinder the agrarian reform process; the government initiative proposing legislation to permit the leasing of national forests – in public areas – for exploitation by lumber companies; and “non-implementation of a full program of agrarian reform”.

This last point summarizes the character of the agrarian policy of the Lula government.  The intent to unlock a process of structural change in favor of excluded populations has been abandoned. 

The government’s political performance points in the same direction, and various studies show this.  The document “A review of the agrarian reform program of the Lula government: subsidies for the internal debate of the Workers' Party”, the texts of Ariovaldo Umbelino de Oliveira, “The non-agrarian reform of MDA/INCRA in the Lula government”, and of Bernando Mancano Fernandes, “From cloning to autophagy: the dilemma of agrarian reform in Brazil”; among others, prove that the goals were not reached and that the figures of settled families were divulged in a misleading (at best) way.  The Mancano article, based on information from the “Data Luta” Data Bank, affirms that in the first three years of the government, only 25% of families were settled on appropriated lands.  Besides this, the documents inform that the settlements occurred principally on public land and in the Amazon region.  The agrarian policy put into practice has not inconvenienced the large landowners, and has even benefited agribusiness.

The comparative analysis of the principal government documents on agrarian reform, from the previous presidential campaign platform - “Dignified life in the Countryside”, through the “Proposal for National Agrarian Reform Plan II” and the actual “National Agrarian Reform Plan II”, to the 2006 election campaign documents - “Program of Sustainable Rural Development for a Dignified Life in the Countryside”, in its two versions, preliminary3 and official – shows the change in character of the reform proposal: from structural to merely compensatory like the “reforms” of the previous governments.  Today, the government no longer speaks – or speaks only vaguely – about the various relevant issues highlighted in previous documents. 

Settlement targets have not been set.4  The reformed area is not considered to be strategic for the implantation of agrarian reform5 - the settlements continue to be implemented in a fragmented form.  It is not affirmed that appropriation for agrarian reform purposes constitutes the principal instrument for implanting agrarian policy – instead, this instrument is seen as an auxiliary to buying and selling.6  An emphasis remains on programs of land credit (along the lines of the Land Bank).  There is no clarity on the hindrance of the continued scandalous regularization of land-grabbing in the northern region for agribusiness.  The only promise which was clear in the current campaign document, in its preliminary version, referred to the very necessary updating of the indices of productivity.  In the official version, this simply disappeared.

This initiative is of fundamental importance for obtaining land for Reform and confronting the interests of landowners and/or of agribusiness.  In place of the express commitment in the preliminary version to “update the income indices which inform the processes of appropriation, making them compatible with the new platforms of productivity reached in recent decades”,7 the official version contains the vague commitment to implement “a new legal and institutional framework”.8   

Further, the official document for 2006 draws out many things about family agriculture, as well agriculture in general, yet, as already seen, very little about agrarian reform.  It imitates the Alckmin candidacy.9  Neither program has a structural character.

The lack of an effective agrarian reform policy feeds the violence in Brazil. Oliveira expressed this well: “What is the difference between the landowner who ordered the killing of landless peasants in Felisburgo, Minas Gerais, and those who ordered the killing of the employees of the Ministry of Labor in Unai?  What is the difference between the mill owners in Sao Paulo who, through their administrators, daily work rural laborers to death cutting sugarcane, and members of the “consortium” who paid to have Sister Dorothy Stang killed? In other words, what is the difference between the so-called “modern agribusiness” and the old rural oligarchy? They are two sides of the same coin.  The de facto civil war taking place in legal Amazonia – especially in Pará – between landless squatters and land-grabbers with their gunmen is an example of this double-sidedness.12 

The condemnation of peasant women who defied the strong eucalyptus company Aracruz Celulose also characterizes this period. The legal system treated them, along with the MST and the Via Campesina, as criminals.  On the other hand, it benefits the criminal practices of agribusiness.  As Vieira warns, the Judiciary, in this and other issues, practices the “exercise of control over the impoverished sectors of society...in the struggle for land, for the millions of rural landless workers the door of the Judiciary displays the same phrase as the door of Dante Alighieri's Inferno: Renounce all hope, ye who enter here.”13

The agrarian reform proposal with potential to change the rural structures and reverse the situation of injustice was emptied out with the passing of time.  Past events and the current vague commitments do not warrant the claim of “broad, massive, quality agrarian reform”.  It is essential to place this again as a national priority, whatever the result of the elections.14