Da Silva was supposed to be a success story–part of what President Fernando Henrique Cardoso calls a “veritable peaceful revolution in the countryside.” In one of the most ambitious land-reform programs ever, Brasilia has parceled out 18 million hectares to 542,000 families (nearly 2 million people). Since 1995 Cardoso has settled more people on more land than all the monarchs, populists and generals in Brazil’s 500-year history. The rapid spread of settlements has given homes to the homeless and restored a modicum of justice and peace in places known for neither. And yet, Cardoso had grander designs. The peasants were supposed to become modern family farmers. Sowing the countryside with their crops and their courage, they were to be transformed into “full socioeconomic citizens,” breathing new life into Brazilian democracy. Only they haven’t. Thousands of poor and failing peasants have abandoned their plots while most of the rest are barely hanging on. “Brazil has produced the largest and the worst land-reform program in the world,” says Francisco Graziano, once Cardoso’s top adviser on the issue. He’ll get no argument from Gilmar Mauro, a leader of the fiery Landless Workers Movement (MST): “The government just wants to ease social tensions by handing out land. We have been left orphans.” Half a decade and $6.5 billion later, Brazil’s grand land reform is just another sad fable of the developing world.
Across Latin America, Africa and Asia, countless peasants yearn for a plot of their own. But the struggle for land has especially fired the Latin American imagination–from the defiant peasants of Diego Rivera murals to the masked Zapatista rebels of Mexico. Owning land can make the difference between being a serf and a citizen, as Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto eloquently argues in his call for property rights for the poor. And what great nation hasn’t first brought democracy to its countryside? If ever there were a case for radical reform, it would be lopsided Brazil. Since colonial days, its boundless backlands have been a parquetry of privilege, where a handful of barons ruled over rambling estates the size of countries, while millions of peasants scratched out a living from meager patches. At last count, in 1996, around 11 percent of rural property owners controlled 68 percent of arable land.
Cardoso aimed to change that. Critics say he was shamed into reform by rising rural violence and increasing land invasions, and now takes credit for helping peasants who had already helped themselves. Winning a plot land is still a blessing to the homeless, but a mixed blessing, at best. Despite countless studies, no one can say for sure how the 4,200 or so land-reform settlements are faring, how much they produce or even how many disillusioned new landowners have quit their plots. The meager data that exist are not encouraging: partial surveys show that at least one of every four settlers nationwide gives up his plot within two years, and in some regions up to half the settlers quit.
The real miracle of Brazilian land reform may be how many remain. Transportation is unreliable in the countryside, electricity a luxury. Diseases like malaria and dengue fever are rife; only one in two families has ever seen a doctor. Some 95 percent have no running potable water. And their finances are no healthier. Brazil’s settlers owe banks and the government nearly $450 million. Less than 5 percent of settlements are financially independent.
To be fair, many settlements are stable, and a few have become models of efficiency, especially where settlers have formed cooperatives. One is Fazenda Anoni, a onetime squatter camp in southern Brazil that does a brisk business in homemade brands, such as mate tea, organically grown coffee and grass-fed beef. But Anoni is one of the exceptions. Although Brasilia waxes grandly about a hale new class of rural entrepreneurs, most settlers seem more like welfare cases. The vast majority can barely feed themselves. Their collective output doesn’t even get tallied into Brazil’s $80 billion agricultural product. If not for social-security benefits, which account for at least a fifth of rural income, many more might have left.
The settlement is a rural shantytown, where pigs patrol dirt streets flanked by open sewage ditches. Three of every 10 residents have caught dengue fever. Leprosy is prevalent. A doctor calls once every three months, “and he hurries away at the end of the day because the lines are so long,” says Eliene da Silva, a settlement leader (no relation to Acelino). The police, for obvious reasons, are not welcome, so 17 de Abril has become a lair for thieves, prostitutes and marijuana dealers. Vigilantes keep the peace. “If a bandido murders someone, we take him to the woods and kill him,” says da Silva. “We have to look after ourselves.” Only the children seem not to mind. Like little militia, they scout barefoot in the dirt, wielding toy wooden guns.
Still, the people of 17 de Abril–like settlers everywhere–speak proudly of the fruits of their labor: fields of rice, trellises heavy with black pepper vines, a teeming fish pond and a grove of 36,000 coconut palms. With a bank loan, the co-op purchased the latest in farm equipment: a brand-new rice-packaging machine, a small dairy, a manioc flour mill and a climate-controlled chicken coop. That was a year ago. The machines are still gathering dust. “We have no electricity,” says Waldomiro Costa Pereira, community treasurer. “Our projects are on hold.”
A power shortage? “Not at all,” Pereira says, pointing to the sky, traversed by thick transmission lines from the Tucurui hydroelectric station, one of Latin America’s biggest power plants. Without a transformer, the 500-volt current is useless to the households and shops below.
What little the people of 17 de Abril do have they owe in large part to the MST workers’ movement. It has become a familiar part of the Brazilian landscape: columns of men, women and children, marching in formation along a country road or gathered in an angry knot in an urban plaza. In their flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, hoisting red flags and a thicket of hoes, they make a ragtag legion, one part peasant insurgent, one part Brancaleone. In fact, the MST is a sophisticated, spin-savvy political machine. Che may be their favorite icon, but the Internet is their most powerful weapon; the MST Web site is translated into six languages.
Highly organized and disciplined as soldiers, the Movement boasts cadres nationwide. Barely a week goes by without news of MST legions mounting their tent cities on some rancher’s estate, often with the blessings of bootstrap Roman Catholic clergymen. Though the MST and the government generally butt heads in the press, they have in fact struck a kind of uneasy pact. With the peasant legions at the barricades, Cardoso has been able to parlay fear of land invasions into support for land reform, a policy Brazil’s rural elite would never have swallowed.
Today there are far more peasants in settlements than there are landless huddled under black plastic tents. But the MST has not relented. They claim to speak for 4.8 million “disinherited” Brazilians, rural and urban alike. Like a political perpetual motion machine, the militantes untiringly scour for new recruits in the city slums, at university campuses, even abroad among Brazilians who migrated to find work in Paraguay. “These days landless Brazilians are manufactured,” says Graziano.
Increasingly, experts argue that old-style land reform, based on land giveaways, is a secondary issue–or should be. What good is sending more settlers to fields where so many have failed? They point to the growing urbanization of the country: 82 percent of Brazilians live in urban areas today, compared to less than 45 percent in 1960. (Many scholars contest the official demography; by their measure 30 percent of Brazilians are still rooted in the countryside.) But whatever the numbers, many believe there is a fundamental tension between Brazil’s land reform and the demands of the country’s emerging economy. In the last three decades, Brazil has become an agricultural powerhouse. The 2001 harvest of soybeans, cotton and other plantation crops topped 100 million tons and fetched some $80 billion. Large-scale commercial farming produced that bounty, accounting for 61 percent of Brazil’s internationally traded farm goods. The economy is already brimming with struggling farmers. Most economists predict that big agribusiness will put more subsistence farmers and field hands out of work as it continues to mechanize.
Globalization is also working implacably against small landholders. In an effort to integrate with the South American economy, Brazil has toppled barriers to imported farm goods. That means consumers enjoy lower food prices, but struggling family farmers are pushed further behind agrimoguls who can make up for cheaper prices by selling greater quantity. “We add spoonfuls of people to the countryside, while the economic policies take them away by shovel,” says Gilmar Mauro of the MST.
Not long ago, the most bullish Brazilians predicted that the markets would sop up the “excess” labor, as former farmhands flowed into the city to build factories, homes and office towers. Then along came the international debt crisis of the 1980s, Latin America’s Lost Decade, followed by the volatile, free-booting capitalism of the 1990s. Brazil simply stalled out. The MST camps are full of field hands, but also ex-bricklayers, struggling merchants, street vendors and part-time supermarket clerks.
Such a grim tableau suggests land reform is more poverty relief than sound economics. Of course, for desperate peasants any help is welcome. “Rural poverty is unbelievable, and we have to do something,” says Luiz Hafers, who heads the Brazilian Rural Society, a planters association. “Land reform shouldn’t be measured by an economic yardstick.” But using land to pay a social debt may have a price as well. Half a century ago, success in agriculture meant owning a generous spread and having many sons with strong backs to work it. No longer. “Brazil is a market economy. We need a reliable supply of food from efficient farmers who know agronomy and use biotechnology,” says Fernando Homem de Mello, an agricultural economist at the University of So Paulo. “If you break up productive land and hand it out for land reform we could see a collapse in food supply.”
The riddles of the contemporary countryside have not been lost on Brasilia. But the Cardoso government is unrelenting. Officials point to a bumper crop of recent scholarship that says family farms make far more efficient use of their paltry government farm credits than do the privileged men in their air-cooled harvesters. With proper guidance and a friendly hand, the true believers insist, this “orphaned” class of laborers can not only rise from misery, but become agents of true democracy.
Perhaps. No one denies Brazil has a huge social debt to the victims of the new farm economy, the countless idled workers who need a wage, a roof, job training and a chance to start over. But true land reform requires much more than the dole and deeds. It means targeting aid to those able, but struggling, farmers, large or small, who still have a chance to compete in the modern world–through rural extension services, prudent farm credits, access to biotech and better roads and schools. A good deal is at stake. Transforming the countryside could yet mean transforming Brazil itself. “The absence of [a] class of intelligent small landowners,” British historian James Bryce once declared, “is a grave misfortune for South and Central America.” Bryce was writing in 1912. He could have been writing today.
