A poster of President Lula here at Global Exchange reads, "You can be sure of one thing, that if I am ever elected President, I will redistribute so much land, that you won't know even what to do with it all." The MST played a huge role in Lula's election to the presidency, because he had promised to give access to land for 430,000 families by the end of his term in 2006. The results of Lula's government for landless peasants has not just been disappointing, it has been crushing. Under the current administration, only 60 thousand families have been settled - that's less families than were settled under the previous neoliberal government. At that rate, it would take about 150 years to ensure land for all in Brazil. Lula's government has frozen the land reform budget in order to save money that will be used to pay the foreign debt.
Coming out of a more than 20-year dictatorship in 1985, Brazilian hopes for economic growth under democratic governments have been disappointed. The largest country in South America suffers from a gigantic debt that has made policymakers subject to economic guidelines set by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, including privatization of essential services, deregulation of private industry, an emphasis on production for export rather than domestic consumption. Finally, with the 2002 election of Lula, a metalworker from a working-class background and strong ties to social movements, the vast majority of Brazilians believed that democracy would finally be combined with sensible national economic policies, and the poor could hope for a better future. But Lula has pinned his hopes on agribusiness to export Brazil's way out of debt. According to the Ministry of Agricultural Development in Brazil, the government-run Bank of Brazil destined over $6 billion in supports for agribusiness in 2003. The same year, 73 landless peasants were killed in incidents linked to land struggles with agribusiness. According to the Pastoral Land Commission's Antonio Canuto, "[i]t's important to demystify the agribusiness industry, because its growth is not linked to the national development, as many say; it's linked to the exploitation of workers." full: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0520-20.htm --- From the article "Promised Land" by Glenn Cheney in the June 2013 Harper's: A few people have come to understand that the forest must be maintained or replanted, but the rest think these idealists are communists and pot smokers. Ranchers routinely cut down every single tree on an allotment, even though leaving a few for shade would increase the growth of grass and thus the production of beef. It seems they actually hate trees. When the then mayor of Terra Nova, Manoel Freitas, took me to his 1,850-acre ranch, which was covered in forest just a decade ago, he expressed pride in how thoroughly he had stripped away the original vegetation. The property was now treeless, except for a narrow band along a stream. Freitas gave me a wicked, ironic laugh and said, “I am a destroyer!” This economy, based on theft from nature, is among the most debased forms of capitalism. Not much capital is involved. A ranch, for example, requires little more than a herd and some fencing. And that investment, and the return on it, flow directly out of the region. Here’s how it works. It takes about two and a half acres of grass to feed one head of cattle. A pasture of 25,000 acres yields a lot of beef. But the beef gets exported and the profits go to a wealthy absentee squatter. The whole business employs only a handful of locals. During the dry season— which used to be June and July, but now extends from May through October—the ranchers burn the fields to put nutrients back into the soil. But the nutrient cycle, too, is subject to diminishing returns, and eventually the grass stops growing. As vegetation disappears, the streams and springs dry up. When this process can wring nothing more from the land, the rich will leave and the meek will inherit their dry and desolate parcels. This scenario isn’t some distant, dystopian nightmare. It’s already happening. The agronomist Epifânia Rita Vuaden gives the region another five or ten years. “The dime has dropped,” she says. “Terra Nova has already lost fifty-six springs. Some areas cannot be farmed anymore, and people have just abandoned their land. It’s dead.” She knows twenty-year-olds who have never seen a forest. When their parents were that age, there was nothing here but forest. In collaboration with Sister Leonora and a number of social organizations, Vuaden launched a project to begin reforesting the area. In 2010, landowners were obliged to keep 80 percent of their property as natural, native forest. Virtually no one in Mato Grosso obeyed the regulation, and to be fair, it was unrealistic to expect them to do so. If the farmers of the American Midwest let 80 percent of their land revert to its natural ecosystem, the United States wouldn’t have much of a breadbasket. Vuaden says that two and a half acres of forest produces more economic benefit—nuts, fruits, wood— than the single cow that requires that same land for grazing. But while just a handful of people can oversee thousands of acres of pasture, harvesting the forest is more labor-intensive. An absentee landlord in São Paulo can’t easily direct such an operation from afar. It’s a job for a family farmer with 250 acres of land—a scale that would allow farmers to maintain 80 percent as forest, with the rest dedicated to a garden, a small field for cash crops, and a couple of dairy cows. A 125,000-acre ranch, which destroys the region’s environment without returning a penny to its inhabitants, could instead support 500 family farms. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
