Popular Agrarian Reform

Abstract

In almost three decades of land struggle from 915,000 to 1.3 m illion families (depending on whose statistics one chooses to believe) have been settled or resettled on the land—no mean feat. In addition, notwithstanding the lack of access to capital and modern technology and the significant structural and political constraints placed on small-scale peasant production based on family labor, many farms on these settlements have been brought into production. Lifting many, if not most, resettled families out of poverty and converting many of them (mainly via cooperativism) into productive members of Brazilian society, vastly improving the social condition of the rural population. However, the MST has always been more than a movement to reconnect rural landless workers or peasants to the land. From the beginning it sought to advance a new and specific type of agrarian reform, based on a new economic model and transformative social change—another system, a new world, a better form of society in which the fruits of collective cooperative activity are equitably shared and not appropriated for the benefit and enrichment of the powerful few.