Summer 2002 Research Report Raquel Moreno-Peñaranda Energy and Resources Group "The Brazilian Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the Environment"

 

The Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) is the largest social movement in Latin America and certainly one of the most successful grassroots movements in the world. Brazil is a country mired by an overly distorted land distribution pattern in which less than 3% of the population owns two-thirds of the arable land. While 90% of Brazil’s farmland lies idle, used for ranching, tax write-offs, or to produce crops exclusively for export, 25 million landless peasants struggle to survive by working in temporary agricultural jobs. Given the existing gap between the wealthy and the poor rural masses, Brazil is one of today’s most unjust countries worldwide.

The MST booth at I Encounter of Ecological Agriculture in Rio Grande do Sul.

The MST originated in 1985 as a response to these inequalities. Although the Brazilian constitution determines that unproductive land can be expropriated for agrarian reform, the unwillingness of the government to comply with this legislation has forced hundreds of thousands of landless peasants to set up camps on idle property as a means of negotiating its expropriation. Over the last fifteen years the movement has secured land titles for more than 250,000 families, although approximately 80,000 families are still in encampments throughout Brazil awaiting government recognition.

Environmental issues constitute a relatively new area within the debate surrounding the MST in Brazil. Throughout the nineties the MST’s struggle has been challenged by politically motivated arguments claiming that the settlements are a main cause of environmental degradation. The Movement interprets these criticisms as an attack from those social sectors that are politically opposed to the MST’s struggle for land. The MST holds that such groups attempt to illegitimate the MST’s cause by means of positioning the public opinion against the landless’ agricultural practices, thereby appealing to the growing environmental awareness of the citizens.

While it is true that the initial efforts of the MST’s struggle focused on the transfer of idle land into the hands of the landless, over time, environmental issues had come to the forefront of its agenda. The logic of the “green revolution agriculture” imposed by the neo-liberal model (hybrid seeds, agrochemicals, intense mechanization, monoculture for export and lately transgenic seeds) is pointed out by the MST as being the actual cause of the extreme landlessness found in Brazil. The unequal land distribution pattern, plus the unsustainable agricultural practices, has caused widespread environmental degradation and massive migration to urban areas. As an alternative, the MST proposes a new agricultural model for the encampments that evaluates economic, sociopolitical and environmental sustainability. Within this socio-environmental approach, human beings and their necessities (indeed deeply related to nature) are the center of the environmental debate.

My research on MST looks at the ways in which issues like poverty, development, and the environment interrelate to shape the struggle for social justice of the poor and the landless. Within the context of my pre-dissertation research I focus on two central questions: 1) What are the actual agro-environmental practices within the MST’s settlements and 2) How and why have environmental issues recently been incorporated into the MST’s discourse on agrarian reform?

In relation to these questions, my central hypothesis is that the element of environmentalism recently integrated into the MST’s discourse is a response to the external critiques coming from those Brazilian political sectors opposed to the movement’s cause. However, I would argue that the nature of its environmentalism originates from the MST’s own socioeconomic model, in which the relationship between people and nature is considered from a socio-environmental perspective.

During my summer fieldwork I studied settlements in three very different regions of Brazil: the south, the northeast and the Amazon. In all the regions I explored the intricate interaction between social, economic, political, cultural and ecological factors in order to characterize the MST’s environmentalism. In order to address the first research question, I studied in situ the agro-environmental projects in the settlements, through participant observation and unstructured interviews. I used qualitative agro-ecological indicators as a way to assess the environmental component of those projects. In order to answer the second question, I also used participant observation, semi-structured interviews with MST community leaders and key founders, as well as political leaders external to the MST. I also conducted archival research of key foundational MST documents and critical press items regarding MST’s environmental issues.

The whole family participates in the agroecological project of their recently gained land in Rio Grande do Sul.

During the period of participant observation, I lived in one household at each settlement, participating in the family’s and in the community’s everyday activities. That involved the following activities: attendance at community meetings, support in the agricultural field, collaboration in environmental projects (e.g. campaigns against transgenic seeds and in support of organic farming), work with the environmental education projects, both in the schools and with adults in a grass-roots type of effort.

Under the MST’s socio-environmental approach, rural development is defined as a process of improvement of the material, social, cultural and spiritual conditions of the settlers through the sustainable use of the natural resources available. Therefore, human beings and their necessities are placed at the center of nature, and the settlers are the main element of both development and environmental protection. In order to achieve those goals, the Movement proposes collective use of the forests, agroecological agricultural practices, and educational programs to emphasize their socio-environmental approach. The settlements are currently addressing agroecological practices in different projects and campaigns. For example, they have created a National Collective on the Environment (Equipe do Meio Ambiente, EMA) for dealing with MST policies regarding organic agriculture. EMA elaborates papers and organizes discussions about environmental problems, identifying alternative solutions.

Additionally, the MST’s Environmental Education Program, supported in part by the Secretary for Environment, targets leaders, teachers and the young people living in the settlements. Many cooperatives are also working with the organic production of rice and coffee, and with reforestation. Arguably, the MST’s most well known activity is their campaign against the use of transgenic seeds in Brazil, and their production and commercialization of organic seeds as an alternative to the use of GMOs (genetically modified organisms). Presently, the MST is looking for a new agricultural model for the encampments that considers sustainability in its economic, social, environmental, politic and cultural implications.

The basic environmental objective for the MST is therefore the transformation of the latifundio into an extended community of settlements that represent the rebirth of human life and of nature. Accordingly, the human, social and economic development policies of the Movement specifically address environmental conservation, minimizing the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and diversifying agricultural production. Following the rationale that frames the MST’s environmental discourse, this task is a “complex and long process that could take several generations but that has to be started now so the new generations have something upon which to build”.