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Church presses for agricultural reform
Members of the Landless Workers´ Movement carried out 171 lan takeovers. Seculo Diario
José Pedro S. Martins
The government still has not fulfilled its election promises.
The Brazilian Catholic Church’s focus on the land situation and demands for agrarian reform in the country have resulted in a deterioration of relations between the Church and the administration of President Luiz Inácio da Silva (or "Lula", as he is commonly known) of the Workers’ Party (PT).
The situation has worsened after the Agrarian Development Minister, Miguel Rossetto fired the president of the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), Marcelo Resende, on Sept. 3.
In recent years INCRA’s authority had become diluted and during Resende’s eight months in the job, he had restructured it, with the goal of making it an effective tool for promoting a broad-based agrarian reform (LP, March 12, 2003).
The Catholic Church usually allied with Resende who had a good relationship with the National Conference of Bishops (CNBB) and the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT). The CPT immediately criticized the decision to dismiss Resende. In a strongly worded official message, the commission’s leaders said the firing had occurred "during the implementation of the long-awaited Second National Plan for Agrarian Reform, which may now be aborted."
According to Bishop Tomás Balduíno, president of the CPT, Resende’s view of agrarian reform came "from a constitutional standpoint, of expropriation of unproductive properties." His firing, the bishop said, represented at least a partial victory for those whose point of view is "more closely tied to the market, to the buying and leasing of lands, more individualistic and without much possibility of considering communal and cooperative models."
The National Forum for Agrarian Reform and Justice in the Countryside — which includes the main organizations working on the issue, including the CPT, the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and the Brazilian Association of Agrarian Reform — are hoping that "the president will be faithful to his campaign promise: the implementation of an agrarian reform that truly reexamines the agrarian structure in order to include an enormous mass of rural workers in the country’s socio-political process," said Balduíno.
While the MST was an old ally of Lula, and his inauguration (LP, Jan. 15, 2003) raised rural workers’ hopes for land redistribution, the organization has maintained a certain distance from the government, emphasizing its autonomy. Since the beginning of the year, members of the MST have staged 171 land takeovers in the country.
In Brazil, 26,000 landowners control 178 million hectares of land — an average of 7,000 hectares per estate — while more than 20 million rural workers have no land (LP, Oct. 30, 2000). According to a report on land-related crime released Aug. 26 by the CPT and other institutions, fewer than 50,000 landowners have estates of more than 1,000 hectares and control 50% of the country’s titled land. About 1 percent of rural landowners control 46 percent of the land. Of the approximately 400 million hectares titled as private property, only 60 million are under cultivation. The rest are fallow, underused or dedicated to livestock. According to INCRA, more than 100 million hectares of land lie fallow while there are about 4.8 million families without land in Brazil.
According to the CPT, the proposal with the strongest backing now aims to give state and municipal governments responsibility for agrarian reform. Balduíno warns that this would place it "in the hands of politicians who have closer ties to landowners than to grassroots organizations."
Tensions are running high in the countryside. The church commission is launching an international campaign against the heavily armed private rural militias that are proliferating in parts of the country. Balduíno said the groups are terrorizing and repressing campesino organizations, aided by the media, which has manipulated public opinion to see "the actions of rural workers (land takeovers) as banditry." According to the CPT, 46 people have been assassinated in rural areas so far this year, compared to 43 assassinations in all of last year. On Sept.12, eight rural workers were shot dead in the south of the state of Pará, in what constitutes the first massacre to occur over land issues, under Lula’s presidency.
José Genoíno, the PT’s national president, has reaffirmed the party’s ongoing commitment to "broad, peaceful agrarian reform...an indispensable condition for bringing peace to the countryside." However Agriculture Minister, Roberto Rodrigues, a harsh critic of the land takeovers, has called for a reform "that is done legally, with respect for the Constitution, the right to property and the protection of productive lands."
Rodrigues has repeatedly said that the Brazilian countryside is "modern, competitive, peaceful and characterized by solidarity," holding up as an example the fact that agriculture represents 27 percent of the country’s gross domestic product and accounts for 37 percent of jobs. Rodrigues favors a "capitalist agrarian reform" that would put small communities into the chain of production.
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