can someone give me info on Brazil land reform?

Answer 1

Brazil and Agrarian Reform

Brazil is the 4th largest country in land area only Russia, China and Canada are larger. It has 350 million hectares of productive agricultural land. And 40% of its land is Amazonian rainforest. Its economy, by Latin American standards, is huge: $1 trillion dollars. (The US economy is about 9 times larger). Agriculture contributes 12% of Gross Domestic Product (about $130 billion).

The population of the country is about 155 million, 32 million are rural and another 34 million live in towns that have less than 20,000 inhabitants.. [For more details on the economy and population see: demography and economy in Brazil,] Conservative figures estimate that there are 7 million families that are landless. However, besides the landless we have no less than 4.5 million families who live on very small tracts of land. They are the small farmers who live on the so-called minifundia. They number approximately 18 million people, including sharecroppers and unpaid workers. Twenty four percent of the work force is involved in agriculture - that is, 17 million people.

Gunther Schonleitner in a very insightful essay "Discussing Brazil's Agrarian Question: Land Reform is Dead, Long Live Family Farming?" writes, "The agrarian structure has remained essentially exclusive, constantly reproducing inequality, poverty and political domination. In 1980 the Gini coefficient for family land ownership was 0.86, and when landless families working in agriculture are included, it was 0.9 (Maddison, 1992:91). In 1985 the top two percent of landowners controlled 57 percent of total farmland, while the bottom 30 percent of farmers owned just one percent of the farm land (Hall, 1990: 206)."

Last year Mark S. Langevin and Peter Rosset reported (Land Reform From Below The Landless Workers Movement in Brazil) that, "small family farmers with 10 hectares of land or less comprise 30.4 per cent of all Brazilian farmers, but together hold only 1.5 per cent of all agricultural land" But, "the country's largest farms, of 1,000 hectares or more, comprise only 1.6 per cent of all farms, but hold 53.2 per cent of all agricultural land. The largest 75 farms, with 100,000 hectares or more, control over five times the combined total area of all small farms. The consolidation of farmland increased agricultural exports and provided an effective hedge against inflation for the wealthy."

Brazil has a bi-modal agrarian structure: large estates (latifundia) that hires labor. The laborers used to be tenants and sharecroppers. And very small farmers that progressively are marginal. In other words, peasants who used to work for themselves are increasingly becoming a proletarianized and poor rural work force. It should be noted that the latifundia system has 33 million hectares of unused land (that is the size of Germany today).

The present situation of land ownership inequality, poverty and unequal access to political power has a long history. There is a semi-official history of Brazil's agrarian reform policies covering the period from the 19th century until 1994. The government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has produced a useful page that presents the government policy and logic on agrarian reform - it claims the real problem is not the concentration of land ownership. Moreover, it shows how much land it has distributed (although it does not state that it did so under landless peasants' pressure).

Agrarian reform, which had been a forgotten topic during the Reagan years, was re-discovered by international economic agencies in the 1990s. The Bank Information Center, which monitors the policies of the World Bank, reports that "In the early 90's, under increasingly severe criticism of neo-liberal structural adjustment policy, the World Bank announced the need to reinforce its anti-poverty programs. With this new orientation, agrarian policies became a priority, but with a fundamental difference: the market, rather than government, became the key actor in land reform. The model of "market-assisted land reform" or "negotiated land reform" was applied in various countries around the world. This model has been consistently attacked by rural social movements ever since, principally for substituting already existing land reform programs. In the new regime, the slogan "land for whoever works it" has become "land for whoever can buy it"."

Brazil was used as a model of the World Bank's thinking on agrarian reform; a pilot project was organized and $90 million was transferred to the Brazilian government to implement the plan. The project required that the rural landless create associations and obtain loans in order to purchase land at market value. The concept of distributing land to the peasants, free of charge, was not acceptable to the world institution (expressing the views of economic liberals).

There has been thorough critiques of the US-sponsored World Bank approach. The critique basically stresses that land should be available to those who work it rather than to those who can afford to buy it. The World Bank land reform program in Brazil has clearly benefited those with money and not the landless.

About 43 per cent of agricultural land is not cultivated. And of the largest landholdings (1,000 hectares or more) 88.7 per cent of arable land is left unused. One should add to the problem of unused land, the rapid deforestation of the country. This has been shown by satellite photos since the 1980s.

One of the most extraordinary developments in Brazil has been the organization, development and growth of a landless peasant movement. Professor James Petras has written a very thoughtful and theoretically important essay (The movement gains momentum) on the landless in Brazil. The Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil is, without a doubt, the most impressive. They have initiated what has been called "land reform from below." For an exquisite photo essay of the landless workers' movement visit the page prepared by the Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado.
The recent election of the Workers' Party in Brazil may initiate the first serious and thorough changes in land distribution in the country.

Answer 2

Here are some sites to help you get started on your homework.☺

http://www.unm.edu/~nvaldes/350/brazilreform.htm

http://www.mstbrazil.org/?q=needforlandreform

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/3146937.stm

http://forests.org/archive/brazil/landrtar.htm

http://www.brazzilmag.com/content/view/5727/53/