One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  Since becoming a member of the WTO, of course, Brazil had little choice in the matter. The WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture requires countries to continually lower tariffs and subsidies, enforce minimum import levels on various crops, and introduce no new protection or support for their farmers. This last rule does not, however, apply to existing support. In other words, under the WTO’s Agreement, Europe and the USA are allowed to continue massively subsidising their farmers as they have done for decades – but ‘developing’ countries like Brazil are not allowed to introduce similar protection themselves.

  In rural Brazil, as a result of all this, several trends are converging. A small number of large farmers have benefited from the new market regime. Around 90,000 of them, it is estimated – less than 2 per cent of all Brazil’s farmers – account for over 60 per cent of agricultural income. These are the big exporters. The rest are not so lucky: millions of them, according to one of the Brazilian government’s top advisers, are in big trouble. Over 80 per cent of Brazil’s farms could go under as a result of globalisation. Many already have; steady streams of people are being forced off the land, unable to compete. Over 4 million flooded into the cities between 1996 and 1999 alone, often ending up in the filthy slums that surround Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and other such megacities. ‘There is no way,’ the government adviser, Guilherme Dias, warned his bosses in 2000, ‘in which these producers can survive a transition as violent as the one we’re going through . . . such is the scale of the social problem created by this transformation that the country’s productive structure is threatened.’7

  Many of the small farmers who remain, precariously, on the land are reduced to the status of hired hands – contract labourers producing seeds for American multinationals, chickens or pigs for giant meat companies, tobacco for European smokers. The expansion of vast soya monocultures to feed increasing global demand for this crop, which is used mainly to feed cattle for Western consumption, is gradually edging into the Amazon basin, taking parts of the world’s biggest and most diverse rainforest with it as it goes.

  Finally, and perhaps most bitterly of all, Brazil’s immensely concentrated land distribution is concentrating even further. Between 1992 and 1998, the proportion of land taken up by farms of over 2,000 hectares increased from 39 per cent to 43 per cent, and the number of very large farms – over 50,000 hectares – almost doubled, to cover almost 10 per cent of all farmland.8

  Enter the MST. In the early 1980s, when what was to become the Landless Workers’ Movement began to coalesce, Brazil was still ruled by the military dictatorship that had seized control of the country in 1964. That coup had put paid to widespread hopes that the left-wing government it overthrew might put a serious national land reform process in place from above. All that remained, it seemed, was to initiate one from below. This, with a military junta in power, was a risky business; but so was starving to death without land. Though globalisation had not yet begun to bite, mechanisation was forcing families from their farms and concentrating land in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

  In 1979, in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, a group of landless families, with the help of sympathetic supporters in the Catholic Church, decided to act. With nothing to lose but their lives, they invaded a local estate and claimed it for their own. Nationwide media attention made it difficult for the government to send in the troops, and the occupation, miraculously, survived. Within a year the state government had formally granted the land to the families. Inspired by this victory, other landless people across Brazil – the sem terra, as they began to call themselves – started to invade land too. In 1984, a group of a hundred sem terra from thirteen states got together with trades unionists, church workers and others to turn this burgeoning social movement into a national force, and the MST was born. ‘Land for those who live and work on it’ ran their slogan. Nobody, including those involved, had any idea what this new political force was about to unleash.

  ‘There are three things that every man should do in his life,’ says Sebastian Batista to me, as he walks me around the edge of his cornfield. ‘He should write a book, plant a tree and have a child. I have done the second and third of these. You are doing the first. And there are plenty of trees here you can help us plant, so we will both have done two out of three.’ Sebastian is a big, serious man, with short black hair, wearing jeans, a blue jumper and cowboy boots. A knife is attached to his belt. He and his wife, Nazare, are among about 500 formerly landless families who have created an enviable life for themselves on one of the MST’s earliest settlements, Itapeva, in São Paulo state. Itapeva was idle land when Sebastian and others invaded it in 1984, the year that the MST was born. Back then, there was nothing here. Today, it is an object lesson in how land reform from below can give new life to those who have nothing.

  São Paulo is a long way from the Amazon rainforest, but the rain, when it comes, seems like it belongs there. It is vast, instant, sheeting, and it drives us to seek shelter. Inside Sebastian’s low, wooden house, a soggy dog is sheltering underneath the porch, dripping guiltily on to the wooden floor, and an old man is leaning on a wall eyeing the sky with a quiet satisfaction. ‘Good for the crops,’ he says. Inside the kitchen, Sebastian sits down and begins to tell me about Itapeva.

  ‘We came here when the MST was just beginning,’ he tells me, ‘but it wasn’t until 1995 that the government formally recognised our right to this land. Eleven years of struggle, but it was worth it. I was brought up on a farm around here, but then I went to the city and became a metalworker. I lost my job, and had nothing, so I decided to come back to the land; that’s when I joined the MST. When we first took the land, we lived for a year under black plastic. All of us – families, children, the old people. It was hard.’ Nazare ambles in through the door. She has been outside, in the rain, picking ripe plums off the tree in the garden. She piles them up on the table in front of us.

  ‘Now we have good homes, and much more,’ says Sebastian, as we both start on the plums, which are delicious. ‘Tomorrow, you can see. At the moment we are growing corn, beans, rice, soya and wheat. We have pigs, and we produce honey, cheese and milk. Some of it we keep, some we sell, though it is very hard to sell these days.’

  ‘The soil!’ interjects Nazare, from the other side of the room, where she is preparing dinner. She is a kind, friendly woman with curly black hair whose hospitality knows no bounds. She has insisted on feeding me and Daniella and putting us up for the night. ‘The soil here is wonderful. Beautiful red earth – anything you plant, it grows. In some places in Brazil the land is terrible; all the people can do is graze cows. Here, we can throw any seeds on to the ground, whatever they are, and they will just grow!’

  ‘The MST,’ says Sebastian, ‘is very important. It allows people to start to do things for themselves. If you vote, you change nothing. We could have Jesus Christ as president, and he’d still have to do all the deals that politicians do. He would still not be in control. Unless the people can start to do things for themselves, and unless we can change our way of seeing things, nothing will change – in Brazil or anywhere.’ He drops a plum stone on to the concrete floor.

  ‘The MST help you to think. They teach illiterate people to read and write. They teach people how to work together. We have schools, land, homes, and all of it we have got because we stood up and we fought for it. In the old days, church people used to say that if you were poor it was God’s will. The MST say, if you are poor, it is because someone is exploiting you. One thing I have learned since I joined: Brazil is a very rich country, and there should be a place in it for everyone. But if you want that place – that place which you deserve – well, then you are going to have to fight for it.’ He finishes another plum.

  ‘None of us will get rich here,’ he goes on, ‘but we have what we need, and what we want. We have enough. Everybody should have enough in Brazil; and they could. But I will tell you the most important thing that the MST has given me.’ He looks me straig
ht in the eye.

  ‘The most important thing,’ he says, ‘is my dignity.’

  Itapeva is a big place: 17,000 hectares of land, studded with houses and communal buildings. Like other MST settlements it is run as a co-op and is an interesting combination of common and private land. The settlers have each been allocated a piece of land of almost equal size – about seventeen hectares each, Sebastian tells me – within the whole. None of the families have their own land titles, however, because this would allow them to sell their land and break up the settlement. The landscape, like that of Maranhão, is broad, flat and expansive.

  The next morning I am being given a tour by Jamil Ramos, one of the MST co-ordinators on the site who is unsurprisingly keen to show me the best of the settlement. Jamil is balding, with a goatee beard and an MST T-shirt, and the first thing he wants to do is show me the radio station.

  ‘Radio Camponesa,’ he explains, which translates as ‘farmers’ radio’. ‘We set it up ourselves, and we broadcast to the whole community. We play traditional country music that is being lost, and we broadcast debates, politics – many things. Whatever we want.’

  The radio station is based in a low building with antennae on the roof. We are shown into the studio, a small, square room with a large mixing desk taking up most of the space, and revolutionary murals on the wall behind it. A random collection of people are hanging around, there is no lock on the studio door, and as a young, lithe man behind the decks broadcasts to the sem terras, kids play around on the floor, fiddling curiously with CDs and being half-heartedly shushed by their mothers, who are gossiping in the next room.

  I thought I might interview the DJ; ask him what the radio station does, and why, and what it means to the community. It turns out, though, that he wants to interview me; through Daniella, naturally. He hands me a very large microphone and quizzes me on air about what I’m doing here, what I think of Itapeva, how I like Brazil. ‘Do you have any message for the heroes of the MST?’ he asks me, in conclusion, and politely listens while I stumble about trying to say something inspiring, hoping Daniella’s translation sounds better than the original.

  The next stop is the herbalist. Itapeva has a women’s co-op which produces herbal products from a pot-pourri of herbs grown in a special plot behind their office. ‘Lucia the herbalist’, as she is known, takes me outside to her herb garden. It has been bucketing down all morning, and in a brief gap in the rain she shows me around the neat plot, picking sprigs for me to sniff and explaining their purpose. Inside the office-cum-clinic, Lucia explains that the main function of their work is health care.

  ‘There are no doctors in Itapeva,’ she says, ‘and the nearest one is in the town, a long journey away.’ Lucia, and the nine other women in the co-op, make up for much of that lack of medical attention with their herbal medicines. They have allergy creams, headache remedies, lotions for skin problems, disinfectants and more, all made from the contents of their garden. They even, Lucia tells me, proudly, make a type of flour with added calcium, which is used to make bread for young children and people with osteoporosis.

  ‘Most people are very healthy here,’ she says, ‘and many problems can be solved this way.’ Then she sells me a bottle of home-made herbal shampoo and some MST-recipe mosquito repellent, which I don’t feel able to refuse.

  An hour or so later, my tour complete, I find myself eating, probably faster than is polite, a plate of delicious home-made cheese, and drinking strong home-grown coffee, in the house of Ilda Martins da Souza, a 56-year-old woman with lively eyes, a wide, firm smile and a house full of grandchildren who run in and out of the room and roll across the floor together as she speaks. Ilda was, she tells me, one of the original occupiers of Itapeva.

  ‘For two years,’ she says, ‘we lived on a roadside before we got this land. And it was worth all of it. Look around you. Yet since I got involved with the MST, I have learned that it is not just about getting land, but about understanding how to live in a different type of society. Since I came here, I have seen a real transformation in people – people making an effort, understanding that we can live in a more egalitarian society. This is what made me fall in love with the MST, and what brought me out here. The more I got involved, the more beautiful things I found out.’ As she speaks, her grandchildren, Nina and Marco, catapult themselves from nowhere on to her lap. She tousles their hair and tells them to go and fetch more food from the kitchen.

  ‘Of course,’ she goes on, ‘not everything is perfect. The MST is not perfect, and neither is Itapeva. There is still a lot of work to do, here and elsewhere. This is a continuous struggle, and there are tensions. For example, when we were camping out, waiting for land, there was total solidarity. When we got the land, when the government came in and granted title, when people got their houses – then it was less easy. People’s opinions change; some get more selfish. But still, this is much more of a brotherly society than I have ever seen. It’s in this struggle that we come to firmly believe that there is a way out for Brazil – there can be a new way forward.’

  Nina and Marco march back in with more coffee and cheese. Outside, the rain is pounding down again, on to Ilda’s tin roof. I ask her what it’s like being a woman in the MST.

  ‘Better!’ she says immediately. ‘In Brazil, men are in charge. In the MST, it is much more equal. Early on in the MST’s life, women would come to all the initial meetings, before an occupation. They would come for years, and say they had a husband, but he never turned up at the meetings. When they got their land and their house, the first thing that would arrive would be the husband. This made some of us very angry. Then the government would come in and write the contract for ownership of the house, and the contract would be made out not with the woman, but with the husband! In his name!’ She snorts, derisively. ‘Some of these men,’ she goes on, ‘would then try and sell the house, and the women would be homeless again! We have put a stop to that. In the MST now, we do not allow this to happen. The women’s role is very equal. Here, both people in couples can really contribute in a way that I have not seen elsewhere.’

  Most importantly though, Ilda thinks that what the MST stands for is something that can apply outside the settlements – perhaps even outside Brazil. She makes this point several times, until she’s sure I’ve got the message.

  ‘People have to work for their own transformation,’ she says. ‘People often think of this in terms of consuming: “There are good things out there and I want them; I have to buy them.” Then people just get attached to small things, and forget about the bigger things in life. It makes you dependent on people who sell you things, or on the government to give you schools or roads or hospitals. People have to lose their fear of struggling – not in the sense of fighting or violence, but in the sense of addressing their own problems, and making their own answers. On your own, this struggle will not work. Learn solidarity, and struggle together, and it does. We have all seen that. There is a lot of good in all of us – together, we can spread it. This is creating solidarity.’

  Ilda heaves her determined grandchildren off her lap again, gets up and walks across the room. I’m horrified to discover that I’ve managed to stuff both plates of cheese down my throat in under fifteen minutes but Ilda doesn’t notice, and probably wouldn’t mind if she did. She’s looking out of the window, where the rain is still battering down, running in rivulets across the red roads and the green verges.

  ‘People die,’ she says, suddenly. ‘It’s such a shame. They go to heaven, they say, but why would you want to?’ She looks at me, smiling again, the rain still drumming on the roof.

  ‘I am only going to heaven,’ she says, ‘if they can guarantee that heaven will be like this.’

  The MST’s head office, in the smog-hung megacity of São Paulo, could be any office anywhere. Apart from the framed, black-and-white photos on the walls – famous, stark and beautiful shots, taken by photographer Sebastião Salgado, of life in MST settlements – it is a comfortable, unexcep
tional, officey sort of place: pot plants, photocopiers, a receptionist, a water cooler; a million miles away from Maranhão and Itapeva. It’s a comparison which the MST’s critics have not been slow to highlight, and one which can grate: dirt-poor farmers living under plastic at the suggestion of an organisation run by non-farming urbanites with regular salaries. Some have accused the MST leadership of manipulating the landless for their own political ends; an accusation which assumes something of a lack of intelligence and guile on behalf of rural people. It is true, though, that the MST’s leadership, some of whom see the organisation as a political project to transform Brazil, can clash with the grass roots, for whom the overwhelming priority is everyday life, and improving their material lot.

  I am here to talk to one of the MST’s leading lights, Neuri Rossetto, a man who sees no contradiction between these two goals. Neuri is one of twenty-three people on the MST’s national directorate, which is elected by delegates from the settlements at regular national conferences. He is a middle-aged man in glasses who has been involved with the MST for many years and has seen it transform itself, slowly and sometimes painfully, from a movement for land reform into what Ilda wanted me to see it as in Itapeva – a broad-based national movement for change.

  This, says Neuri, is the aspect of the MST’s work that is most overlooked. It is also, he says, probably the most important for the future.

  ‘You could say the MST has gone through three phases in its development,’ he tells me, as we sit around a big wooden conference table drinking coffee. ‘The first phase, in the early 1980s, was the movement arising. The second phase, from about 1985 to 1995, saw us consolidating and growing. We are now in a third phase – perhaps the most difficult one. I call it the “confrontation of models”. To put it very simply, we have realised that you cannot imagine a traditional model of land reform under the kind of capitalism we have today.’ He shrugs, almost imperceptibly.