brazil and farm land

[the_future_modernes]

Dialogues:Brazil Doesn’t Need Poisons to Maintain Food Production Fabíola Ortiz interviews MST leader JOÃO PEDRO STÉDILE*

For the last three consecutive years, Brazil, an agricultural giant, has occupied first place worldwide in the consumption of agricultural herbicides, fungicides and insecticides. It had risen to second place behind the United States in 2006, but took over the top spot in 2008 after a record soybean harvest.

A study by the German market research firm Kleffmann Group, commissioned by the National Association for Plant Protection, which represents agrochemical manufacturers, confirmed that Brazil is the world’s leading market for agrochemicals.

Over seven billion dollars were spent on these products in 2008, while the area of cultivated land decreased by two percent.

Nevertheless, the amount of chemical products used per farmer in Brazil is relatively small compared to other countries. In 2007, an average of 87.8 dollars per hectare were spent on agrochemicals in Brazil, compared to 196.7 dollars in France and 851 dollars in Japan.

The five biggest transnationals in this sector - BASF, Bayer, Syngenta, DuPont and Monsanto - all have manufacturing plants in Brazil.

This situation has led the MST to broaden its focus beyond its original purpose of pushing for the effective implementation of agrarian reform. The organisation currently represents some 20,000 members throughout Brazil, and works alongside 60,000 rural families in pressuring the government to distribute idle farmland and improve the conditions on those areas already settled by small family farmers. Stédile spoke with Tierramérica about the movement’s current concerns.MORE

Brazil at Risk of Agrarian Counter Reform

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 27, 2011 (IPS) - A process of "agrarian counter-reform" is taking place in Brazil, according to activist João Pedro Stédile, a leader of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST).

Stédile said Brazil's land reform efforts faltered in the last few years of the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), while land ownership became more concentrated.

In the final stretch of President Lula's second term, many legal expropriations of idle land on large estates were blocked in court.

In addition, the international financial crisis "had the opposite effect in Brazil, because in order to protect their funds, international capitalists ran to Brazil to invest in land and energy projects," the activist said.

That led to a "perverse logic" in agriculture, in which purchases of unproductive land by the government were disputed and ownership became more concentrated, as part of "an agrarian counter-reform process," he said.

The most recent official figures are from 2006. The Agricultural Census of that year, published in 2009 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), shows that the concentration of rural land has remained virtually unaltered in the last two decades.

In Brazil, one of the countries in the world with the most uneven distributions of land, around 3.5 percent of landowners hold 56 percent of the arable land while the poorest 40 percent own barely one percent.

According to the IBGE, properties larger than 1,000 hectares cover 46 percent of Brazil's farmland, while properties smaller than 10 hectares occupy barely 2.7 percent.

"The concentration is worse now than in 1920, when we were just getting over slavery (which was abolished in 1888)," Stédile told IPS. "We hope the government of Dilma (Rousseff) will change the agrarian policy, starting with INCRA," Brazil's National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform. MORE