View From
Within - Land Reform II
Brazil's Ideology-Based Land Grab:
A Pointless, Wasteful Exercise...
by Luiz Antonio Nabhan Garcia
Week of Apr 17 - 23, 2004
Luiz Antonio Nabhan Garcia is
national president of UDR, the Ruralist Democratic Union, a national
association of agricultural landowners. A third-generation cattle and crop
farmer, whose immigrant grandparents arrived in Brazil and began their
farming activities in 1908, he describes himself as proud of the fact he
and his family have made a living by working the land and producing food
for close to a century. The UDR was launched in the mid-1980s in the
central state of Goiás, with the declared intent to pressure Congress and
block what it perceived as an advancement of left-wing views on Land
Reform and agricultural property ownership. The UDR claims its work in
Congress resulted in the rejection of attempts by the political left to do
away with the right to private land ownership in Brazil, and the addition
of a clause to Brazil’s revised Constitution of 1988, guaranteeing the
right to private property for agricultural land owners.
Editor’s Note: More than 70 land invasions were carried out by the
MST throughout Brazil by the middle of April 2004 – a month the movement
declared would be marked by intense mobilization of its membership, to
push the government to speed up Land Reform. In light of this development,
InfoBrazil asked leaders of the MST, and the landowner’s association,
the UDR, to write guest opinion articles to be published simultaneously.
Below is the article submitted by UDR President Luiz Antonio Nabhan Garcia
– the opposing viewpoint, prepared by MST leader João Pedro Stédile,
is available in the InfoBrazil archive, in the Past Issues section.
The question is often asked: how can a nation as vast as Brazil, with
abundant land and agricultural frontiers yet to be explored, generate so
much controversy and confrontation over the issue of land? And all of it
involving a people the entire world recognize as peace loving, who’ve
always lived in harmony?
The
answer is actually rather simple and visible: the politics of populism,
demagoguery, incompetence and weak leadership, topped off with the wrong
choices, explain what we witness in Brazil today, and have witnessed over
a number of years.
Contrary
to what at times appears to be the case, the Brazilian Constitution
protects private initiative and guarantees the right to own property.
Unfortunately, that Constitution has not been duly enforced, or respected
as it should be.
The
so called peasant leagues, as they are known in the few Communist
countries that still exist, have created in Brazil a group of idealists
known as the MST – the Landless Rural Workers Movement. They go to
sleep, and spend every waking moment dreaming of transforming our
democratic regime into one of these anachronic, surpassed arrangements
that exist in remote corners of the world.
Our
last few federal administrations, with a recognized Socialist bend, in a
certain way gave the MST government support and recognition as a social
movement. With that, the MST gained strength and began to invade and
pillage productive private farm properties, in organized rampages that
include theft, destruction and torching of buildings and infrastructure,
the killing of farm animals, physical aggression and the illegal capture
and holding of individuals in isolation against their will.
Given
the complete inaction of these administrations and institutions under
their leadership, the MST went further and began to promote the invasion
of public buildings and bank branches, in events that featured blatant
vandalism and various other crimes. It seems ironic, but how is it
possible that a band – or is it a gang of criminals – can be
recognized as a social movement?
Thousands
of families have been settled by the federal government throughout Brazil
since 1994, in operations that have cost the public purse billions of U.S.
dollars. The results of so much effort have been explicitly pitiful,
perhaps even shameful. The Land Reform that is the object of those
rose-coloured dreams is really little more than a rural shantytown. The
widely promoted social and economic objectives in favour of the families
who received land, with rare exceptions, have proved to be little more
than a mirage in the desert.
Questions
persist. Why hasn’t it worked out? Answer: because ideology prevailed.
Without competent management, a careful selection and registration of
families whose true calling is to work the land, and proper inspections in
settlements – and the use by settlements and settled families of the
public funds dedicated to them – Land Reform simply doesn’t have a
hope of producing results.
How
much longer will government funds, taken from Brazil’s seriously
overburdened taxpayers, continue to be thrown straight into a garbage can,
without any chance of positive change being accomplished? Certainly
nothing will change until the government promotes sweeping changes over
the entire Land Reform and management structure – starting with the
replacement of people who now occupy key positions in the system, and
still believe Land Reform can be carried out through anachronic
ideologies.
If
and when common sense and reason prevail once again, we might see
different results in Brazil’s efforts at Land Reform. But we would also
need to see a greater degree of respect for private property, and for
agricultural entrepreneurs – not just from governments, but from all of
Brazilian society.
Related
sites:
UDR – Ruralist Democratic Union
(Portuguese only)
http://www.udr.org.br
INCRA
– National Institute of Colonization and Land Reform
(Portuguese only)
http://www.incra.gov.br
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