Sustainable food production depends on agrarian reform, says MST

The 4th National Agrarian Reform Fair of the MST (Movement of Landless Rural Workers)’, held in the Água Branca Park, in São Paulo, from today (11) to Sunday (14), has more than five hundred tons of food, with 1,500 product items sold by more than 1,200 vendors. Of this amount, 25 tons will be donated in a solidarity action.

For Ceres Hadich, from the national coordination of the MST, “the fair brings a lot of this intention to demonstrate the totality of the agrarian reform and how we get to this healthy food produced. The beginning of this struggle takes place in the occupation of land, this is the bond that we also want to bring into the fair. For this food to be able to get here, to be able to reach the masses and effectively fulfill the social function, we need to look back to see where that first struggle came from, and the struggle takes place in the struggle for land, in the struggle for occupation ”.

He adds that, within the proposal of popular agrarian reform, the objective is to demonstrate that it is possible to produce food without pesticides, in an agroecological way, with fair working relations between producers and nature. However, it emphasizes the need for public policies and the intention to produce cooperatively so that food can reach all people in a viable way, at a fair price.

Ceres considers that the MST is the result of a redemocratization process in Brazil that took place four decades ago. “We were getting stronger and discovering with our recent Brazil how to carry out the democratic struggle, which is the struggle for agrarian reform, a constitutional struggle, a legitimate struggle, even though the agrarian issue already has more than five centuries in our history. , as a great debt that we owe to the Brazilian people”.

Next, it emphasizes the importance of holding the fair in the recent political context, in which it is possible to return to dialogue, debate and problematize the movement’s issues.

“In recent years, we have suffered from its absence (democracy). The last few years, for us in the working class, not only the landless people, not only the peasants who were in the countryside suffering from the absence of public policies, from state policies, suffering from the absence of the state, from the denial of science, of the possibilities for us to build a serious Brazil with dignity, we experienced very dark years for our society, for our people, of great hopelessness and lack of horizons”, he explains.

More than five hundred tons of food are part of the MST’s 4th National Agrarian Reform Fair Photo – Rovena Rosa/Agência Brasil

Diversity

Also from the national coordination, Gilmar Mauro says that an attempt was made to show the diversity that makes up the landless movement, bringing different cultures from the country to the fair, whether in terms of food or artistic actions. He points out that this production and this set of settlements in the country is only possible because land occupations were carried out in the past, which turned into settlements.

And he continues: “Agrarian reform is within the Brazilian Constitution, our fight is nothing more nor less than compliance with the Constitution, which establishes that all land that does not fulfill its social function should be expropriated for the purposes of agrarian reform. And, to fulfill the social function, it needs to produce rationally, respect the environmental legislation and respect the labor legislation. And we know that there is slave labor, burning, environmental destruction, and huge debts with the INSS (National Social Security Institute). The federal government could levy these lands for land reform purposes,” he says.

He also considers that agrarian reform is one of the alternatives for combating hunger and extreme poverty in the country, in addition to donations. “The donation is important, of course it is important, but it does not solve the structural problem of hunger. Public policy is needed and agrarian reform can come in handy with public policies to finance the production of settlements, small-scale agriculture, quilombolas, indigenous peoples, and this production (can) be brought to the large centers.”

agrarian injustice

For Ceres Hadich, agrarian injustice generates other structural injustices. “It is no longer possible for us to be in the middle of the 21st century in the cradle of this thriving agro that generates hunger. Today, we have more than 33 million Brazilians in a situation of hunger and millions of Brazilians in a situation of food insecurity. It is no longer possible for us to live with this knowing that we have all the conditions to seek alternatives and to combat this from a structural point of view.”

Farmer Carlos Aparecido Ferrari, 67, participated in the process of creating the MST and is one of the representatives of this virtuous cycle of sustainable production based on the distribution of land, with respect for workers and the environment, generating income and food supply free of pesticides for consumers.

After a national meeting to deal with land conflicts, he says that it was realized that inequality in land distribution was present throughout the country and that the fight for this right was already taking place in different ways.

The 4th National Land Reform Fair of the MST, in São Paulo, will be held until Sunday Photo – Rovena Rosa/Agência Brasil

“We made the decision, we needed to build a tool to unify the struggle from south to north along the same political line and the same way of fighting for land”, he says. A commission was created to think about the movement, the first national meeting was held and, from there, the MST was born in 1984.

“This line that we adopted of carrying out the occupation, of confronting the large estates, was what led us to conquer millions of hectares of land in this whole country. And with that, he came to discuss food production to end hunger. It advanced not only in production, but also in agro-industrialization, such as rice in Rio Grande do Sul already industrialized, honey already industrialized that comes from the settlements, (it) had a very big advance from the point of view of production, of industrialization and commercialization”, analyzes Carlos Aparecido.

land concentration

Occupations and encampments were ways of denouncing the concentration of land in the hands of a few and unproductive latifundia, and are strategies in the struggle for land distribution.

“In some cases, conquering some areas that were not even occupied. But the occupation led to the denouncement of the unproductive latifundia and, suddenly, Incra (National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform) began to carry out inspections even without being occupied, it did not give an index of (adequate) production and with that (that area) entered the list of expropriations, there have already been many settlements like this”, he adds.

Also according to Carlos Aparecido, the movement ended up taking on the role of denouncing other injustices that occur in the countryside, in addition to the accumulation of land, such as murders and massacres, in addition to the occurrence of slave labor. Tamakavi, in Mato Grosso do Sul, he distributes free of charge and exchanges Creole Aztec maize, bean and rice seeds. According to him, this variety of corn is almost extinct and it is important that the seeds are shared.

“Continue the resistance to produce native seed, clean seed, without transgenics, without poison. If we don’t distribute it to friends and work to see if someone buys the idea of ​​a ‘clean’ production, it will end,” he concludes.