" Without land reform, there is no chance of saving the rainforests and the indigenous people of the Amazon from destruction. The development of sustainable farming methods, birth control programmes or reserve protection measures will be little more than palliative while the battle for land in Brazil still rages".  From "The Struggle for land and the Fate of the forests" (edited by Marcus Colchester & Larry Lohmann)

"Amazon is the dustbin of Brazil's social policies"
small farmers are responsible for 20% of the deforestation

    At least 170 million hectares of farmland lie idle. When the peasants leave toward the Amazon they are not heading for a land of richness leaving poverty behind them. They are leaving fertile states (underpopulated in terms of farming potential) to arrive in a region so infertile that some have restarted their lives there up to 25 times.

     The paradox arises because of land ownership: 0.8% of landlords possess 43% of the land while 53% of landowners (small peasants) own 2.7% of the land. Multinationals own 36 million hectares of Brazilian territory. Also, many of the biggest landowners are the senators, ministers and army chiefs. They exert their power in their landholdings (locally) using legal and illegal (murder) means to keep the small farmers from striving to get a more just distribution of land. In some regions, government favouring certain cash crops make small farming systems economically unviable. The majority of the territory owned by these people is unfarmed. Used as speculative asset whose market value has nothing to do with its productivity. ONly about 7% of the Amazon's soils are capable of sustaining annual crops. An industry called industria de posse has developed around clearing land for pasture: people sell the land cleared for pasture ( whose value is one-third greater than that of forest) as quickly as possible and then move on to another part of the forest.

     There has already been an agrarian reform in 1985 which aimed to redistribute unproductive farmland but there was a lot of opposition (formation of the Rancher's Union, amongst which a lot of government members to combat the reform) and only 10% of the amount of land proposed for reallocation had been expropriated and about 18000 rural families(out of about5 million with no land) had been settled. What went wrong? This is the way to go though.  The few successful expropriations were due to lobbying, demonstrations and occupations of unused properties by the peasants.

     There has been another major problem in the land policy of the government in the 90s: credit is mainly given to big farmers who produce very little and since the real rates of interest were negative, these subsidies were like free gifts. An agrarian reform should take this into account: land receiving subsidies should prove its productivity in the year following the credit. Small farmers, especially if farming with agroforestry process (which is what we want to achieve in our plan), might prove to deserve subsidies much more than landlords and be more productive. Right now credits cannot be granted without title to the land which small illiterate farmers do not have.

      The peasant problem is in a large amount caused by the First World which has promoted production of cash crops (dumping of surplus food at subsidized prices and pressure exerted by World Bank and IMF) and this causes staple food producers to go out of business and the increase of staple food imports!This process has been forced by the international agencies by structural adjustment programmes and selective investments. This has been done to force the government to be less protectionist and to convert the domestic economy to foreign exchange. This may have had very beneficial effects on the economy of Brazil but maybe a balance can be found so that domestic markets are not fragilized so much.

      The economical strength of some markets is reduced because of tariff barriers set by First World countries: no tax for raw product and high taxes for processed products. This means Brazil has to produce a lot and that uses more land than necessary.

Question: Is small farming appropriate in Brazil?
      The small farmers produce a large amount of the staple food Brazil needs (manioc, beans, rice, maize) but not enough though because the country still needs to import some.
      There are many land conflicts arising from these problems and murders of peasants by landlords are not rare. They are even sponsored by the Rancher's Union of which many people of the government are part. (Is there an international organization which has enough power to control this?) But they have been decreasing a little as the peasants organizations have become stronger and they have found improved self-defense mechanisms and are working with foreign non-governmental organizations. There actions also include massive squats of land during the night to get the land promised by government in redistribution plans but never given. We should not neglect the consciousness of these people and their motivation to fight. They seem to have very organized groups and be doing the right things to raise awareness in their country. They might just need support
     The Minister of Justice has proposed the creation of an agrarian court in which land disputes can be heard. Has this been done?

      Since 1970, to avoid land redistribution in the South, the government has encouraged colonization. They encouraged the peasants to farm as they did in the south and constructed the Trans-Amazon Highway to settle them along there without taking into consideration that only 3% of the land is fertile in that region.
Another main cause of deforestation is that deforestation is a mean of establishing control over the land. Under the laws of INCRA (Institute of Agrarian Reform), an area six times the size of the actual land cleared can be claimed. So clearing is  a good way to secure land bearing interesting resources (valuable timber and minerals). It should be know that a recognized land claim permits the holder to have royalty rights on minerals which are technically owned by the Brazilian state. Deforestation should not be legitimized as a proof that the land is exploited so should be owned. Indians exploit land without deforestation and they don't even have the right to own it!  This process has led to numerous ruthless expropriations of small peasants. With this going on they can't be expected to take on sustainable farming practices. Since they're always threatened, they don't invest in the land but raise fast-growing crops.  It also causes the peasants to convert to mining which is a major threat to indigenous people. The peasants invade the reserves and there is a lot of murderous conflict (invasion of the Yanomami territory in Northern Brazil).
Another common way to claim land is to use cattle ranching. Low in labour cost, easy to spread, this is an easy way to claim occupation rights for both large and small-scale producers. In cattle ranching, the production itself is not the major interest. This explains why cattle ranching still takes place even though it has proven to be so little productive in the Amazon.
10/22/02
More on agrarian reform: can we do anything to improve it?
      Reading information provided by the Cardoso government on the land reform of 1996, I have the impression that the process is rather well organised except that they plan a few settlements in the forest. I don't know if we can do more than stating that this reform is essential to the sustainable use of the forest. I will have to check though whether the information provided by the government is reliable and whether the families which are said to be resettled actually do own their land and are in security.  President Cardoso says " sustainable development of the land settlements is a necessary condition for the success of agrarian reform".  I would argue that agrarian reform is a necessary condition for the success of sustainable development. The following website provides very detailed information on this reform. But keep in ming these are figures given by the bureaucrats, the government. Nothing tells us it reflects reality. see
     ISLA (information services Latin America) and the Landless Workers Movement offer a completely opposite view of the situation: their claim is that the so-called land distribution policy of the government profits the rich landowners and that this system is supported by the World Bank. The basic principle of this policy is to have a land bank which allows landowners to sell their land to the government who sells it to the landless peasants on credit. The problem is that few landholders want to sell their land. The selling price is to his benefit so the landowner can sell bad land far from markets and then buy better land near the cities, thus worsening the problem of land concentration.  The plan also causes indebtness of the peasants and the latter are totally dependant on a market price set by the landowners themselves. This formula is promoted by the World Bank which has never (according to the author of this article) bothered to consult to workers' organizations (there exists quite a few) to know their claims and their needs. The author says that the idle land could be purchased by paying an indemnity in the form of treasury bonds of 15 years (what are they?) and the World Bank could then invest in bettering conditions of life of the peasants. The legal means to do such a thing are in the Constitution.
Next research: try to evaluate the objectivity of each party and see how things can be improved.
 Could we think of a way to reduce the speculative land market?
Under the current laws, land in "effective use" (that is, cleared) cannot be claimed for land reform. Need to change that law.
We could encourage the Brazilian state to have a mining agency employing local people. If clearing is no more a legal way to claim land and if mining is managed by the government then both mining and land clearance will be reduced
Also, the threats of disappropriation of uncleared land should be reduced. Have to come up with criterias which ensure fair land rights so that people are not tempted to clear just for that. If people manage to sustain themselves by an activity which does not imply clearance, they should be given a right to own the land.

11/16/02
 

Cardoso claims that the legal procedures for land appropriations have been simplified and that financial resources are released more quickly.  He also claims that the Rural land Tax which was amended in 1996 increased the rate from 4.5% to 20% for large unproductive landholdings (to discourage ownership of land for mere speculation) and simplified the collection of the tax. He has plenty of good intentions stated at the beginning of his second administration. They all boil down to the intention to resettle landless families and implement agrarian reform by cooperation with federal government and municipalities to ensure that the families have ways to sustain themselves.  Cardoso's agrarian reform has excellent components. The flaw is that it promotes colonization. My point is that the forest already contains enough landless peasants. We cannot deal with those already there plus new waves of migrants. The official site for agrarian reform says that 150 million hectares would be needed if the government were to resettle the several millions of landless families. It says that there certainely isn't such a big area available. Above I have cited from my main source that about 170 million hectares lay idle. My guess is that Cardoso's survey does not acknowledge the extent to which the land is used for speculation because many members from the government actually own this land.  This is why I am being very critical about the numbers given on this site. Unfortunately I do not have the time at this point to find studies on this. So I think we should encourage the new government to use some of the policies which the previous government came up with but don't seem to have implemented effectively enough, but it should remove the colonization plan and expropriate more of the unproductive land which lays in the south. GIS surveillance could be a good way to control the use of land.  It should reform the system by which the land is redistributed. Instead of having a land bank as explained above, it should expropriate speculators from fertile idle land and give that land to the peasants. In return these peasants would have an obligation of production. They should produce staple food for local markets which Brazil is currently importing. In this way, land reform should be a benefit to the country (speculation only means personal enrichment, not growth of GDP, whereas a decrease in imports is good for the economy).
The Landless Workers' Movement expects the change of government to have a positive effect on the issue of land reform because Lula has been head of a similar movement and has connections with this movement and does not belong to the elite which usually owns the speculative land.

additions: when the posseiro is evicted from land and resist, he can obtain compensation. he is usually ignorant of the property principle and does not understand the relation he has with the landowner or the company,or the gvt itself

This problem has been adressed by Mission 2006.
 original experimental solution by Salomon, Joey and Marion