As part of the day of mobilizations for the struggles for agrarian reform, families from the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST, in Portuguese) occupied unproductive areas in the northern region of Brazil.
The actions took place in three states – Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco and Paraíba – in the early hours of Sunday morning to demand that the federal government comply with the agrarian reform policy.
Around a thousand families occupied the CopaFruit company’s farm, located near the Federal Institute of the Sertão de Pernambuco in the city of Petrolina, Pernambuco state, the third occupation MST carried out in the state this weekend.
“It’s an area with all the characteristics to be made available for agrarian reform. It doesn’t fulfill its social function,” MST state leader in Pernambuco, Florisvaldo Araújo told, BdF.
“The property has stopped paying workers’ rights, it has several debts with banks and public agencies such as Codevasf [the São Francisco and Parnaíba Valley Development Company], it has suspended water and power supply and produces nothing.”
In the city of Mossoró, Rio Grande do Norte state, around 200 families from the Chico Mendes brigade occupied the experimental farm of the Federal Rural University of the Semi-Arid (Ufersa, in Portuguese), which had been deactivated for over three years. “Families encamped in the western region of the state are arriving and, so far, we have a list of 300 families that are part of the movement to be settled in this area,” Aglailton Fenandes, from the state leadership of the MST-Rio Grande do Norte, told BdF.
“It’s an area of approximately 400 hectares, and local families had already emphasized the need to claim it to create a settlement. It was chosen because it already belongs to the Brazilian state, to the federal government, so it’s easy to pass it on to landless families,” he said.
In the state of Paraíba, the movement kicked off its Red April activities with the occupation of Carvalho Farm in the town of Solânea. “We inaugurated our day of struggle with more than 50 landless families anxious to have land to work on and decided to enter the city of Solânea at dawn. [They encamped at] An area completely abandoned by its owners, and which does not fulfill any kind of social function,” Paulo Romário, from the state leadership of the MST-Paraíba, told BdF.
“We need to move forward with land reform in Paraíba. As of today, there are 29 landless workers’ encampments in the state that still haven’t been granted land. Therefore, we have placed land reform as central to the development of Paraíba, so that we can move forward in overcoming hunger, misery and poverty and producing healthy food,” he argues.
In addition to the expropriation of specific areas in each state, the occupations are demanding that the federal government resume the agrarian reform policy throughout the country in a context of rising food prices, 145,000 families living in encampments across the country – 100,000 of them linked to the MST – and a recent announcement by the Lula government that it will settle 8% of these landless families.
Pernambuco
In the São Francisco River Valley region, the MST says that 3,000 encamped families are waiting for land to be allocated for agrarian reform. “Last Red April, the government pledged to settle all of them after the occupation of Embrapa [Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation]. However, there is huge difficulty in ensuring that the areas are acquired. Agrarian reform has been destroyed under the Bolsonaro administration and the resumption of the Lula government has not made enough progress to meet the movement’s demands,” Araújo points out.
Rio Grande do Norte
In the state of Rio Grande do Norte, 5,000 families are encamped while waiting for land reform to take effect. The oldest encampment, named Cirilo de Oliveira Neto, has waited 18 years for the land to be titled. The MST points to the slowness of the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra, in Portuguese) to expropriate land in the state: the last settlement to be created in Rio Grande do Norte was Olga Benário, in 2009.
Half of the MST families are encamped in the west of the state, where the Ufersa area is located. “It’s a region with a culture of very productive settlements. That’s why there’s a need to create more settlements here, given that there is a survey of much larger areas where Incra can allocate land for agrarian reform,” Fernandes explains.
Paraíba
In Paraíba, the landless movement points out that 2,000 families are still waiting for their land to be allocated, some of them for more than 20 years.
“We have more than 2,000 families in Paraíba living under a black tarpaulin, who want to have their rights guaranteed. It’s a horror. Since 2018, four comrades have been murdered in Paraíba for fighting for land. There is a latent conflict in the state, but Incra is moving ahead very slowly,” said Romário.
Other side
BdF tried to contact those responsible for the occupied farms through online information, but to no avail. The space remains open for comments.
The report is also waiting to hear back from Incra and Brazil’s Ministry of Education, to which Ufersa is linked.
Red April
Land occupations, marches, food distribution and protests at the Incra headquarters will take place in all regions of the country.
Most of the actions will take place until April 17, the 29th anniversary of the Eldorado do Carajás massacre. Since police repression of a march in the state of Pará in 1996 left 21 peasants dead and another 69 maimed, the date has become the International Day of Struggles for Agrarian Reform.
