Landless Workers' Movement - The Lula Government and The 2005 March For Agrarian Reform

The Lula Government and The 2005 March For Agrarian Reform

The beginning of the Lula government was regarded by the MST as the beginning of a Left and therefore friendly government, the movement deciding to shun occupations of public buildings in favor of actions directed solely towards private landed states, in a second wave of occupations from 2003 onwards. However, the increasingly conservative positions taken by the government, including a low profile stance on land reform (out of a promised grand total of 430,000 resettled families, Lula had managed to actually settle a mere 60,000 in the first two years of his administration, actually less than what had been achieved by Cardoso during his first term) decided the movement to change stance already in early 2004, when it began to occupy, again, public buildings and Banco do Brasil agencies.

In June 2003, the MST also occupied the R&D farm of Monsanto Company in the state of Goiás. On March 7, 2008, a similar action was performed by women activists in another Monsanto facility at Santa Cruz das Palmeiras, in the state of São Paulo, where a nursery and an experimental patch of genetically modified maize were destroyed, slowing ongoing scientific research. MST claimed to have destroyed the research facility to protest the government's support for the extensive use of GMOs supplied by transnational corporations in agriculture: Already in 2003,Lula had authorized the legal using and sale of GM soybeans, which led MSt's Stedile to label him a "transgenic politician". And, indeed, the dominance of transnationals over Brazilian seed production was expressd by the fact of the Brazilian hybrid seed industry being in the early 2000s already 82% Monsanto-owned. The MST views this state of affairs as detrimental to the development of organic agriculture as well as offering the possibility of a future health hazards - similar to those already posed by the intensive use of pesticides - in spite of enhanced economic activity. Monsanto was later targeted by MST leader Stedile as one of the ten transnational companies controlling virtually the whole of international agrarian production and commodities trading.Another similar episode happened in 2006, when the MST occupied a research station in Paraná owned by Swiss corporation Syngenta, which had produced GMO contamination in the area of the Iguaçu National Park. After a bitter confrontation over the existence of the station (which included easing of previous restrictions by the Lula govenment to allow Syngenta to continue GMO research), the premises were transfered to the Paraná State government and converted into an agroecology research center.

After an exchange of barbs between Lula and Stedile over what the President saw as the unnecessary radicalization of the movement's demands, the MST decided for a huge national demonstrarion: in May 2005, after a two week, 200-odd kilometer march from the city of Goiânia, nearly 13,000 landless workers arrived in their nation's capital, Brasilia. The MST march targeted the U.S. embassy and Brazilian Finance Ministry, rather than President Lula. While thousands of landless carried banners and scythes through the streets, a delegation of 50 held a three-hour meeting with Lula, who donned an MST cap for the cameras. During this session Lula recommitted to settling 430,000 families by the end of 2006 and agreed to allocate the necessary human and financial resources to accomplish this goal. He also committed to a range of related reforms, including an increase in the pool of lands available for redistribution . Later the Lula government would claim to have resettled 381,419 families between 2002 and 2006 - a claim that was disputed by the MST. The movement claimed that the numbers had been doctored by the inclusion of people already living in areas (national forests and other managed areas of environmental protection, as well as other already existing settlements) where their presence had only been legally acknowledged by the government. The MST also criticised Lula's administration to call mere land redistribution by means of handing out of small plots land reform, when it was simply a form of welfarism (assistencialismo) unable to change the productive system.

The march was held to demand – among other things – that Brazil's President Lula implement his own limited agrarian reform plan rather than spend the project’s budget on servicing the national debt . Several leaders of the MST met with President Lula da Silva on May 18, 2005- a meeting that had been resisted by Lula since his taking of office. The leaders presented President Lula with a list of 16 demands of which included economic reform, greater public spending, and public housing. Afterwards during interviews with Reuters, many of the leaders said that they still regarded President Lula as an ally but demanded that he accelerate his promised land reforms. However, late the same year, in September, João Pedro Stedile declared that, as far as land reform was concerned, Lula's government was "finished". By the end of Lula's first term, it was clear that the MST had decided to act again as a separate movement, irrespective of the government's agenda. As far as the MST was concerned, the greatest gain it received from the Lula government was the non-criminalization of the movement itself- the tough anti-occupation measures taken by the Cardoso government being left in abeyance through non-enforcing. Attempts at lawmaking that could be tailored in order to define the MST as a "terrorist organization" were also successfully opposed by Workers' Party congresspersons. Neverthless, the Lula government never acted in tandem with the MST, according to a general pattern of keeping organized social movements outside the fostering of the government's agenda.

Into a nutshell, however, as stated by a German author, in terms of land reform, what the Lula government did in general was to foward, year after year, a blueprint that was also regularly blockaded by regional agrarian elites.