Rodrigo Savazoni, Christiane Peres
and Aloisio Milani
Reporters - Agência Brasil

Brasília – The agribusiness, the orthodox economic policy, and the own nature of the Brazilian State are, for the Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST), the greatest barriers for the effective agrarian reform in the country. Reason why two weeks ago more than 12 thousand workers started a march towards Brasilia. Their objective is to expose to society the dissatisfaction of those who do not have land for cultivating crops.

The MST will present four demands to the government this Tuesday (17): the restructuring of the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra), the execution of the National Plan for Agrarian Reform, the creation of a special line of credit, and changes in the definition of unproductive land for expropriation.

The MST defends that the fact that Incra lacks 4 thousand employees makes the agrarian reform process more difficult. For the MST, the institution’s restructuring should expedite the process. They also request the execution of the National Plan for Agrarian Reform announced in 2003, which is the settlement of a total of 430 thousand families until the end of the Lula’s administration. They sustain that only 60 thousand families were settled and that there are still 370 thousand families remaining, for only 20 months of the current administration.

Their third request is the creation of the special line of credit for settled families. They criticize current bureaucracy, which ends up impeding access of small agriculture entrepreneurs to loans.

The last issue is the change in the index that the Ministry of Agrarian Development (MDA) defined to classify farm productivity, which determines if an area will be expropriated to be included in the agrarian reform. According to the MST, this index was last set in 1975 and since then, there were many technological innovations, which influence the classification of unproductive land.

This third MST march to Brasilia was organized by Via Campesina, the international non-governmental organization that fights for rural people’s rights worldwide. The protest, which gathered this year three times more people than previous ones, took a year to be organized.

Translation: Andréa Alves