Brazil's Land Reform Passes Target
12/25/98
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: DEVELOPMENT-BRAZIL: Land Reform Passes Target
Source: InterPress Service
Status: Copyright 1998, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 25, 1998
/** ips.english: 560.0 **/
** Topic: DEVELOPMENT-BRAZIL: Land Reform Passes Target **
** Written 3:08 PM Dec 25, 1998 by newsdesk in cdp:ips.english **
Copyright 1998 InterPress Service, all rights reserved.
Worldwide distribution via the APC networks.
*** 22-Dec-98 ***
Title: DEVELOPMENT-BRAZIL: Land Reform Passes Target
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 22 (IPS) - The Brazilian government has
settled 287,539 families since 1995, surpassing its agrarian
reform target of 280,000 families, announced Minister of Agrarian
Policy Raul Jungmann.
That means some 1.5 million people escaped social
marginalisation, and demonstrates ''the government's will to
settle the social debt,'' stressed President Fernando Henrique
Cardoso, who congratulated the minister for his efforts.
In the past four years, seven billion reals (5.83 billion
dollars) were spent on land distribution and rural settlements,
double the entire amount invested in the previous 30 years, said
Jungmann.
One of the effects of the growing land reform was a reduction
of violence in the countryside, with murders of rural workers
diminishing by half from 1996 to 1998, said the minister.
But the most promising result has been ''the historic defeat of
the latifundio (large estate)'' through laws that give rise to
''new hopes for those who were the condemned of the earth,'' said
the minister, in a message to the nation Monday in which he summed
up the achievements of the government's land reform programme.
As an example of that change he mentioned the rise in the Rural
Territorial Tax, which taxes land left idle at up to 20 percent of
its value, making it bad business to own extensive landholdings.
Other new laws facilitated and expedited the expropriation of
land not serving a ''social function'' - in other words, land that
neither produces nor provides jobs, which can be confiscated for
agrarian reform purposes according to the Brazilian constitution,
promulgated in 1988.
Since the national currency was stabilised in 1994, land has
lost its function as an instrument for protecting wealth against
high inflation. Its market value has fallen 60 percent since the
'Plan Real' went into effect in 1994, according to the Ministry of
Agrarian Reform.
But the Landless Movement (MST), which has become a high
profile organisation in the fight to broaden and accelerate
agrarian reform in recent years, announced that it would step up
its activity next year, especially the occupation of unproductive
land.
The MST rejects the statistics provided by the government on
the number of families settled, and is opposed to the Land Bank, a
mechanism for distributing land to peasant farmers through
financed acquisition, which the government adopted to increase the
land distributed and cut the costs of settling families.
The Land Bank is ''market agrarian reform'' which will actually
increase the concentration of land in Brazil by paying landowners
more than the property is worth, thus allowing them to buy up
better property, charged Jose Pedro Stedile, one of the national
coordinators of the MST.
The Catholic Church Pastoral Land Commission released figures
that contradicted Jungmann's assertion that rural violence had
diminished. According to the Commission, murders over land
disputes have increased again this year, with 31 cases already on
the books up to Dec. 15.
But the big problem of agrarian reform is its limited effect in
a country that is experiencing a growing rural exodus. The 1995-96
Agricultural Census, carried out by the governmental Brazilian
Institute of Geography and Statistics, found that the number of
people working in agriculture had shrunk from 23.39 million
workers in 1985 to 17.93 million in 1995 - a drop of 5.46 million
people in 10 years.
And door-to-door surveys indicate that the decline has become
even sharper since 1996. (END/IPS/tra-so/mo/ag/sw/98)
Origin: Montevideo/DEVELOPMENT-BRAZIL/
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