Abstract
The Landless Workers Movement (MST) is one of the most important social movements in the world for the implementation of agrarian land reform. Their fight for access to land has been based on the premise that land should serve a “social function.” Since its birth in the 1980s, the MST has settled more than one million people in Brazil on approximately 35 million acres of land (an area about the size of Paraguay). Many of the settlements across the country have demonstrated a commitment to move beyond social justice by combining environmental justice into their discourses and activities, and pinning their struggle with the fight for food sovereignty. This ethnographic research explored the different ways that environmental discourses and activities are being incorporated into the movement by describing the experience of the 12 de Outubro settlement in the state of Mato Grosso. Interviews with members of 12 de Outubro reveal that by implementing alternative agricultural methods like agroecology and agroforestry, they believe they are able to restore and protect the land that they acquire, while working towards food sovereignty. Secondly, they hope to demonstrate that their struggle for access to land is not just for individual benefit, but rather, that by growing healthy food sustainably and by developing a cooperative that benefits the entire community, land is fulfilling the social function that it should. Finally, they believe that their activities have connected them to the larger urban community through the establishment of CANTASOL, a solidarity commercialization system, extending awareness about food, the environment, and social justice into the urban sphere.
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Notes
- 1.
Total area of 903,378.292 km2.
- 2.
Between 1960 and 1970 the estimated population was about 117,608 people, but by 1980 that number had jumped to 433,545 (IBGE, Censos demográficos de 1980, 1970, 1960). According to the 2010 census, the total population in Mato Grosso was 3,035,122 people (IBGE).
- 3.
Currently, agriculture makes up about 40% of the state’s GDP (IBGE). Mato Grosso has steadily increased its production of soybeans over the past seven years and it currently leads as the state with the highest total production. In 2013, the state was producing 23,417,000 metric tons of soybeans.
- 4.
The total area used for cattle ranching was 24 million hectares, with a total of about 29 million heads of cattle.
- 5.
Illegal possession of land and illegal land titling. The word itself refers to drawing up a title and placing it in a box with crickets so that it can appear aged to help individuals legitimatize their illegal possession of land.
- 6.
“Agroboys” is a local term used for the culture of large landowners that have adopted U.S. ranchers fashion and practices. Most of this has been influenced by Texan cowboys and can be traced back to the close connections between Texan ranchers and the expansion of intensified farming in Mato Grosso.
- 7.
The 12 de Outubro settlement was chosen as a study site for this project after I conducted a survey of all of the existing MST settlements and camps in Mato Grosso with help from the Pastoral Land Commission in Brazil. Subsequent interactions with MST members and local NGOs at regional meetings provided some insight on the activities that were taking place at 12 de Outubro which led me to visit and then return for a longer stay to conduct the field work.
- 8.
The Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (INCRA, National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform) is a federal entity has the largest land jurisdiction in the region, it owns land is responsible for land titling. It was formed in 1970 to resettle people at 100,000 families in undesignated or illegally occupied lands, it was also assigned the responsibility of overseeing the colonization of the Amazon during the 1970s.
- 9.
Cooperativa de Produtores Agropecuários da Região Norte de Mato Grosso or Northern Region Cooperative of Agricultural Producers.
- 10.
Sistema Canteiros de Comercialização Solidária (CANTASOL) or Canteiros Solidarity Trade System project.
- 11.
Universidade Estadual do Mato Grosso or Mato Grosso State University.
- 12.
Canteiros is an initiative developed by students and professors at UNEMAT who seek to break past what they considered to be the exclusion and elitism of academia by encouraging the exchange of ideas with the community and engaging in service-learning projects. The objective is to find ways to strengthen the working class, not to maintain inequalities.
- 13.
The idea was modeled after another organization, Instituto Ouro Verde, who had already established a successful community supported agriculture program like this in Alta Floresta, Mato Grosso.
- 14.
The CANTASOL website can be found at: http://cantasol.org.br/portal/.
- 15.
About 25 of the 30 families that participate produce their goods organically (field notes).
- 16.
Feiras da agricultura familiar e reforma agraria or family agriculture and agrarian reform fairs.
- 17.
The MST national movement has a school called Florestan Fernandes in São Paulo, and a research center in Rio Grande do Sul where a few of the individuals from the settlement have spent some time to learning about the different aspects of these alternative agricultural models.
- 18.
Novos Talentos is another program that was established in partnership with the UNEMAT Canteiros initiative.
- 19.
Even though it is a state sponsored school, the community plays a very active role in carefully choosing who is qualified to teach there. The leadership at the settlement takes many steps to ensure that the education imparted there aligns to the movement’s own ideals. They are focused on nurturing critical citizens, people who can think and make decisions collectively.
- 20.
The pedagogic approach at the assentamento school is reminiscent of the Freiren model that was implemented in the CEBs. The school’s regular k-8th grade curriculum and the Novos Talentos classes follow the same bottom-up leadership development in which solidarity and cooperation are favored over individual or elitist relationships. Because of the early connections between the Brazilian liberation theologians of the Catholic Church, the CPT, and the landless, it is not surprising to see this as the model being implemented especially because it promotes liberation and collective thinking.
- 21.
In the audio-visual technologies classes the students learn how to take photos, conduct interviews, film, and utilize computer software to produce short documentaries that explore a variety of themes. The most important aspect of this is that the topics they explore are all related to their own realities, they interview their neighbors and document the issues that they face.
- 22.
The agronomy class is designed to teach the assentados about the importance of agriculture, expose them to different philosophical lines in agriculture, and provide them with tools and training to farm sustainably. They learn how to grow and cultivate crops by experimenting with some of the different systems that they are learning about.
- 23.
The civic engagement class is designed to teach team-building, communication, critical thinking, and community collaboration skills.
- 24.
As part of one her classes, one teacher took the students to the university to show them how the delivery/pick-up of the products worked. One of the students did not understand why some products were sold in a bundle and others by the kilo. So, the teacher grabbed one of the bundles of green onions and counted them out one by one. She explained how light they were and that if sold by the kilo, the producer would not be able to profit very much. Then, she demonstrated by placing the onions on the scale and asking the students to do the math to determine what the profit would be utilizing one approach versus the other (field notes).
- 25.
Daniele pointed out that before she got involved with the Cantasol cooperative project, she had never been exposed to the MST very much other than the comments she heard from her uncles, “I didn’t really understand what the movement was, or what kind of work they do because I didn’t have very much proximity to them because my uncles were always very prejudiced against them. After I met them and started working my admiration became very big. I managed to change the mind of many of them. Here in Brazil that organization suffers a lot from prejudice. And after, when I began to wear the MST shirt, I felt in my own skin what they go through on a daily basis—at the university, on the street. That day at the fair, people stopped to buy things, but when they saw the flag of the movement they did not like that very much” (field notes).
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Chávez, M.A. (2017). It’s Not Just About Us: Food as a Mechanism for Environmental and Social Justice in Mato Grosso, Brazil. In: Werkheiser, I., Piso, Z. (eds) Food Justice in US and Global Contexts. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57174-4_5
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