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Action Card Briefing – April 2007

Brazil's Landless Workers Movement, or in Portuguese Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), is the largest social movement in Latin America with an estimated 1.5 million landless members www.mstbrazil.org.

The aims of MST are:

• To build a different society where people matter more than profit

• To provide land that serves everyone in society

• To guarantee work for all, with fair distribution of land and wealth

• To develop a new way of doing agriculture that does not depend on big agribusiness and that respects the environment

And it has succeeded in:

• Winning land titles for more than 300,000 families in 2,000 settlements

• Establishing a further 180,000 encamped families that are currently awaiting government recognition

• Setting up 96 small and medium-sized cooperatives that process fruit, vegetables, dairy products, grains, coffee, meat, and sweets; such MST economic enterprises generate employment, income, and revenue that indirectly benefit about 700 small towns in rural Brazil

• Founding over 1,000 schools attended by 95,000 children and 17,000 adult learners

• Creating BIONATUR - an MST venture that produces organic seeds – which is reclaiming control of seeds from multinational corporations

In this picture you can see an MST member examining a crop of organic rice on land that the organisation has helped enable him to farm.

Agricultural land use and land reform is a major issue in Brazil where 46% of the land is owned by only 1% of the population, and many of those who have no land are forced to farm in conditions analogous to slavery.

One of the aims of the Trade Justice Movement is to do away with unfair trade practices and subsidies in order to make it easier for poorer people in developing areas, such as the landless people of Brazil, to make a decent living for themselves.

In Brazil, further land reform is needed to provide farms and livelihoods for rural communities. 

Send your cards to the UK Department for International Development (DFID) to ask the UK Government to encourage the efforts of the Brazilian Government to assist its landless people, and to support initiatives similar to the MST in other countries where land is unfairly distributed.  Stress the need to do more to reform our agricultural policies in Europe to help farmers throughout the developing world.

Write to: Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP, Secretary of State for International Development, DFID, 1 Palace Street, London SW1E 5HE

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