A Via Campesina Brasil e a avaliação da primeira década de impactos da reforma agrária do Banco Mundial

During the past decade, influenced strongly by World Bank land policies, many governments instituted a new mode of recreating the peasantry, one supposedly led by market forces through credit programs secured by land. Supported by large landowner organizations, defended as a conquest by the rural labor movement and combated by member organizations of the Via Campesina, the new mode of peasant renovation has inspired a diversity of interpretations both positive and negative. To evaluate these events, this article seeks to demonstrate the World Bank's intentionality in urging the implementation of market-led agrarian reform in developing countries; discusses the construction of immaterial territories in the context of this policy; analyzes the development of a people's think tank in response to the agitation of the Via Campesina Brazil and the negative impact of the credit system on peasants.

Direitos de propriedade e usos econômicos da terra:um estudo de caso de assentamentos de reforma agrária no sul do Pará

This article discusses the Brazilian land problem related to property rights of rural land. After emphasizing the importance of land policies in order to define and distribute rural land properties rights, we show how in Brazil the institutions of rural land registering and cadastering as separated processes debilitates the property rights, making them vulnerable to the effective occupying actions. In order to illustrate it, in this article we analyze Data based in a Case Study of conflict and property rights distributions in an important farming and mining region of southern Para state, in Brazil.

Reforma agrária e estrutura fundiária no Brasil: uma análise a partir do I Plano Nacional de Reforma Agrária

Pós-graduação em Economia - FCLAR

Entre a independência e o endividamento: análise da contrarreforma agrária pelo Banco da Terra

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Agrofuel policies in Brazil: paradigmatic and territorial disputes

The expansion of agrofuel crops challenges us to rethink policies, territories, human agency, and the paradigms used to explain them. In Brazil, policies supporting the expansion of agrofuel crops and the intensification of agrofuel production are reorganising rural land use and undermining some forms of participation in the capitalist and family modes of production. To reflect on this new reality, we study peasant movement reactions, proposals, and territorial disputes with agribusiness. Using the Pontal do Paranapanema region of São Paulo state as a case in point, the paper analyses territorial disputes between expanding sugarcane plantations and agrarian reform settlements as well as biodiesel production projects developed by the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the Western São Paulo Federation of Settlement and Family Farmer Associations (FAAFOP). It also analyses the agrofuel policies of other peasant organisations, including Via Campesina. The production of agrofuels has changed the processes of land acquisition and use by both agribusiness and the peasantry, provoking new insights into the nature of territorial conflicts and thereby stimulating the need to revise perspectives on the agrarian question in Brazil.

Pervasive transition of the Brazilian land-use system

Agriculture, deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions and local/regional climate change have been closely intertwined in Brazil. Recent studies show that this relationship has been changing since the mid 2000s, with the burgeoning intensification and commoditization of Brazilian agriculture. On one hand, this accrues considerable environmental dividends including a pronounced reduction in deforestation (which is becoming decoupled from agricultural production), resulting in a decrease of similar to 40% in nationwide greenhouse gas emissions since 2005, and a potential cooling of the climate at the local scale. On the other hand, these changes in the land-use system further reinforce the long-established inequality in land ownership, contributing to rural-urban migration that ultimately fuels haphazard expansion of urban areas. We argue that strong enforcement of sector-oriented policies and solving long-standing land tenure problems, rather than simply waiting for market self-regulation, are key steps to buffer the detrimental effects of agricultural intensification at the forefront of a sustainable pathway for land use in Brazil.