AGRARIAN
REFORM |
III- AGRARIAN REFORM IN BRAZIL
3.1 Historical Perspective
3.2 The Land Statute
3.3 Colonization Projects
3.4 ResultsThe history of agrarian reform in Brazil is one of lost opportunities. In the 18th century Brazil, still a Portuguese colony, did not have the social movements that democratized access to land and changed the face of Europe. In the 19th century, the specter that spread throughout Europe and served to accelerate social progress did not cross the Atlantic Ocean and affect Brazil with its unjust concentration of land. And, unlike the United States, which, during the period of the settlement of the northeastern and central-west territories, resolved its problem of land access, the Brazilian land settlement -- which is still far from complete -- continued to follow the old latifúndio model, dominated by the same old rural oligarchy.
Although the socialist revolutions of the 20th century -- principally, those in Russia and China -- attracted the attention of a portion of the Brazilian intellectual elite, their influence was never anything more than theoretical. Nor did Brazil have the type of wars that gave impetus to the agrarian reforms in Italy and in Japan, for example. Neither did the country experience a revolution with a strong rural worker base, like that of Emiliano Zapata in Mexico at the beginning of the century.
Under the First Republic (1889-1930), large areas of land were incorporated into the productive system, and European and Japanese immigrants began to play a relevant role. The number of properties and of property owners increased, compared with prior decades, but the land structure remained essentially unchanged.
The revolution of 1930, which overthrew the coffee-based oligarchy, greatly stimulated the industrialization process, recognized the legal rights of urban workers, and gave the State the principal role in the economic process, but it did not intervene in the agrarian area. At the end of the Second World War, Brazil returned to democracy and proceeded with its transformation process of accelerated industrialization and urbanization. The agrarian question then surfaced as an issue and the country recognized it as an obstacle to development. The National Congress considered dozens of agrarian reform bills, but none was passed into law.
At the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, increased popular participation amplified the debate. The government considered the so-called basic reforms (agrarian, urban, banking and university) to be essential for the economic and social development of the country. Of all the reforms, agrarian reform drew the most attention. In 1962, the government created the Superintendency of Agrarian Policy (Superintendência de Política Agrária - SUPRA) and made it responsible for the implementation of agrarian reform.
In March 1963, the Rural Worker Statute (Estatuto do Trabalhador Rural) was approved. This statute regulated labor relations in the countryside, which until then were beyond the scope of labor legislation. One year later, on March 13, 1964, the President signed a decree that authorized the expropriation of 10 kilometer strips of land contiguous to federally constructed highways, railways and dams. In a message to Congress on March 15, the President proposed a series of "indispensable and pressing" measures to "address the old and just aspirations of the population." Agrarian reform was at the top of the list.
But time ran out. On March 31, 1964, the military overthrew the President and initiated the cycle of military governments that would endure for 21 years.
Soon after taking power, the military added agrarian reform to its priority objectives. It immediately formed a working group, under the direction of the Ministry of Planning, to draft an agrarian reform bill. The group worked fast and, on November 30, 1964, the President, following the National Congress' approval, signed Law No. 4,504, which dealt with the Land Statute.
The text -- long, detailed, comprehensive and well prepared -- constituted the first government-drafted agrarian reform proposal in Brazilian history.
Instead of distributing property, the economic model of the Brazilian military regime (1964-84) promoted the modernization of the latifúndio by means of strongly subsidized and abundant rural credit. But the ample, cheap money, together with the push for soybean cultivation -- to generate large surpluses for export -- resulted in the absorption of small rural landholdings by medium- and large-sized properties: soybean cultivation required large properties, and the credits facilitated land acquisition. Thus, the more land a proprietor had, the more credit he received and the more land he could purchase.
The "Brazilian miracle" occurred during this period; the entire economy grew vigorously. The country quickly urbanized and industrialized, without having to democratize landownership or to develop a domestic rural market. The agrarian reform project disappeared as an issue, and the legacy of land and income concentration remained untouched. Brazil is at the door of the 21st century, but it still has not resolved a problem rooted in the 16th century.
Since 1970, the federal government has launched a number of special regional development programs as substitutes for agrarian reform. Among them, the National Integration Program (Programa de Integração Nacional - PIN, 1970); the Program for Land Redistribution and Stimulus of the Agro-industry of the North and Northeast (Programa de Redistribuição de Terras e de Estímulo à Agroindústria do Norte e Nordeste - PROTERRA, 1971); the Special Program for the San Francisco Valley (Programa Especial para o Vale do São Francisco - PROVALE, 1972); Program of Agricultural and Agromineral Centers of the Amazon (Programa de Pólos Agropecuárias e Agrominerais da Amazônia - POLAMAZÔNIA, 1974); and the Program for Development of the Integrated Areas of the Northeast (Programa de Desenvolvimento de Áreas Integradas do Nordeste - POLONORDESTE, 1974).
The PIN and the PROTERRA were the programs that enjoyed the most attention and received a significant amount of resources. With the goal of occupying the part of the Amazon that is along the Trans-Amazon highway, the PIN created farming settlements and, according to the saying at that time, sought to "integrate the men without land in the northeast with the land without men in Amazônia."
In practice, it turned out that the majority of the nearly 5,000 families that were relocated to the region came from the extreme south of the country, principally the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, and not from the northeast. Subsequent studies revealed that the program was costly, benefited fewer families than projected, and had an insignificant impact on the region.
The performance of PROTERRA also left much to be desired: the program expropriated parcels of land selected by the owners, paid cash on the spot, and provided highly subsidized credits to the landowners. Four years after its inception, the program had resettled only about 500 families.
During the first 15 years in which the Land Statute was in force (1964-79), the section related to agrarian reform was virtually abandoned, while the section dealing with agricultural policy was carried out on a large scale.
In total, only 9,327 families benefited from agrarian reform projects, and 39,948 from colonization projects. In Brazil, the Gini 1 index of land distribution increased from 0.731 (1960) to 0.858 (1970) and to 0.867 (1975). This estimate includes only the distribution of land among landowners. If the Gini index considered also landless families, it would indicate an even larger concentration: 0.879 (1960), 0.938 (1970) and 0.942 (1975). In truth, the small changes in the concentration of landownership in Brazil over the last 50 years were for the worse, as shown in the following graph.
At the beginning of the 1980s, conflicts over landownership intensified in the northern part of the country. This situation resulted in the creation of the Special Ministry for Property Issues (Ministério Extraordinário para Assuntos Fundiários), the Executive Group of the Lands of Araguaia/Tocantins (Grupo Executivo de Terras do Araguaia/Tocantins - GETAT) and the Executive Group of the Lands of the Lower Amazon (Grupo Executivo de Terras do Baixo Amazonas - GEBAM).
However, these three entities achieved very little, legalizing the land titles of only a few thousand squatters. During the six years of the last military government (1979-84), emphasis was placed on granting legal titles to the land. During that period, the government resettled 37,884 families -- an average of only 6,314 families per year -- all in colonization projects.
During the 1964-84 period, an average of 6,000 families were resettled per year, as summarized in the following table:
In 1985, the government of President José Sarney prepared the National Agrarian Reform Plan (Plano Nacional de Reforma Agrária - PNRA) that was authorized in the Land Statute. The plan's goals were extremely ambitious: the resettlement of 1,400,000 families over a five-year period. However, the five-year plan succeeded in resettling only about 90,000 families.
In the 1980s, the organized social movements defending agrarian reform made a great deal of progress and the state agencies responsible for landed property issues grew in size and strength. Almost every Brazilian state had such an agency and, overall, state-level measures benefited almost as many families as did those of the federal government.
During the Fernando Collor government (1990-92), the resettlement program came to a halt; there was no land expropriated for agrarian reform purposes. The Itamar Franco government (1992-94) resumed the agrarian reform program. It approved an emergency program to resettle 80,000 families, but it succeeded in assisting only 23,000, implementing 152 projects in an area of 1,229,000 hectares.
At the end of 1994, thirty years after the promulgation of the Land Statute, the number of families that had benefited from the agrarian reform and colonization projects of the federal and state governments was on the order of 300,000. This is a rough estimate due to the wide range of criteria used and to the inadequate census data for the 1964-94 period.
1 The Gini index measures the degree to which the distribution of income, or of some other resource, is unequal. The index ranges from a minimum of zero to a maximum of one. "Zero" represents no inequality and "one" signifies the highest degree of inequality. (Return to text)