SUNS  4308 Friday 23 October 1998



Brazil: Agrarian reform promises to be hot issue



Rio de Janeiro, Oct 21 (IPS/Mario Osava) -- Land rights advocates are unhappy with methods used by Brazil's government to speed up agrarian reform, likely to be a hot issue now that factions on both sides of the land divide have increased their strength in parliament.

Mechanisms the government has adopted to acquire land and thus quicken the pace of agrarian reform include auctions. Gilberto Portes, a national coordinator of the Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST) says they are too market-oriented and not in line with a Constitution that
allows land left idle to be seized.

However, Milton Seligman, president of the National Institute of Land Settlement and Reform (INCRA), said land would continue to be taken over by the state. The main difference, he said, was that the government had decided to diversify the methods it uses to obtain land for redistribution to landless peasants.

The problem, said Seligman, is that expropriation is slow and ends up being "a reward and not a punishment for landowners". He gave the example of a plot which, after an 25-year court case, cost the INCRA 320 million dollars or 12 times its market value.

In Pontal de Paranapanema, a hotbed of land disputes some 600 kms from Sao Paulo, a judge ruled that huge plots occupied by landowners had been public property since 1957, but litigation over the value of improvements to the land has prevented thousands of peasants living nearby from moving in.

Four to five percent of all land taken over by the state is bought directly from the landowner but what often happens is that the MST occupies the plot and starts working it, which allows the landowner to demand a higher price from the government, according to Luis de Matos Pimenta, INCRA's director of agrarian resources.

Now, however, INCRA is using auctions which, in addition to reducing costs, "offers greater transparency and avoids pressure," said Pimenta. As "the only buyer among many sellers," the INCRA benefits from the rivalry among proprietors, who are often pressured by debts and high
interest rates.

Another mechanism is the use of World Bank funds to provide long-term soft loans to farm workers - or small farmers who do not have enough land - to allow them to buy larger plots.

The success of an initial project of 150 million dollars to finance the purchase of land by 15,000 families led to the creation of the Land Bank, through which World Bank and Brazil's government will provide 1.6 billion dollars in loans to the agrarian sector over the next five years.

In the four years that Fernando Henrique Cardoso has been Brazil's president, more than 280,000 families have been given land, which is double the number who have received plots in the previous 30 years of agrarian reform, said Seligman.

Cardoso, reelected at general elections held on Oct. 4, has not set targets for 1999-2002, a period in which land is expected to be hotly debated in parliament given the increased strength of the interest groups on both sides of the reform divide.

The MST had direct links with eight parliamentarians in the outgoing legislature. That faction was increased to 14 - all from the left - on Oct. 4. The movement is also backed by the rest of the opposition leftist front, which has grown from 96 to 110 seats in the 513-member House of Representatives. Only 12 of the 81 senators are from the front.

The 'ruralistas' as the large, anti-reform landowners are called, increased by 50 percent to 48 in the lower and upper houses. But, said MST leader Gilberto Portes, their bloc has up to 160 parliamentarians when people who defend their interests are included.

However, Raul Jungmann, the minister in charge of agrarian policy, contends that "the large landowners have already been defeated politically" and do not represent an obstacle to agrarian reform. He said the stability of the Brazilian currency since 1994, which caused a 60-percent reduction in land prices, and laws imposing taxes on idle land - thus making it easier to take over - had weakened the large landowners. It was only because of the government's fiscal limitations
that land redistribution was no longer moving ahead, Jungmann said.

The lack of resources is likely to worsen with the fiscal reform the Brazilian government is now negotiating with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to obtain loans and cover its balance of payments deficit.

Cuts will be made where possible, which basically means non-compulsory spending will be slashed. The Ministry of Agrarian Policy has already suffered a 170-million-dollar budget cut this quarter and that will make it difficult for it to achieve its goal of settling 100,000 families this year.

Things will be even harder in 1999, when the state has to cut its expenditure by more than 20 billion dollars.

"More conflicts and more pressure" are inevitable in 1999, said Portes, whose movement has become famous for its big protest marches and its occupation of rural land and government buildings to press demands for faster agrarian reform. The MST says it has 60,000 families camped
waiting for land. That's three times as many as five years ago.

Settling a family costs an average of 35,000 reales (nearly 30,000 dollars), according to INCRA. Buying the land accounts for 20 percent of that amount. The rest goes towards helping the family to settle in and start planting, technical assistance, education and local infrastructure.

The 420,000 families settled in the entire history of land redistribution in Brazil are just about a tenth of the country's small farmers, whose number INCRA estimates at four million.

Without a policy to develop the countryside, home to 37 million Brazilians - 23 percent of the population - agrarian reform might become a lost cause since some 440,000 farmers have lost their land and 1.8 million rural workers their jobs in the past three years, according to the Getulio Vargas Fund, an economic research centre.

The main reasons for this are falling commodity prices, high interest rates and mechanisation.