Brazilian Agrarian Social Movements

Rebecca Tarlau, Anthony Pahnke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138665682
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317214854
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Globale Entwicklungsstudien

Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this volume, individual contributions from a variety of researchers across the field highlight seven key characteristics of contemporary Brazilian resistance that have broader resonance in the region and beyond: the growth of international networks, the changing structure of state–society collaboration, the deepening of territorial claims, the importance of autonomy, the development of alternative economies, continued opposition to dispossession, and struggles over the meaning of nature. By analyzing rural mobilization in Brazil, this collection offers a range of insights relevant to rural contention globally. Each contribution in this title increases our understanding of alternative agricultural production, large-scale development projects, education, race and political parties in the contemporary agrarian context. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Understanding rural resistance: contemporary mobilization in the Brazilian countryside

Anthony Pahnke, Rebecca Tarlau and Wendy Wolford

Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this introductory paper, we synthesize the literature on agrarian resistance in Brazil and situate recent struggles in Brazil within the Latin American context more broadly. We highlight seven key characteristics of contemporary Latin American resistance, which include: the growth of international networks, the changing structure of state–society collaboration, the deepening of territorial claims, the importance of autonomy, the development of alternative economies, continued opposition to dispossession, and struggles over the meaning of nature. We argue that by analyzing rural mobilization in Brazil, this collection offers a range of insights relevant to rural contention globally. Each contribution in this collection increases our understanding of alternative agricultural production, large-scale development projects, education, race and political parties in the contemporary agrarian context.

Introduction

Brazil has long been recognized as a country of contrasts (Bastide 1959; Eakin 1998). Rich in natural resources from arable land to water, forests and gold, high levels of inequality have perpetuated poverty, marginalization and violence. Known for its open, welcoming culture, Brazil has been governed by a minority elite often criticized for its lack of transparency or accountability; in a country where ‘all politics are personal’, great emphasis is placed on ‘knowing who you’re talking to’, in Roberto da Matta’s (1991) memorable words. In recent years, as Brazil’s economic growth and governmental programs have been praised for reducing poverty and hunger, mass protests throughout the country have exposed the fractures of a so-called emerging economy in which structural forms of discrimination and poverty are still evident.

Nowhere are these contrasts more evident than in the countryside, where great agricultural promise has generated boom cycles in key commodity crops while millions of rural landholders and workers live in poverty. Forty years of agricultural modernization and development in large part due to the introduction of ‘Green Revolution’ technologies – which have been, and remain, contested by a myriad of social actors – have made Brazil globally competitive in the production and export of major commodities, including corn, soy, cotton, rice, orange juice and livestock. At the same time, the country has enacted one of the largest agrarian reforms of the late twentieth century. Policies that support large-scale export-oriented agriculture, including subsidized credit (particularly in the early years of development in the Center–West grasslands known as the cerrado), deregulation and privatization, co-exist with government programs that support the redistribution of land and wealth.

Brazil is simultaneously praised as the site of a new ‘economic miracle’ in commodity agriculture (The Economist 2010), and a global referent for transnational peasant organizing around agro-ecological alternatives (Hardt and Negri 2004, 280; McMichael 2006). The contrasting realities in the countryside are mirrored in the creation of two separate ministries – one for agriculture, dominated by agribusiness and large farmers, and one for agrarian development, dominated by concerns for small farmers and the rural poor. As Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, Welch, and Gonçalves (2010) argue, these two ministries represent two different territorial imaginaries, one dominated by capitalist calculations of profit and extraction and the other by a peasant understanding of livelihood (see also Martins 1981).

In this collection, we analyze rural social movements as expressions of the contrasts – or contradictions – identified above. Persistent, structural rural poverty, challenged daily by peasant, small producer, indigenous and landless worker resistance, causes us to question the promise of dominant agrarian development strategies. Together, the papers argue for a nuanced understanding of the ways in which different actors negotiate new modes of political activity (and new forms of ‘being’ political) as they construct meaningful livelihoods through production, social reproduction and organization. We argue that these movements are not simply a reaction to, or rejection of, changing conditions – to neoliberalism or globalization or even to poverty and hunger. Rather, these movements produce and represent new agrarian identities that provide the symbolic, ideological and material means to make sense of – and resist – political and economic extraction in the contemporary conjuncture. These identities and meanings resonate globally even as they themselves are always context-specific, constructed in particular times and places and embedded in long histories of production and social reproduction.

All of the papers in this collection deal with social movements mobilizing in the Brazilian countryside. The focus on one country may seem narrow, but Brazil’s size and diversity provides for a variety of comparisons. There are of course parallels across Latin America as a whole; all of the movements featured in this collection were formed during what scholars call the ‘third wave of democracy.’¹ Regime change across the region in the late 1900s ushered in new constitutions, which in many cases explicitly sought to deepen and extend the inclusion of marginalized populations. The movements in this collection are also being shaped by a ‘fourth wave’ of democracy in which large-scale popular mobilizations with strong anti-neoliberal sentiment resulted in the election of left-leaning – often called populist – governments across Latin America. These governments – from Venezuela to Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Brazil – engage in new ways with social movements like the ones discussed in this collection. Political actors in both state and civil society perform complicated dances between participation and inclusion on the one hand and resistance and exclusion on the other.

In what follows, we outline the contemporary context in which the social movements included in this collection are operating. We discuss the relevance of Brazilian rural movements for social movement theory, and vice versa; the movements featured in this collection provide empirical examples of resistance, as well as theoretical insights into the relationship between movements and states, people and power, and nature and society. We then outline the essays in the collection, grouping them into four themes: alternative economies and development strategies; education of/in the countryside; identity and race; and party politics. We conclude the introduction by exploring some of the methodological questions and potential tensions inherent in studying and working with social movements. We ask how our position and positionality within the academy shape the questions we ask and subjects we entertain. We speak to the importance of acknowledging these tensions, insisting that the tensions are productive as long as research is responsible, accountable and transparent.

Contemporary mobilization in Brazil: a history of protesting monoculture

The economic, political and cultural histories of rural Brazil are histories dominated by large-scale agricultural production. From the first sugarcane plantations in the early 1500s to coffee, tobacco, cattle and dairy, elite land-holding families have governed in the countryside and in national politics. While much has been written about smallholders – from plantation workers with small plots of land to escaped slaves, frontier colonists and millenarian radicals – who have worked at the margins to fight for autonomy on the land, the options available to these actors have very much been conditioned by production and reproduction of the large estates. As a result, it is fair to say that collective resistance in rural Brazil has been historically and is today a rejection of landed elites and large-scale agricultural production. One key element of this rejection is certainly the size of ownership and production; Brazil has the second highest degree of concentration in land ownership in the western hemisphere. But another key element of rejection and resistance is the monocultural orientation of most large-scale plantation production. The singular focus on particular commodity crops sits in direct opposition to the diversified family farm practiced and idealized by many participants in rural social movements.

A central goal of this volume is to explore this opposition in contemporary forms of rural contention and modes of movement organization. The dominant economic model in Brazil today privileges agro-industrial exports, reducing the factors and outputs of production in rural areas to commodities. This view has worldwide reach and ambition; agribusiness elites in the United States and Europe develop the latest genetically modified crops, not in order to sustain the land or farmers or to keep students in rural schools, but so that corporations and large landowners will make a profit. This approach to farming is capital and land-intensive but usually operates with as few people as necessary. By ‘farming without farmers’, the countryside is reduced to a vehicle for accumulation to the benefit of people and places elsewhere. Rural movements in Brazil today need to be understood in light of this model of farming, even as different movements position themselves differently vis-à-vis the model. Presenting these movements together in this collection thus gives us a unique opportunity to understand the broader conjuncture as well as to analyze and compare mobilization efforts.

The papers in this collection examine social movements that in some way are focused on life and the land. Their campaigns shed light on the transformation of rural life; they provide us with tools for thinking through the specific ways that access to land is changing in particular places and how new modalities of land tenure shape broader changes in the regional and global economy. That these actors are at the forefront of a global ‘movement of movements’ (Mertes 2004), or struggles for an alternative forms of globalization, suggests that academic scholarship needs to take seriously the complexity of land–labor relationships in the global political economy.

The particular dynamics of capital accumulation today have thrown the various meanings of land – as territory, soil, livelihood, homeland, home, place, commodity, speculative asset, reservoir for future generations, and political platform – into dramatic tension. New political, social and economic imperatives and possibilities are in turn being shaped by – and re-shaping – property relations, the forces of production and new political subjects. As the authors in this collection demonstrate, the supposed death of the peasantry and the move to the industrial, modern city as part of the linear model of development has been greatly complicated by failures of that vision itself, and by everyday acts of resistance and large-scale, sustained mobilizations.

The topic of this collection is timely and important. The purpose of this collection is not to provide grand theories of agrarian change in Brazil, but rather to build an analytical toolkit for understanding contemporary struggles for alternative economies, the provision of public services, political representation and conflicts surrounding race and ethnicity, in the countryside of Brazil, one of the major agricultural powerhouses of the developing world. The key categories of analysis here are applicable to other regions. The authors suggest that in order to understand contemporary agrarian transformations, we need to draw from theories of access, accumulation and extraction in agrarian studies, including: theories of property and land, property as theft, property as accumulated labor, property as a social relationship or a bundle of rights; theories of differentiation and ongoing struggle over surplus and the means of production, primarily if not only the land; theories of moral economy and the relationship between custom, transgression and law; theories of hegemony and the tensions between consent and coercion.

Working within these theoretical frameworks, scholars in agrarian studies have shed considerable light on the presence, nature and effects of resistance. One could argue that the subaltern nature of peasants across time and place has led scholars of agrarian life to focus on contestation, whether through revolution (Moore 1993), collective mobilization (Wolf 1969; Davidson 1974; Paige 1978), or engagement in small, even hidden, acts referred to as the ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1994), from foot-dragging to sabotaging grain supplies. Much of this literature is ‘transitional’, studying the transition from ‘pre-modern’ life, whether feudalism, subsistence, migratory or tributary, to market society, both capitalist and socialist. That this transition has been enacted on the backs of the peasantry through the forced re-allocation of surplus is a key insight from the field of agrarian studies. Current indigenous resistance to neoliberalism, exemplified especially by the Zapatista movement (Harvey 1998), highlights new forms of contention that challenge prior understandings of revolution by contesting identities, models of development and governmental organization. The papers in this collection provide cases that speak to these theoretical frameworks, but in grounded ways that offer a lens for connecting the specific to the abstract or general.

Existing literature and debates

The nature of contemporary rural resistance

It would be difficult to analyze agrarian politics in contemporary Brazil without engaging debates surrounding neoliberalism. For more than two decades, scholars in Brazil and around the world have investigated the rapidly shifting terrain of neoliberalism – a still-hegemonic mode of organizing politics and economy that has shaped the ‘field of possibility’ for actors globally. In many ways, neoliberalism has exacerbated the production principles of monoculture; the withdrawal of state support for farming in the 1990s along with the fall of tariffs and other protection for the domestic economy increased vertical integration along the agro-industrial chain. Whether conceived as a class project with specific actors ultimately responsible for creating these practices, or systems of thought generated from greater discourses, social movements such as the ones featured in this collection have organized campaigns to highlight the reductive and unequa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Understanding rural resistance: contemporary mobilization in the Brazilian countryside
• 2. Institutionalizing economies of opposition: explaining and evaluating the success of the MST’s cooperatives and agroecological repeasantization
• 3. Rural unions and the struggle for land in Brazil
• 4. Engaging the Brazilian state: the Belo Monte dam and the struggle for political voice
• 5. Education of the countryside at a crossroads: rural social movements and national policy reform in Brazil
• 6. Learning as territoriality: the political ecology of education in the Brazilian landless workers’ movement
• 7. The Landless invading the landless: participation, coercion, and agrarian social movements in the cacao lands of southern Bahia, Brazil
• 8. The Brazilian quilombo: ‘race’, community and land in space and time
• 9. Can urban migration contribute to rural resistance? Indigenous mobilization in the Middle Rio Negro, Amazonas, Brazil
• 10. Lula’s assault on rural patronage: Zero Hunger, ethnic mobilization and the deployment of pilgrimage
• 11. Managing transience: Bolsa Família and its subjects in an MST landless settlement
• Index