When we talk about agrarian issue in Brazil, we are referring to the occupation, possession and distribution of land, both in its historical aspects and in its geographical aspects.
In this sense, the distribution of land was directly linked to the colonization of our country, which was responsible for a occupation process that privileged only the economic elites of the time, excluding mainly the indigenous people, the blacks and the poor.
The Portuguese crown carried out a system of distribution of large tracts of land, called land grants, aimed only at those people who had large sums of wealth and were able to invest in sugarcane production. Thus, the occupation of the Brazilian agrarian space was marked by the formation of large estates (which are very large rural properties), aiming at the predominant production of a single type of product (the sugar).
This was the case throughout Brazil's agrarian history. After the decline of sugarcane, a mining economy was installed, which intensified the extraction of gold and silver in the country, especially in the Midwest region. This activity also took place involving large landowners, using slave labor and invading indigenous territories.
The nineteenth century saw the peak of the coffee and livestock economy, in addition to being characterized, not unlike the times earlier, by the concentration of land in the hands of few people and by the exploitation of workers in the countryside, even after the end of the slavery.
During the 20th century, the situation has not changed, despite advances in legislation and debates held, especially during the 1950s, when the Peasant Leagues – an organization of rural workers in search of Agrarian Reform. It was extinguished by the military regime that was installed in Brazil in 1964.
Currently, although coffee is still an important element for the Brazilian economy, the main product cultivated in the Brazilian agrarian space is soy, followed by sugarcane. Not unlike the past, there is still a high concentration of land. What has changed is that, starting in the 1970s, in a process called green revolution, there was the replacement of man by machine in the countryside, generating a mass of unemployed.
This process, together with the industrialization of the country, contributed to the intensification of the migration of people from the countryside to the city, also known as rural exodus, which was one of those responsible for the current moment of population swelling in the country's large urban centers.
By Rodolfo Alves Pena
Graduated in Geography
