THE land reform is the set of actions and measures aimed at ensuring the fair distribution of land, changing the regimes of use and property, the in order to ensure that most of the arable land is in the hands of a corresponding amount of workers. rural areas. In short, the agrarian reform policy aims to break with the maxim: “a lot of land in the hands of a few”, that is, it aims to end or considerably reduce the amount of large estates in rural areas.
With this premise as the main objective to be met, agrarian reform is a government policy that is usually adopted through the expropriation - with compensation or not - of large estates, especially unproductive ones, and their transfer to those families that do not own land. This transfer can be carried out through direct concession or through flexible and affordable financing.
Brazil has a high concentration of land ownership, as a result of the historical relations of power and land use that marked the colonial period, the monarchy and the Brazilian republic. According to the IBGE, the Gini index in the Brazilian countryside was 0.854, according to a survey carried out with the 2006 Agricultural Census. This index is measured from 0 (for totally egalitarian) to 1 (for totally unequal), revealing the poor distribution of land in the country.
Contrary to what many people think, agrarian reform is not an exclusively socialist agenda, but above all reformist, that is, a perspective of reprogramming the functioning of the capitalist system in order to improve the life conditions. Furthermore, many capitalist countries in developed economies have already carried out agrarian reforms, such as the United States, France and Japan. In the latter, the operationalization of this policy was crucial to increase the level of productivity in the countryside, since the Japanese territory has few agricultural spaces.
In some countries with a socialist system – or, as some point out, planned economy –, the agrarian reform was carried out from the nationalization of land in rural areas. The most emblematic case of this action occurred in China, which, with a large part of its territory made up of deserts, realized the need to expand agricultural productivity in order to guarantee work and food for its large contingent populational. In this perspective, the Chinese expropriated without compensation all private properties in the countryside and directed their use to the peasants, who started to cultivate products previously designated by the government in order to meet the demands of the Marketplace.
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In Brazil, although the Land Statute has existed since 1964, agrarian reform has made little progress in recent decades. In fact, small advances only started in the 1990s, when there was a greater number of expropriations of unproductive latifundia. However, this distribution was not accompanied by a public policy to maintain the families that received the new lands. Thus, the peasants had neither the financial conditions to invest nor a system of logistical integration to transport their production.
Another factor that hinders the reduction of land concentration in Brazil is the rise in the price of land. As a result, expropriations through indemnity became unfeasible, as the State would have to disburse a lot to acquire a small amount of land that, without structure, would not be able to produce with quality. Added to this is the political and economic pressure of agribusiness in Brazil, which is concerned with directing the production line to the foreign market.
Currently, only 20% of rural properties in Brazil have more than 100 hectares. However, these properties occupy more than 80% of the national territory. On the other hand, small properties represent more than 80% of the number of land in Brazil, occupying only 20% of the total rural area. Even so, family farming is responsible for 70% of the bean production, 48% of the corn production and 38% of the coffee production, very significant numbers due to the small amount of land that these workers possess.
The main popular organization fighting for the implementation of agrarian reform in Brazil is the MST (Landless Workers Movement) and the federal agency responsible for its operation is the INCRA (National Institute for the Colonization of Agrarian Reform).
By Me. Rodolfo Alves Pena
