A Piece of Land or Peace on the Land: How Much Is a Peasant's Life Worth in Brazil?

Abstract

Land inequality in Brazil is alarming and several poor individuals living in rural areas do not have enough income to survive decently. The struggle to access land should lead to a paradigm shift with social movements leading this process since democratization. Their strategies vary, but usually focus on complementary activities of mass mobilization that culminate in the occupation of unproductive land that is not fulfilling its social function in order to force expropriation and the creation of new settlements. This study aims to investigate, through empirical evidence, if such strategies are having the desired effect of allowing the poor to access land, without increasing the already high numbers, and potentially aggravating the violent characteristics, of such disputes. During the Cardoso and Lula presidential administrations the relation between the number of new settlements and the number of deaths caused by land disputes increased. However, there is still a long way to go to improve this policy and achieve positive results. Overall, is this struggle for the reduction of inequality in the Brazilian countryside being won? Is the sacrifice paying off? And what is the price regarding the relation between land conflict victims and the creation of new rural settlements?

Understanding land-use change conflict: a systematic review of case studies

“…Yet, our national-scale and regional-scale studies eventually report on the local manifestations of reported land-use conflicts (e.g. Pritchard, 2013;Zimerman 2016), thus increasing the comparability of cases as the scale of the phenomena studied are relatively similar. Moreover, restricting our review to local cases only would come at a cost of the number of cases which was deemed undesirable.…”

Appearances can be Deceptive: Political Polarization, Agrarian Policy, and Coalitional Presidentialism in Brazil

“…Public policies, in this sense, show a significant increase in new rural settlements during the Cardoso and Lula Governments, following the pattern of land occupations. The only difference between these two presidential terms was that the area designated to the new settlements was greater in Lula's administrations than in the Cardoso's, although the number of families was very similar (Zimerman , 44). Land distribution as public policy was effectively performed during these years of PSDB and PT (with the exception of Rousseff, as already explained) (Figure ).…”

Agroecological peasant territories: resistance and existence in the struggle for emancipation in Brazil

“…While these were positive political changes for peasant and agroecology movements, at the same time a powerful elite constituted by large plantation holders, transnational agri-business corporations and local rural eliterepresented by the 'rural bench' in Federal Parliamentdid not completely lose power. In different areas of Brazil, it even expanded its control over land and other resources, often at the expense of more vulnerable populations of rural workers, smallholder farms, indigenous peoples, quilombolas, mineworkers and rubber-tappers (Zimerman 2010(Zimerman , 2016.…”