Women's Land Rights and Rural Social Movements in the Brazilian Agrarian Reform

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of the demand for women's land rights in the Brazilian agrarian reform through the prism of the three main rural social movements: the landless movement, the rural unions and the autonomous rural women's movement. Most of the credit for raising the issue of women's land rights rests with women within the rural unions. That women's formal land rights were attained in the constitutional reform of 1988 was largely a byproduct of the effort to end discrimination against women in all it dimensions. The achievement of formal equality in land rights, nonetheless, did not lead to increases in the share of female beneficiaries of the reform, which remained low in the mid-1990s. This was largely because securing women's land rights in practice was not a top priority of any of the rural social movements. Moreover, the main social movement determining the pace of the agrarian reform, the landless movement, considered class and gender issues to be incompatible. By the late 1990s, nonetheless, there was growing awareness that failure to recognize women's land rights was prejudicial to the development and consolidation of the agrarian reform settlements and thus the movement. The growing consensus among all the rural social movements of the importance of securing women's land rights, coupled with effective lobbying, encouraged the State in 2001 to adopt specific mechanisms for the inclusion of women in the agrarian reform.

Pro-Poor Land Reform : A Critique

“…Around the mid-1990s, however, a confl uence of events occurred to bring land reform back onto the policy agendas. Various sporadic but dramatic land-based political confl icts, such as that in Brazil (Petras, 1997(Petras, , 1998Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001;Veltmeyer, 2005aVeltmeyer, , 2005bDeere, 2003;Wright and Wolford, 2003;Robles 2001;Branford and Rocha, 2002;Meszaros, 2000aMeszaros, , 2000b, Zimbabwe (Worby, 2001;Moyo, 2000;Palmer, 2000b;Waeterloos and Rutherford 2004), and Chiapas in Mexico (Harvey, 1998;Bobrow-Strain, 2004) contributed to this policy revival (see also Pons-Vignon and Lecomte, 2004). Also responsible was the realization by promarket scholars that neoliberal policy reforms had diffi culty taking off in most developing countries, which are saddled with the problem of highly skewed land ownership in which most of the rural poor cannot actively participate in the market, or when land markets were distorted by state regulation.…”

“…Collective identity is inherently dynamic, as "it is constructed and negotiated through a repeated process of 'activation' of social relationships connecting the actors" (Melucci, 1985(Melucci, : 793, 1992). This collective perception may cut "horizontally" based on social class divisions, or "vertically" by transcending social class divisions to include other social identities such as community, gender, ethnicity, ideology, or even a shared elite patron (see Alavi, 1973; see also Brass, 1994Brass, , 2000Brass, , 2003bHarvey, 1998;Deere, 2003;Platteau, 1995;Rutten, 2000aRutten, , 2000bPetras and Veltmeyer, 2003). Second, peasants do not usually immediately engage in overt actions, as the "everyday forms of resistance" literature demonstrates.…”

Agrarian change and peasant studies: changes, continuities and challenges – an introduction

“…Scoones (2009, 171-96, this collection) has explicitly raised the same point with regards to the sustainable rural livelihoods approaches. 30 Compare, for example, gender studies (Razavi 2009, 197-226 (this collection), Razavi 2003, O'Laughlin 2008, Deere 2003, Deere and Leon 2001, Kabeer 1999, Tsikata and Whitehead 2003, Agarwal 1994 or the 'everyday peasant politics' (e.g., Scott 1985, Scott and Kerkvliet 1986, Kerkvliet 2009, 227-43 (this collection), 2005, 1993 with the sustainable rural livelihoods approaches (e.g., Scoones 2009, 171-96 (this (ii) (Re)engaging with real world politics A critical approach to rural development is one that has, in Ben White's (1987, 70, emphasis in original) words, 'a continuing concern for issues of social and economic justice as part of our understanding of what rural development means and as an essential part of the meaning of ''development'' itself, however unpopular this emphasis may be in some quarters, at some times.' This implies taking politics seriously.…”

Liberalisation and the debates on women's access to land

“…It took more than a decade of activism by feminists within the movement for women's rights to be strongly articulated by rural social movements in Brazil. 13 This is explained by the multiple and often competing venues for participation which opened up to rural women, and the many priorities of these rural social movements. It was not until the exclusion of women began to have 'real practical consequences for the consolidation of the agrarian reform settlements (the assentamentos) that women's land rights became an issue within the main social movement leading the agrarian reform, the MST .…”