Pipiripau

Paulinho, who works at the national office of the MST, was taking Lungisile, a South African sociologist who works on the land question, along with two young anthropology students from UnB to visit the Oziel Alves II settlement at the edge of the Federal District, and I tagged along. The settlement, called Pipiripau (after the creek near which it stands) is actually a pre-settlement, since the 168 families living there are already living on the land which is to be legalized as their settlement (i.e., not a roadside encampment with little space near a different property to be expropriated), but they haven’t yet been granted legal recognition by the state.

Although the families living there have been struggling for this territory for over seven years now, they still receive no support of any sort from the state, not until they receive title to the land. The land used to be part of a much larger soy plantation, expropriated years before and left unproductive on the hands of varied state bureaucracies. Hence the MST occupation. Over the course of these years, they began whatever production they could, with their own limited resources, and organized themselves politically to demand that the state follow up on its land reform program. Several times, they had to resort to blockading the main highway nearby which connects Brasilia to the North in order to demand meetings with the bureaucracies that have been stalling the process instead of meeting their demands.

There we met Cupim, a young agronomist who is working with the peasants at the Pipiripau on his own account as his MA field work in agroecology through a Spanish university. Cupim and 15 families are starting a project of organic passion-fruit in some of the collective land of the settlement. Other than a few collective areas used for irrigation reservoir, collective crops such as the passion-fruit, and common building structures (for now only a meeting space, but when they obtain government assistance they’ll also set up their own school, daycare, church, community center, etc.), the rest of the territory is organized into 7 hectare plots, set up in four or five groups (called nuclei). Each family then has her own plot and common use of the collective land and property. (These arrangements are made collectively by each settlement on its own terms, depending on the political, cultural, geographical, agricultural, etc., factors of each settlement.)

Only a few of the families are working on the passion-fruit project, since they have very little resources to begin with, especially irrigation, which for now is restrained to a single reservoir (from the waterbed) dug out by an arrangement with a donor ngo. Many families must still resort to non-agricultural work in the nearby towns to make a living, since they are unable to be self-sustaining farmers without enough government assistance, and, which is just as important, not having title to their land yet they are left in an extremely vulnerable situation where any investment they make on the land (such as sowing crops) is a high risk endeavor, since they can be forced off the land any moment.

The majority of peasants there haven’t worked on the land in some time, having tried to carve up a living through whatever jobs they could find in the cities around. And the agricultural experience of most is limited to work in larger plantations that focus on grains and other cash crops. As such, their predominant production (restricted to the few months of the rainy season) are beans, followed by corn. The beans are kept for subsistence the rest of the year, and whatever surplus is sold (in informal markets, since their ‘illegal’ situation as yet precludes them from setting up formal market connections). The corn is used mostly to feed chickens, and some have pigs. These too are kept for subsistence, and the surplus is sold (also informally). Most of these peasants use agrochemicals as fertilizers and pesticides, both from habit, and also from fear of losing too much of their crops otherwise.

The land is somewhat eroded, significantly in places, due to the unsustainable practices of soy plantation that were employed there before the original farm was expropriated. The lack of a strong enough tractor to till the land and clear the rough Cerrado grasses leaves many of the peasants with no alternative but to resort to fire to clear their land. Although strongly discouraged by their own common arrangements, such fires are still used, and often get out of control, resulting in crop loss of other settlement neighbors, as well as the common field space in which many of their chickens roost. Needless to say, such fires getting out of control causes serious problems within the community, who collectively impose restitutions upon those found guilty, and sometimes even resort to expulsions for repeated offences (it seems this happened a handful of times during the past seven years or so).

We visited for some time with dona Almerinda, a charismatic woman from Bahia with deep agroecological knowledge. She never had any formal education, but learned much about medicinal plants from her family. She experimented much with different policultures and varieties of intercropping, as well as with different ways to employ some plant’s oils as pesticides on other crops. Although most peasants have small gardens, mandioca and fruit trees, Almerinda’s garden was clearly more diverse and cared for. She also grows a wide variety of beans, corns, and legumes for her own consumption, unlike most of her neighbors who grow single varieties and attempt to market it. She also has a wide variety of farm animals, such as chickens, pigs, ducks and other fowl, goats, as well as cats and dogs for pets. After having tried to work in the city for some time, and suffering unemployment and hunger, she gave up all she still had and joined the Movement to fulfill her “dream of having her own piece of ground.” She participated in three or four encampments before coming to Pipiripau, because she would always attempt to start her production of crops and animals even while in roadside encampments, causing distress to other campers, who then strongly encouraged her to relocate. Eventually, others in the Movement were able to figure out a way to bring her to this pre-settlement, where she has enough space to have her animals without inconveniencing her community neighbors.

Dona Almerinda is highly regarded in her own community, and also by Cupim, the agronomist who learns agroecology along with her, and also by Lungisile, who was enthralled by her personal story and her productive ability. Lungisile has been visiting Brazil to learn more about our peasant movements for land reform, in order to advance also the struggles in his native South Africa. He tells us that the struggle there, unlike here, is driven mostly ‘top down’ by ngo’s, with very little experience in agriculture and very little ability to maintain coherent and sustainable struggles for agrarian reform. Moreover, settled peasants are now finding that the struggle “for land” cannot stop with the title, but continues just as arduously in the production stage, i.e., on “what to do with the land once you get it.” Hence his interest in Brazil in general, where the struggle “for land” has already advanced to the comprehension of a broader struggle for “agrarian reform”, and his interest in dona Almerinda’s deep agroecological knowledge in particular. For more information on the land struggle in South Africa, see Lungisile’s own websites here and here.

Dona Almerinda told Lungisile that she has a deep passion for Africa and the African people, and that receiving her in her home is already a little fulfillment of her dream of knowing Africa. After their long exchange and after she showed him her gardens, he asked if she would be ready to visit Africa along with him. She, turning red with emotion, tried to say that the people in the country are never ready to travel, but with the reassurance with the others present, she agreed that she would visit if she could. Lungisile said he wants to make arrangements for some people from Brazil to visit South Africa for some three months to share their experiences with agrarian reform and agroecology. He will continue working with the MST during the next three years, and I trust that sooner or later he will bring dona Almerinda to complete her dream of going to Africa, and to advance his own dream of strengthening the South African movements for agrarian reform and agroecological production.

When saying good bye, I thanked dona Almerinda for all she taught us, for hosting us, and asked if I could come visit her again and work her garden with her so I could learn as well. She said I not only could, but should! So we made plans for me to return there after I come back from my trip to the South, and I can hardly wait!

After our visit to the settlement, I returned with the younger folk to their common house in a nearby town for a meal, then we came back to Brasilia to meet another young anthropology grad student, and have a few beers with some other young folk. We talked a lot about our different academic experiences, about life abroad and in Brasilia, about the peasant movements and class struggle, about healthcare and race and gender… It was an amazing time, and after several hours, when my mom came to pick me up, she joined us to talk about bioethics (which my mother studies now at the graduate level at UnB) and public health care (with which she has worked her whole life).

These new friends gave me a Via Campesina flag, which is to decorate above my bed, and invited me back to their house to spend Sunday afternoon with them. I, of course, agreed, with much joy.

…and we’re moving forward!

An extremely important victory for the peasant cause: the first expropriation in Brazil due to ecological considerations! The Plantation Nova Alegria (“New Joy”) in the municipality of Felisburgo, in the Jequitinhonha Valley of the state of Minas Gerais, was expropriated on the 20th of this month and the victory was pronounced today in the Movement’s website here.

According to the superintendent of our national agency for land reform (INCRA), Gilson de Souza, “the fact that the decision was based on an environmental crime does not make any less relevant” other criminal factors that support the expropriation, especially “the massacre that took place there in 2004. Five people were murdered and thirteen wounded on orders of the landowner.” The landowner, Adriano Chafick, is being charged not only for ordering the massacre but also for murder in the first degree since he was there with the gunmen at the moment of the murders.

As I have argued in previous posts (and in all my recent work), such expropriation on grounds other than productivity are extremely important for the articulation and definition of the SOCIAL FUNCTION OF PROPERTY. As the superintendent said, “To ignore the social function of a piece of real estate is a disrespect on behalf of the owner against the Federal Constitution.”

Here is an excerpt from the news release from the MST website:

“O fato de a decisão ser pautada na prática de crime ambiental não tornamenos relevante o massacre ocorrido na área em 2004. Cinco pessoasmorreram e 13 ficaram feridas a mando do proprietário da fazenda”,argumenta o superintendente do Incra. Além de ser apontado como mandante,o dono da fazenda, Adriano Chafick, é, segundo o superintendente, acusadode ser o execu tor do massacre, uma vez que estava junto com ospistoleiros no momento dos assassinatos.

Essa desapropriação, afirma Souza, é uma importante inovação porque buscao cumprimento da função social do imóvel. “Desconsiderar a função socialde um imóvel é um desrespeito do proprietário contra a ConstituiçãoFederal”, argumenta Souza.

My own personal story was also blessed with an important step forward today: today I finally received a positive response and an invitation from the coordinator of the Education of the Countryside program to meet with some organizers of the MST at their office here in Brasília, and once there I was invited to visit a settlement in the Pipiripau basin here in the Federal District (DF), some 15 miles outside of Brasília.

As my luck would have it, I will be going with a member of the Movement who works here in the national office with programs of international exchange in South Africa. He has been hosting a sociologist from Johannesburg and two Brazilian sociologists from the Federal Fluminense Universtity (i.e., of the state of Rio de Janeiro), so I will have very interesting and informative company on this visit. The contacts with the sociologists from Rio will be useful for me next month when I go through their own state, and the company of the African sociologist will provide an important international context to the conversations.

Topping off the good news, the member who hosted me in the office today is from Rio Grande do Sul, so he gave me some important pointers for when I get to Porto Alegre next Monday and, most importantly, he will be contacting the Movement’s office there ahead of time to give them a heads up about my visit next week.

Such personal contacts are important, especially in the South right now, where State repression has been extremely harsh and, just this past month, turned extremely violent. In conjunction with the encampment here in Brasília (and other simultaneous actions nationwide), a group of landless peasants in São Gabriel (RS) were attacked by the police, who murdered Eltom Brum da Silva with a shot on the back, using a weapon outlawed for use in civil disputes (i.e., he was murdered as though in a military operation). This same month in this same city, where the Mayor has been forcefully opposing the Movement, other landless peasants were arrested and tortured with the School of the America’s techniques employed during the military dictatorship.

Clearly, then, we are moving forward, but still against extremely violent resistance, and there is still a long way to go…

Sustainable Development?

Following up on the contacts with the folk at the Center for Sustainable Development here at UnB has been harder than I would have liked, mostly due to health issues that forced two meetings to be postponed. I won’t make any claims about these two professors themselves, but in general, people here are freaking out far more than is justified or necessary about H1N1. I blame corporate media, which still profits from hysteria.

Still, I will be looking into the possibility of applying for the program here this year, but now I feel far less excited than last week when I was first invited (indeed, encouraged!) to enroll at the program. Several factors to be noted here. First, most people in the program, not surprisingly, adopt the discourse of development full force, and more critical approaches to it are seldom considered (see, for example, Arturo Escobar’s excellent book “Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World” and also Gustavo Esteva’s essay on development in “The Development Dictionary,” ed. W. Sachs).

Second, the chances of obtaining funding are rather slim for my first year of doctoral work, so even though the University is public – and therefore free – I would still need a job to cover my own living expenses, or I would need to continue dependent on my family for even longer. Staying in Brasília, moreover, would make it harder for me to justify additional expenses when I could continue to live at my parents’ house (as many young Brazilians still do in such situations) or my grandmother’s apartment; and neither option seems too exciting for me.

Third, over the weekend I went out with my cousin Graziela (a cardiologist doing her residency in São Paulo, but visiting her family and partner for the weekend) and didn’t really have much fun at all… The “scene” here is ridiculously bourgie, preppy in the worst way, and quite limited. The thought of spending the second half of my 20’s here in Brasília is nowhere near as exciting as being in some place cool within the US, such as Chapel Hill or Berkeley… Sad but true, most of my young adult life has been down north and so my habits, comforts and desires as all quite “amerikanized.”

Fourth, everything is just plain old messy around here… Certain Portuguese words defy translation, being so endogenous to our culture: “desleixo” is a kind of attitude of “it is not worth it” to actually do things properly, and there is the “jeitinho” where “a little way” is always found around the protocols, rules and regulations, and all of this to the point of utter chaos, confusion, and “bagunça,” the messiness I am talking about. Returning to live and work in Brazil, I must inevitably deal with all of this, but there is still a big different in dealing with this as a “mere” graduate student, who is far more dependent on other people and institutions, and dealing with this afterwards when I can have more control and autonomy over my own activities.

Still, I am also getting in touch with professors and researchers in other programs and other institutions. Next week I’m going to Porto Alegre – the city that developed Participatory Budgeting! – where I will be meeting with three or four professors in the program of Rural Development at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Oddly enough, their team seems somewhat conservative in their focus on “small farmers” instead of “peasantry” and on more natural science-y issues instead of agrarian reform.

Hopefully, I will also get to visit some agrarian reform settlements and cooperatives there, which are some of the oldest won by the MST (in the state, after all, where the Movement first organized itself) and also considered to be some of the most functional and successful. However, it has been difficult to get into contact with people from the Movement here in Brasília. The contacts I do have are all postponed until my return from the South. (This difficulty has been part of my frustration, added to that described above.)

In September and October, I am also looking to visit some folk at the Federal University at Viçosa, Minas Gerais, going through there on a road trip with my parents on our way to Búzios to present that paper at our national Bioethics conference. From there I’ll go to the nearby Federal Fluminense (UFF) and Federal Rural (UFRRJ) Universities, but probably on my own since my parents need to return to Brasília to work. From there, I’ll bus over to São Paulo, where there is a kick-ass Geography program (at USP, probably one of the programs I am the most excited about here in Brazil) and where I get to visit Graziela and another cousin of second-degree, Alexandra. Then bus back over to Campinas (inland São Paulo) to visit another second-degree cousin, Mariana, as well as the university there and some folk from our Green Party and a lawyer who works with the MST.

Exciting times ahead, but right now I am wondering whether I can sustain my OWN development in this search for possible academic programs who could host me during my doctoral research. In the end, I am feeling more like I am doing this to get to know these schools and researchers as possible partners for my work while enrolled at a school in the US. I will be taking the month of October to complete some high quality applications to programs down north, since I need to have them done by mid November, when I leave for Peru and Bolivia and don’t come back until Christmas time. By then, all application rounds for programs here in Brazil will already be over, so I will continue to try work here in Brazil into the first half of 2010 while waiting to see if I get accepted and funded in the United States. Failing that, I’ll then have much more to go on when actually making an effort to apply to programs here in Brazil, and if I do get accepted and funded there, then I’ll have the knowledge and contacts necessary to carry on my dissertation research here in Brazil even while based on the US.

First Contacts

Today I went with Sérgio to visit the Education of the Countryside program just outside the city, where he gave a lecture on the agrarian situation of the Cerrado. (The Cerrado is the highland savannah of central Brazil where I am from. It is the world’s richest savannah in terms of biodiversity, but it is also one of the world’s most threatened ecosystems by the expansion of soy monocultures, as well as cattle and, more recently, sugar cane. It is being deforested at twice the rate of the Amazon, and some estimates indicate that close to half of the entire ecosystem is already destroyed. Unlike the “charismatic” rainforest, however, the Cerrado remains relatively neglected in domestic and international environmentalist circles alike.) The other lecturer on the topic this morning was Donald Sawyer, who works on the agroecology of the Amazon and the Cerrado at the University of Brasilia’s (UnB) Center for Sustainable Development (Centro de Desenvolvimento Sustentável – CDS) and with related NGOs. Donald will be my first contact in that program, with which I intend to further familiarize myself this week. The students of the Education of the Countryside program are primarily from peasant movements, including those from Quilombola communities (ex-slaves and their descendents who set up their own communities). Hence, the program is structured on a work/study basis that allows the students to spend several months living in their own communities, and crams full semester loads into 30-40 day periods of morning/afternoon classwork and evening study. The students live in community while studying here, near Brasília, taking common meals prepared by a women’s cooperative organized through the MST. Students with children bring them along for their study periods, so daycare facilities are also set up right there where they live and study. The students were quite even in their gender, and there were both younger (20’s) and older (30’s and 40’s) students, as well as a typical racial spectrum for Brazil. Several times during the day they took breaks to play music and sing together, keeping away the lethargy that would overwhelm anyone on the harsh study schedule they keep. I had opportunities to talk to several of the students during these breaks, as well as during the (delicious) lunch they invited me to share, and I also met several of the academics involved in several ways with the program (younger graduate students and established professors alike, from areas as diverse as pedagogy, anthropology, biology, sociology, geography, philosophy, economics, literature, and theater). In the afternoon, the course took a turn to language, literature, theater and social engagement. Some of the students were noticeably less interested in these “idealist” topics than the issues discussed in the morning, which are more directly related to the struggle for land on which they seem to base their lives. Still, the general feeling I had was that the students were all very happy to be there, and excited to integrate their education to the common education and progress of their own communities in the countryside. The most important developments for myself were the contacts I’ve started to make with members of the social movements like the MST, such as with “Janjão” (Janderson’s nickname that affectionately indicates also his large size and charismatic presence), who is here from the Federal District itself, and therefore someone with whom I can maintain closer contact even after this study period of the Education of the Countryside program is over next month. I asked if he’d introduce me to others from the Movement around Brasília and if he’d show me around the encampments and settlements around here (including, for example, the settlement where he lives himself). He not only agreed, but even suggested that I could perhaps work with them in the Movement on philosophy/education at the encampment and settlement schools. I am very honored and excited about this possibility, but I tried to be clear with him from the get-go that I am here to learn with them, and not to teach anyone the highly bookish thing that I was taught in the name of philosophy. He agreed that we learn best when we learn together. Hopefully, the seeds planted in these first contacts today will bloom into friendships and good work partnerships. I look forward to what is yet to come.

Getting started

After an amazing ten days of travel from Boulder to Brasília, I arrived at my parents' home, where I lived while growing up, and already on the following day I met with Sérgio Sauer, who was very friendly and extremely helpful to me. We talked for over three hours about where I've come from, what I am doing, and where I am going, and all the while he taught me much about what has been taking place in our country, how academia works around here, and many important things about our struggles for agrarian reform. The most exciting thing I took from this first personal exchange is the awareness that there is a space into which I can move through my own work. Agroecology is hardly developed in the Center-West (my own region in our vast country), and where it is developed, it remains focused on the natural science end of the deal. There is an important lack and need, therefore, for theoretical articulations of this praxis/concept that can relate it to our struggles for land. I was surprised to find that, among those who advocate agrarian reform, there has been a not-too-fruitful debate over whether the terms "small farmer" or "peasant" should be promoted in opposition to the increasingly hegemonic role of *agribusiness* in Brazil. Our traditional agrarian reform debate charged the "latifúndio" (akin to "plantation", but with the connotation of lands unused for productive activities, but still maintained by its supposed owners as reserves of value or wealth) with being unproductive, and demanded the expropriation of its unproductive portions and redistribution for the small family farmers, peasants, or landless populations. With the advancement of industrialization into the countryside, agribusinesses began to employ hitherto un- or underused land for the production of agricultural commodities, through massive, mechanized, highly energy and chemical input dependent monocultures, geared towards export. The large landowning class and its enmeshed industrialist (and financial and bureaucratic) elites have been attempting to dismiss, therefore, the arguments for the necessity of agrarian reform, claiming that since the latifúndia are no longer the foundation of our rural economy, demands for agrarian reform are misguided, anachronistic, and plain old counterproductive for the economic development of the country. The employ their control of/alliance with major media to promote an image of the agribusiness as "modern" because of its employment of industrial technologies and as "efficient" because of its massive production of commodities through large scale monocultures. Against these, some say, it is difficult to promote the image of "small farmers" who seem inefficient, or "peasants" who seem anything-but-modern. Proponents of the latter charge advocates of the former for employing a term that does not, itself, differentiate between capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production (since, after all, a small farmer could still produce commodities for a market, or food for her communities). In turn, proponents of the former charge advocates of the latter for employing a term that seems simply unable to win for itself the good-making-quality labels of "modernity" etc. Here is where I find my own niche: an articulation of *agroecology* that is able to break out of the natural science boundaries in which such praxis/concept has been coined sidesteps this entire debate, employing a term that is both "modernistic" in its "green" appeal (in addition to being a neologism imported from English, which serves precisely the desired purposes on debate) and also directly conflicting with the agribusiness practice of subjecting all considerations (not only social but also ecological) to the capitalist goal of profit-maximization. Its "logic" is precisely that of the small peasant famers, but it is more than a "good label" with pragmatic appeal for the same thing under dispute: in fact, agroecology necessarily ties the broader socio-economic-ecological context of peasant agriculture to the particular terms in which our Constitution demands the expropriation of land for purposes of agrarian reform. That is, instead of entering into debates about the productivity of agricultural production (the only terms in which any land has been expropriated so far in the 20 years of our Constitutional demand), which is precisely the terms in which the proponents of agribusiness attempt to promote their own cause, the shift towards agroecology highlights the social and ecological preconditions of ownership of property (including in land) regardless of its productivity (or lack thereof). In a way, the "modern" agribusinesses should be even easier to expropriate *in agroecological terms* than the old latifúndia, since the latter at least let the land lie fallow and refrained from infusing it with toxic agrochemicals and wasting the soil with industrialized irrigation and/or erosion from overproduction. And here is the last, and perhaps most important, niche into which I am already setting myself on the move: the SOCIAL FUNCTION of property, including the social function of land. Our Constitution ascertains that all property rights can only be valid in so far as the property in question fulfills its social function (Article 5). However, the Constitution hardly spells out what this means, save in terms of the social function of land, where the focus remains on the productivity of the land (as explained above). Hence, the vast majority of discussions about the concept of the social function of property remain limited to legalese back-and-forth-ing in extremely limited circles of Constitutional scholars and attorneys. There is a lack and need for more philosophical/political articulations of the concept of social function, in order for its articulation to further imbue a praxis of democratic regulation of property relations such as, of course, the expropriation of those would-be-properties that cannot-be-private-property because they fail to fulfill their social function. This is where I come in, this is what I am setting myself up to do, and this is likely going to be the basis for a dissertation of mine (if I do end up taking on such a task for myself). In the meantime, however, I have been finishing a short essay for oral presentation at our national bioethics conference this September on "Agroecology or Agribusiness?", arguing briefly, as I did far more fully in my thesis in Colorado, that these alternatives are ultimately a matter of "Revolution of Genocide!" The essay was submitted today, and I would be quite disappointed if it is not accepted into the conference. (My mother helped me write the essay in Portuguese, since my abilities with spelling and grammar are, how do I put it, hardly better than the 8th grade level at which I stopped formal studies in Portuguese... The cool thing, then, is that I'll now have a co-authorship with my mom!) Now I'm also starting to translate some sections of my thesis for publication in Portuguese journals, and tomorrow or next week Sérgio is going with me to the MST encampment here at the capital to introduce me to the folks of the Movement. They are here to demand the release or some 800 million Reais the State had promised for the agrarian reform settlements already won, as well as the settlement of millions more landless peasants who are encamped throughout the country. On Monday morning, Sérgio is also taking me to Planaltina (one of the satellite cities around Brasília, where he teaches) to meet other folk who work with, research and promote our land struggles. Things are well on their way, then, for my own participation in our common struggle and search for our Promised Land. That is why I've named this blog accordingly, and if you, my friend, are reading this now, then the purpose of this writing is fulfilled. So many of you, dear friends, said to me you wanted me to keep you posted on my work while we are apart, and I will do my best to update this with some regularity, highlighting at least the important developments pertinent to my life of such interest. I hope you all are well too, loving this beautiful life of ours and advancing strongly in your own paths towards our common goal!