Filhos de Sepé Settlement and the Sepé Tiarajú Workers’ Formation Center

My first visit in the South was to an agrarian reform settlement called Filhos de Sepé (Children of Sepé). Sepé Tiarajú was a Guaraní who held an office of importance at one of the Jesuit Missions hundreds of years ago. Although the facts about his life are far less pleasant than the symbolism he currently represents (having been Europeanized, implemented order upon the other Guaranís at his Mission, and fought violently against “less civilized” indigenous peoples in the name of the colonizers), he is currently highly regarded for having (perhaps) proclaimed the phrase “THIS LAND HAS OWNERS” against invading European colonizers. He is usually depicted in traditional Guaraní attire and said to have died in battle against the colonizers (partially true due to the complex relations between the Missions and Spanish and Portuguese colonial powers more directly associated to the “crowns”).

The settlement is in the rural surroundings of the city of Viamão, one of the oldest in the state (indeed, older than the capital Porto Alegre). It was originally settled by Azorean peasants, the first of many waves of European family farmers that colonized this region of South America. Nowadays, the city is almost a satellite city of the capital, but maintains an attractive “small town” feel near its downtown historic district.

At the settlement, I was hosted at the Centro de Formação de Trabalhadoras e Trabalhadores (Workers’ Formation Center) Sepé Tiarajú. The Centrão (big center), as it is affectionately called by those in the Movement, is a space for social gatherings of the peasants in the settlement all around, as well as for broader meetings, courses, and other such events for members of the Movement and their allies from all over the state. It is maintained currently by two encamped landless peasants, Paulo and Tidão, both being freed from their camp duties to care for the Center. They lack many resources to do the upkeep of the infrastructure, but still do what they can to keep the space functional for all upcoming events, including the production of an organic garden (including medicinal herbs), some pigs, and a young fruit tree garden (pomar) with 180 sprouts. All production is agroecological (employing no toxic agrochemicals, but instead, e.g., organic fertilizers such as chicken manure, of which we unloaded 64 large sacks for use in the new fruit trees).

All that is there has been built by the Movement itself along the ten or so years of existence of the Filhos de Sepé settlement. It is composed, in addition to the agricultural production space around, of five main buildings. The largest has space for large meetings or seminars, a spacious kitchen and an office space packed with books and with computers linked to the internet. The second largest is a residence hall with enough space to host 130 people in large rooms with bunks and other beds (each room named after a known Latin American revolutionary). The third largest building is still under construction (along the principles of permaculture) and will serve varied functions from library to classroom space. The fourth and smallest building is an adobe construction with a grass roof (built along the principles of permaculture) to serve as a classroom and reading room. And the last structure is a common house in which Tidão and some of the agricultural technicians who work in the settlement reside. There is an effort to reduce consumption of energy and water, e.g., with the construction and use of three cisterns to capture and store rain water.

The land in which the settlement is located is a low wetland (várzea) of immense ecological importance. Although it was public land held as an ecological preserve, it was illegally seized by a big farmer during the 1960’s – 80’s, who created a dam for irrigation that has caused serious flooding issues down along the basin (affecting the function of the várzea as a sponge that should drain rain water and slowly release it to the nearby streams) and employed vast amounts of agrochemicals. Due to these and other economic problems (i.e., unmanageable debts stacked by the land “owner” against the state), the land was finally expropriated when the state was pressured by the landless peasants, who settled a few hundred families there, each with about 15 hectare plots. Most families have smaller plots (about 1 hectare) on higher ground where they built their homes and where they keep their gardens and small farm animals, while the larger plots are concentrated in the lowlands where there are mostly wet rice paddies (due to the nature of the place).

This year, only about 80 families have prepared projects for the production of rice, adding up to about 800 hectares of wet rice paddies. This represents only about half the arable low land and irrigation capacity of the settlement as a whole, due to the challenges of agroecological production most peasants there face. Due to the ecological importance of the place, government bureaucracies have required and are attempting to regulate the production of rice in the settlement to restrict the use of agrochemicals. That is, all production is required to be organic by law. Yet not all peasants there refrained from using such toxics, however, and last year a substantial portion of them had their crops seized by the state due to such infringements. This accounts, therefore, for the smaller number of families who are investing this year on the production of rice (either because they do not have the resources after having lost much in the previous year, or because they have chosen to focus on other sorts of production, and some even rely primarily on off-farm income, which is facilitated due to the close proximity of the settlement to the city of Viamão).

The process of organic certification is carried out by internal and external investigators. The external investigators come from some organization in Switzerland once a year, and the internal investigators come from other MST settlements who also work with organic rice. The process involves an extensive questionnaire about each family plot’s production and history, as well as plot walk-throughs and production site verification. The agronomy technician who I accompanied, Alan, is a recent graduate from the Instituto Educar (which I visited later and about which I will write in another entry) and since this was his first certification visit, he was joined by one of the agronomists from the local technician’s cooperative, Leandro, who showed me and him around the settlement and helped him through the process with the 20 or so peasants with which he worked on the certification process. The process was friendly among all, and we all seemed to be learning much throughout about organic production and the politics of the settlement. It was interesting to note that some peasants responded to the question “why have you decided on organic production” going beyond the obvious “because its legally required” to point out that such production is less costly and so they had already practiced agroecology before even knowing what these words meant, since their marginalized conditions precluded them from purchasing agrochemical inputs in the first place.

Such issues of organic vs. conventional production are an important challenge to the settled peasants themselves, who must struggle not only with the state and with the challenges of production, but also with each other for the control of their irrigation and other resources between the organic and the conventional “parties” in their settlement administration elections (the practice of direct democracy common to all agrarian reform settlements). As one of the leaders of the “organic camp” told me, “God is here in the settlement, but so is the Devil.” What he said is as true of that and any other settlement I visited as of any other place on this Earth…
This peasant of German descent is an important reference for the organic rice producers of the region, having produced his own rice crops organically for over 9 years now and even had much success with the combination of rice and fish farming in the same paddies (a practice through which the fish till the land while eating the pests and recycle those nutrients into fertilizer for the rice, a perfect example of the symbiotic integration of meat production in agroecological practice, pace dogmatic vegans). In fact, companheiro (“comrade”) Zang was so successful with the conjunction of fish and rice production (having produced higher yields this way than the average of conventional rice growers who use agrochemical pesticides and fertilizers) that he ended up with far more fish than he was able to sell to the local Gaúcho market (who have no tradition of eating seafood). Since the costs of freezing and shipping the fish beyond the local markets would render the production inviable for him, Zang abandoned the practice of combining fish with rice production this year despite the higher yields of fish-based pest-control and fertilizer and cheaper practice of using the fish instead of tractors to till the land. Comrade Zang’s agroecology seems to be, unfortunately, ahead of his time.