A landless workers' movement in Brazil supports low cost agro ecological technologies and challenges the introduction of GM crops by transnational corporations

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) Landless Workers Movement) is the largest organised group of rural poor in Latin America. The MST grew from a small land occupation in the district of Rio Grande do Sul to a movement of over a million of the poorest people in the country. During the past twenty years, it has taken control of fifty thousand square kilometres of land - about the size of the US State of Ohio or three quarters of the Republic of Ireland.

In a country where, until 1988, the illiterate were not allowed to vote, the MST has promoted social justice. One hundred thousand children study in MST schools, and adults gather in tens of thousands of literacy circles across Brazil, so building the capacity of the movement to grow.

While the MST movement has been spreading over rural Brazil, the country's agricultural sector has become far more integrated into the globalised world food industry. By 1999 seventeen transnational corporations handled around half of all Brazil's agricultural exports. The emerging global food system transforms previously self-reliant farmers in effect into hired hands on their own lands. This change often leaves such people far more vulnerable to periods of hunger than before. In March 2000, one of the Brazilian government's advisers pointed out that farmers could not afford to risk the technological packages of high-yielding seeds, fertilisers and pesticides that were needed to enter competitive export markets. He estimated that around three million family farms in Brazil have very little income and are therefore "sick". About half the migration into cities in Brazil, around four and a half million people between 1996 and 1999, comes from agricultural families.

The MST believes that the programme of rural land reform it has started, together with the move towards the localisation of economies, can reverse this trend. Once people own their land and have organised themselves into a powerful economic and political unit, they will be better able to choose the seed varieties and other agro-ecological practices and sustainable technologies that promote their long-term welfare.

In the mid 1990s, the MST began promoting a model of low-input agriculture "agro-ecology" that prioritises crops that can be eaten, consumed and marketed locally, rather than sugar-cane and soya that are subject to the vagaries of export markets. People who are returning to work the land from the city slums have often lost their families' experience of farming, agronomist Jose da Silva has found. "They've never used chemical fertilisers or pesticides on food crops, so they don't miss them and can move directly onto organic methods without going through the problems caused by chemical farming."

More important for wider issues of bottom-up democratisation in Brazil, the powerful political force represented by the MST has played a role along with other people-power movements in coalitions that have led to major set-backs for Monsanto as it attempts to introduce GM crops into Brazil. Those MST farmers practising organic and other agro-ecological methods were particularly under threat. After a series of conferences and votes by regional representatives, they decided to reject currently available GM crops. By contrast, neighbouring Argentina became the world's second largest cultivator of GM soya in 2000 and its farmers are now impoverished.

Each acre of land taken over by members of the MST has been the result of direct action - the deliberate and technically unlawful occupation of land that has usually been left fallow by large landowners. In a country where slavery was the norm for hundreds of years and in which the gap between the richest and the poorest is, by some measures, greater than anywhere else in the world, these land invasions are vital symbols of rural peasants having basic human rights. "Land that we conquer through struggle is land that we win without having to go down on our knees and give thanks to anyone", says Darci Maschio, "it allows us to go on and fight for other things".

Each land occupation is also an experiment in the use of local know-how against a rule-bound national bureaucracy. Though general principles to a land occupation have built up over the twenty five years of MST's existence, there is no set methodology or blueprint behind a particular occupation. Though they meet many of the same obstacles on each occasion, regional activists adapt their methods to the local conditions. Each occupation is also constitutes a libratory educational experience for the individuals concerned. Paulo Freire, who's philosophy of literacy and empowerment has been a foundation of the movement, has related accounts of landless and illiterate workers who came to realise through cutting the wire of a large landowners estate that this was only part of what was needed to change power relations in their region. "We have three fences to cut down", says Maschio "the fence of the big estate, the fence of education and the fence of capital."

The Brazilian experience of democratising the control of agricultural land - the most basic resource for rural people - over the past two decades has broader lessons for democratising agricultural technologies and the promotion of agro ecological farming. The struggle is summed up Brazil 's MST began with a regional focus in the south of the country, but built up a movement that is now prominent throughout Brazil and which has influenced other people's movements through the World Social Forum movement.

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