In the immediate future, the MST plans to join forces with the left wing of the Lula camp. Beyond that, the movement will join the Left more broadly as Brazil enters the post-Lula period. But the MST is not a party and will not become one.
We do, however, look to fight along three political fronts in the next five years. The first is the front in the struggle for land. The MST must consolidate, strengthen, and establish itself as an organization fighting for land. For us, the struggle over land is central. There are one hundred million hectares of land up for grabs in Brazil, and we need to dispute that agenda side by side with the indigenous peoples and the quilombolas [descendants of Afro-Brazilians who fled slavery].
Whoever controls the land controls the future of Brazil. Let’s make that clear. In Brazil, land is synonymous with food production, environmental conservation, and care for nature. To that end, I think the MST will need to gain strength in and shift its attention toward those conflict regions that are still in dispute on the so-called agricultural frontier, in the Amazon, Matopiba, or even in the Cerrado, where we have less presence.
Our goal is to become one of the largest producers in the world of organic and ecologically sourced foods.
The second struggle is to become a major economic force in the production of nutritious food. In the not-so-distant future, the MST will go head-to-head with large industrial agribusiness in the struggle over food hegemony. We may have only ten million hectares compared to the sixty million controlled by large agribusiness. But we have something they don’t have: labor. There are over two million rural workers living and laboring on MST settlements.
That is why we hope that our policy of cooperatives, agroecology, and food production will become a powerful economic force in the coming years. That way, society will see the Left as an alternative model of economic and social development….
Auteur: João Paulo Rodrigues
