After 40 years of struggle, Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement is now at nearly two million members and taking center stage in the fight for democracy and equality. It’s done that by flying the most unlikely militant banner of all: organic...
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Stagnant agenda: addressing hunger, the environmental crisis, and inequalities requires People’s Agrarian Reform
In 2025, the MST (Landless Workers' Movement) made progress in food production, the mass adoption of agroecology, solidarity, tree planting, among other things; however, the main demands of Agrarian Reform remain stalled under this Lula government.
The year 2025 was a year of struggle, resistance for rights, and some achievements for popular movements in the countryside, such as the MST. After Lula's election in 2023, the collective strength of the working class's struggle is gradually growing again in society, moving us away from a time of darkness, misery, and hatred against the left's struggles for rights, social justice, and Agrarian Reform, in the case of the MST.
This was also the year in which Brazil managed to finalize the trial of those responsible for the coup plot, putting former president Jair Bolsonaro in jail and, for the first time in the country's history, some army generals, although Congress is already making every possible maneuver to reduce the sentences and impose an amnesty on this group of coup plotters. Bolsonaro, the main person responsible for the death of more than 600,000 people during the pandemic, was also defeated in his agenda of spreading hatred and repression against people’s movements and in his attempt to bury Agrarian Reform.
On the other hand, President Lula also faced blackmail from the President of the United States, Donald Trump, regarding the taxation of Brazilian products exported to the country. However, according to the federal government itself, 22% of Brazilian exports to the United States still remain subject to surcharges.
The MST: Agroecology and Reforestation
Program of Plantar Árvores: Plant 100 million trees in ten years in rural schools, cooperatives, technical training centers, squares, avenues and cities, strengthen the production of healthy food in MST settlements and encampments, denounce the destructive model of agribusiness and its impacts on the environment.
These are some of the objectives of the National Plan to Plant Trees, Produce Healthy Food, launched in 2020 by the MST throughout Brazil.
The Plan is a space for articulation, training, political organization and broad debate, reaffirming:
• People’s Agrarian Reform* and the defense of their territories and family farming;
• Food Sovereignty as a radical change in the direction of food production and distribution, providing access to healthy food especially for the most vulnerable populations, as a way of promoting preventive health in the country that uses the most pesticides in the world;
• Agroecology, which is based on sociobiodiversity, the solidarity economy and respect for traditional knowledge and local/regional cultures; and
• The care of Common Goods, such as water, minerals, land and biodiversity, which are finite natural resources and, therefore, common to all human beings (environmental preservation).
Read more on the MST's Tree Planting Program
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Food sovereignty as resistance in Palestine
In Palestine, agriculture is a form of resistance against the Israeli occupation
It is difficult to imagine the existence of agriculture and food production in Gaza, where there is no security, no peace, and even less arable land. After twenty months of atrocities and mass destruction of infrastructure, the death toll from Israel’s genocide on Gaza is over 56,000, with hundreds of thousands of injured, and the mass displacement of the majority of the population. The existence of arable land, untouched by Israel’s devastating bombing campaign, or even the possibility to have freedom to move and tend to the land in Gaza, are distant dreams. In the West Bank, however, agriculture is still a reality.
As of October 2024, half a million Jewish settlers lived in the occupied West Bank – a number that continues to grow especially since October 7, 2023, when Israel launched its genocide on Gaza.
The level of violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is also growing with the intensification of land annexations, the increase of armed settlers, and the killing of Palestinians. And on top of that the Israeli government offers subsidies to Jewish families from other parts of the world (especially from the US and Europe) who, under the belief of an ancestral right to this long-inhabited land, come to the region. The number of settlements has also increased since the beginning of the Netanyahu government.
News from FMST
Conjunctural analysis shows that the slow pace of Agrarian Reform and the prioritization of agribusiness deepen rural inequalities and worsen the food crisis in Brazil
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