Social movements, law and the politics of land reform: lessons from Brazil

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Notes

¹‘Market-assisted land reform’, in which the state provides subsidized credit to the landless to buy their own land, has been implemented in some parts of Brazil since the late 1990s, but in this case the state was actually going into the market and buying the land itself. The limitations of land reform through state purchases, rather than expropriation, have to do mainly with the greater expense involved, as well as the potential unwillingness of landowners to sell land to the state for the purpose of establishing agrarian reform settlements, due to the fear that the presence of settlements in the region will result in more land occupations.