MST’s experience in leveraging agroecology in rural settlements: lessons, achievements, and challenges

ABSTRACT

Since the mid-1990s, the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil has promoted agroecology in its settlements as a strategic guideline. Although agroecological production experiences have spread throughout settlements, MST has not yet succeeded in making agroecology the dominant paradigm within its settlements. Thus, the main purpose of this article is to understand the challenges faced by the MST in promoting the adoption of agroecological practices by its settlers. A framework consisting of eight drivers identified as crucial to bring agroecology to scale was used to analyze and discuss the advances achieved and the challenges faced by the MST. Our findings suggest that some structural characteristics of the MST and the Brazilian State impose unique and complex challenges for the project of scaling agroecology in rural settlements. Therefore, we suggest that some drivers must be better applied in a coordinated way, for example, a) investing in less hierarchical processes of rural extension such as campesino-a-campesino (peasant-to-peasant) methodology and participatory certification; b) implementing more demonstrative areas of agroecological production in settlements, and c) advancing actions and partnerships that bring farmers and consumers closer.

KEYWORDS:

• peasant movements
• scaling-out agroecology
• MST
• Brazil

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the grants #472738/2014-3 and #427726/2016-6, National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) - Brazil. Ricardo Borsatto was partially supported in this research by the grant #2017/04577-1, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). We would also like to thank Peter Rosset and Omar Giraldo for valuable comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. In Brazil, family farming is defined by the Family Farming Law (Law 11,326/2006), based on four criteria: a maximum land tenure defined regionally; a predominant recourse to non-wage family labor; a significant part of the income originated from the farming activity; and a farm managed by the family. For La Via Campesina, “the term family farming is vast, and may include almost any agricultural model or method whose direct beneficiaries are not corporations or investors. It includes both small-scale and large-scale producers (with farms covering thousands of hectares), as well as small-scale producers who are entirely dependent on the private sector, through contract farming or other forms of economic exploitation […] This is why La Vía Campesina defends family farming in terms of peasant based ecological farming, as opposed to the large-scale, industrial, toxic farming of agribusinesses, which expel peasants and small farmers and grab the world’s lands.” (La Via Campesina 2014).

2. “Organicity is a term present in the MST and signifies the organic movement present in its organizational structures and the relations between them” (Babniuk and Camini 2012).

3. The Production, Cooperation, and Environment Sector is one of the MST’s coordinating bodies and is responsible for supporting issues related to organizing production within rural settlements. Other MST’s sectors are: Training, Communication, Finance, Education, Mobilization, Human Rights, Gender, and Health.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo [#2017/04577-1];Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico [#427726/2016-6,#472738/2014-3].