Letter from the MST to the Brazilian society

From the MST website

We are fighting to make our collective voice heard throughout the country, echoing the sentiments of the Brazilian society and of President Lula in their unconditional defense of national sovereignty, which is threatened by imperialism and the actions of Donald Trump.

However, the threat to our popular and national sovereignty has also come from within the country itself, with the subordination of our agriculture to transnational corporations and the actions of the Legislative, which represents the interests of agribusiness and mining companies.

Agrarian reform is an instrument for defending the country’s lands, in contrast to agribusiness, which is submissive, coup-mongering, plundering, and unpatriotic. National sovereignty is only possible with food sovereignty. And food sovereignty is built with family farming and Agrarian Reform.

That is why the Landless Workers Movement takes to the streets in defense of national sovereignty and Agrarian Reform. We struggle for land, housing, credit, and rural education as policies to strengthen Brazilian agriculture and as basic and essential rights to be guaranteed to settled and encamped families.

The defense of Popular Agrarian Reform, beyond confronting large landholdings and land concentration, as provided for in the Constitution, is a struggle for a just, sovereign society, free from exploitation and oppression, and a project to confront the ongoing plundering of nature.

Land concentration remains one of the main causes of inequality in our country, with land being one of the most important assets protected by the elites — and its dispute, a driver of permanent tension, violence, and attacks on the rights of nature and its peoples.

For this reason, we repudiate:

• The action of the Chamber of Deputies which, contrary to the climate emergency, approved
  Bill 2.169/2021, the so-called “devastation bill,” a direct attack on nature and its peoples;
• The approval of Bill 8262/2017, which allows police action without a court order in rural and
  urban occupations. This bill may go directly to a vote in the Chamber of Deputies without any in-
  depth debate with society on the issue. Such a proposal violates all legal rights and precepts
  related to the right to social mobilization;
• The permanence of Normative Instruction No. 112, issued at the very end of the Bolsonaro
  government, which makes mining and large-scale construction projects easier to be carried out in rural settlements.

After over three years of Lula’s government, Agrarian Reform remains paralyzed — and
encamped and settled families ask themselves: Lula, where is the Agrarian Reform?

We are thousands of landless people! There are more than 122,000 families, organized in
1,250 encampments across the country, who need land to work and live on.

About 400,000 settled families are still waiting for public policies that exist but do not reach the
base to improve food production and the development of settlements.

Thousands of young people want to stay and contribute to rural development but are unable to
attend post secondary education due to the lack of sufficient funding for the National Program
for Education in Agrarian Reform Areas (PRONERA).

The slowness of the government, through the Ministry of Agrarian Development (MDA) and the
National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), only increases discouragement
and further exacerbates social conflicts.

With regard to settlements, structural programs for human, social, and economic development
in Agrarian Reform areas—such as the Program for Strengthening Family Agriculture
(PRONAFA), PRONERA, and the Food Acquisition Program (PAA)—have not received the
necessary and urgent resources.

With regard to the Ministry of Education, it is necessary to guarantee budgetary conditions for
the National Policy for Education in Rural, Water, and Forest Areas (Pronacampo) to work to
overcome the intense and accelerated process of Rural Schools closing down as well as
overcoming the infrastructural, training, and pedagogical challenges of rural education,
combined with the strengthening of the peasant territorial project.

We achieved an important victory for the Brazilian people in the streets and at the polls by
electing Lula as president. The popular forces—women, youth, black people, LGBTI+
community, indigenous peoples, and the working class in rural and urban areas—were the
protagonists of this victory.

We are committed to the campaign for the taxation of the super-rich and the reduction of
working hours without a reduction in wages, which united all progressive forces around the
Popular Plebiscite for a Fairer Brazil.

We will continue to mobilize our social base to guarantee national sovereignty, democracy, and
workers’ rights, in addition to denouncing the attacks our country has been suffering at the
hands of the United States government.

Our banners are raised once again to demand Popular Agrarian Reform as a necessary path to
building a sovereign country committed to environmental care, wealth redistribution, and
combating social inequality.

For this reason, we demand that the government make a real and effective commitment,
allocating land and resources in line with the concrete needs of peasant families. We therefore
trust in President Lula’s historic commitment to guide his ministries to act more swiftly in this
direction.

We can no longer postpone our conquers!
Brasília, July 21, 2025.