Reforma agrária e sustentabilidade: luta pela terra, realidade e perspectivas dos assentamentos rurais do Triângulo Mineiro e Alto Paranaíba

Abstract

Brazil is marked by an extraordinary concentration of land ownership (1% of the owners own 45% of the land). Since the discovery of successive governments composed of or under the influence of a large landowning elite, they have implemented a development model that dispensed with the need for agrarian reform. The process of modernization of the countryside, experienced, deepened social exclusion, rural exodus, the swelling of cities, environmental degradation, rural and urban violence. In the last two decades, several landless movements from the massive occupation of large rural properties have reinstated the demand for the democratization of land in the country. Without the willingness to implement a real land reform project, under fantastic pressure from the landless, the Sarney, Collor, Itamar and FIIC governments were forced to create a policy of rural settlements. The present work seeks to analyze the current reality of these settlements in the Triângulo Mineiro and Alto Paranaíba regions. Marked by radical modernization (large agricultural projects sponsored by the state), the concentration of land (cattle ranching and capitalist rural enterprise) and the exclusion of rural workers is quite remarkable. It appears that here the landless is becoming an important subject of transformation in the regional countryside. However, the economic and ecological results for the settlers are still very timid, which can jeopardize the future of the settlements and the agrarian reform itself, despite significant social advances. The analysis of the Triângulo Mineiro and Alto Paranaíba settlements is carried out within a historical and political perspective of the Brazilian reality and not in isolation. The understanding of the attempt at sustainable rural development is also deepened, where the settlements appear as potential builders of a new paradigm.