After spending a few days visiting and learning about the Escola Latino Americana de Agroecologia and Assentamento (which means a MST agriculuture community) Contestado, I was invited to help out with the Assentamnto´s Cooperativo. The Cooperativo is made of of 103 of the 108 families in the Assentamento, and requires families to contribute fruits, vegetables, and agro-products on a weekly basis to be sold in the city. They must also volunteer their time and work to help coordinate and load and unload the truck that makes weekly trips into Curitiba and other nearby cities.

Cooperativos are part of the MST´s economic development plans, and are often essential to the economic survival of new assentamentos. The member families pool a portion of their products, resources, and labor to establish a shared source of revenue that is generated by gaining access to local products and consumers.

I awoke at 5 am the day of the trip and me and two other men left the assentamento before dawn. The flatbed truck was loaded 8 feet high with over 20 different types of fruits and vegetables. We spent the entire morning and most of the afternoon driving around the outskirts of Curitba, delivering produce to a school for mentally impaired adults, a home for abandoned children, a cancer hospital, a recycling center, and an office for the Roofless Movement (Movimento Sem-Teto, which is an urban movement for citizens without legitamate houses). The recycling center is part of the Movimento dos Catadores (or Recyclers), and both movements have strong connections to the MST. These and other social movements and organizations are part of a larger network of social movements that work together and support one another, and the MST benefits by selling their products to these organizations. The cancer hospital is an interesting market for the MST, since cancer patients must eat organic food without pesticides and poison, and the interest there is not necessarily supporting agrarian reform products, but rather the legitamate need for organic products.

Like the Assentamento I visited in Itapeva, Sao Paolo, the proximity to nearby cities is very important for the survival of community, since most families need to generate some form of income aside for sustenance agriculture.

Assentamento Contestado and the Escola Latino Americano de Agroecologia

Last week I left Sao Paolo and took a bus south to the city Curitiba, in the state of Parana. I first learned about Curitiba in my Environmental Studies 201 class. Professor Ganghi used the city as an example of environmental-friendly, pedestrain-friendly urban planning. The city has a reserved lane for busses to enable speedy and punctual public transportation and also has an extensive bike path that runs througout the city.

After a few days in Curitba I got a ride with an MST member to Assentamento Contestado, an MST community about an hour West of the city. The MST gained rights to the land in 1999, and formed Assentamento Contestado.a 3,000 hectar agricultural community that is home to 108 families. Beforehand the land was managed by a multinational agro-business company that cultivated soy and bean crops and harvested pine and eucalyptus plantation trees, which are not native to Brazil and cause desertification of the soil.

Assentamento Contestado´s name represents a violent struggle for land rights during a regional civil warin the early 1920s. With the support of the Brazilian govermnet, a english railroad company began construction of a railroad connecting the interior of the state to the capital and the coast. The construction and timber interests of the railroad displaced all families within 21 km in either direction of the railroad. Thousands of peasants in the area mobilized to resist the government mandate and defend their rights to the land, however they were eventually subdued by the military.

In 2005 Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, hosted the 5th, World Social Forum, which is a annual meeting that brings NGOs, social movements, and paricipants from across the world to network, plan, and debate alternatives to the hegemonic tendencies of neoliberalism and globalization. One of the fruits of the 2005 Forum was the creation of the Escola Latino Americano de Agroecologia in Assentamento Contestado, supported jointly by La Via Campesina and the MST.

The Escola Latino Americano de Agroecologia (ELAA) receives campesinos from rural agriculture movements across Latin America to teach and develop sustainable agriculture methods. The students, who are of all ages, spend 3 months at the Escola, learning and working at the school and around the assentamento, and then return to their communit

ies for 3 months to work on the farms and teach their communities what they learned in the Escola. From May to August the students are working in their own regions, however those who come from other countries in Latin America sometimes stay and work at the school year round. When I visited there were four students from Ecuador, four from Colombia, one from the Dominican Republic, and a few from Paraguay.

The Escola represents a very important focus of the MST today which is education, and the concept of Educaçao do Campo, which proposes a alternative style of teaching than that of the city, with more focus on rural history, environment, and peoples. The Escola is a sort of university of the MST and Via Campesina that receives students from all socio-economic backgrounds in attempt to capacitate small-farmers in techniques that are both productive and also harmonious with the local soil and environment.

Assentamento de Itapeva

Early this week I awoke before dawn and traveled some 350 kilometers south to Itapeva, a city near the southern border of the state of Sao Paolo. Mario, three other MST members and myself packed into a small VW and drove the 4 hours to the MST acampamento of Itapeva.
Mario and the others work for state sector MST in the state of Sao Paolo, were travelling to the assentmaneto to plan a state-wide Olympic competition that will host MST communities from all over the state of Sao Paolo.
It was great to finally get out of the greater Sao Paolo area and see a bit of the countryside. The landscape between Sao Paolo is mostly rolling hills dominated by monoculture fazendas of corn, soy, and beans, and occasional stretches of temperate forests, where little family farms and concrete huts can be seen carved out of the lush green forests.
The assentamento of Itapeva is one of the oldest in Sao Paolo. After the first National Congress of the MST in 1984, Itapeva became the first assentamento in the state of Sao Paolo to come about under the official national MST organization. It is very much model for MST communities throughout the region. The assentamento is home to over 300 families, who each have a large portion of family land to cultivate for family consumption and market purposes. The assentamento also has a very successful farm co-op, composed of around 215 families, who collectively manage a large scale farming operation of mostly beans and corn. Since the co-op cultivates large areas of land for only a few crops, it uses chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which are normally criticized within the movement. One of the community leaders explained to me that while the smaller family farms use organic methods, the co-op must use chemical fertilizers to produce a product that is competitive with market prices in the nearby city of Itapeva.
--There is a small market for certified organic products in Brazil, however they are much more expensive. The Walmart is Sao Paolo, like more and more in the US, has a section of organic produce and products, however only a small portion of Brazilians can afford these products.
The assentamento of Itapeva also has a MST school for political and ideological formation as well as technical skills--a sort of regional verison of the Escola Nacional Florestal outside of Sao Paolo. The assentamento doesn´t have its own primary or secondary school, however a bus comes daily to the assentamento to transport the children to the local municipal school. The proximity of MST assentemntos to nearby cities has become a central factor in MST actions across the nation, as access to schools, roads, healthcare, and markets are essential to the survival of a community. While the assentamentos petition the government to extend the infraestructure of schools, healthcare centers, and roads to the community, most often the families must leave their communities to gain access to these public services.

Sao Paolo: Centro e Periferia

Earlier this week I met with the Gabriela, the secretary of the National MST office here in Sao Paolo. They were very receptive of me and my interests, and even helped create a programacion for visiting different MST offices and settlements in other parts of the country. In Sao Paolo the manager of the hostel, Mario, has shown me a round a good bit and has tremendously helped me manuever through the city and get connected with knowlegeabe people and relavent literature . Next week I will head south to Curitiba, Parana, which is internationally known for its environmental and pedestrain friendly urban planning.
On Tuesday I took an hour long train (an extension of the city's metro system) to the periferia or periphery of Sao Paolo. Over the centuries Sao Paolo's booming industry has caused massive migration to the city, where jobs and opportunities are plentiful, however this has caused such an immense urban sprawl that some citizens have to travel 2-3 hours each day to work in the city center. While Sao Paolo's metropolitan population is 20 million, there are another 20 million living in the 'greater Sao Paolo area.´
Although we travelled for an hour away from the city´s center, we still hadnt made it outside the city. In Jandira, a perihpery city where over 1 million people live, we took a taxi to an urban settlement of the MST.
While most of the MST´s land squatting and petitioning goes on in rural areas, the movement is also present in the city. In Janira, we visited a urban settlement which is located on the outskirts of a favela. A group of landless members of the MST squatted/camped in the area for over 3 years, trying to gain access to vacant land, and were moved by the police a number of times. Finally in 2008 the state of Sao Paolo awarded a group of 128 families a plot of land on the outskirts of the favela. The state government also agreed to provide the resources for the construction of the houses if the people provided the labor.
The result is a beautiful community of adobe brick apartments with adobe shingled roofing. Mario took part in the struggle and will live there once its complete. The arquitecture and design of the casas is different from that of most in the city because it includes open community spaces, with little plazas and balconies that families share, rather than the boxed, block style of common city houses where neihbors never interract.
While the movement is based in rural agrarian reform, the movement of landless workers is present wherever there are citizens without land or opportunity.