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.