The meek want the Earth now
By Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone

Brazil and Mexico are the pioneers in solidarity economies, those economies in which local production for local needs employs democratic and often non-market forms of manufacture, distribution, savings and investment. Is the current system nurturing its own replacement? One thing is sure: Brazil and Mexico have led Latin America both in resisting neoliberal globalization and in creating alternatives to it. After Argentina, the topic of our first two articles in this series, our second stop on our tour of such alternatives was São Paulo, Brazil. 

Part 1

Pried open by the IMF, using as a wedge the big debts run up by dictators, Brazil's economy has been penetrated by transnational corporations. The agribusiness companies, with their huge monocultures of soybeans, beef and corn, are land-hungry engines, and rural unemployment has spread to the cities. The world banking allies of these transnationals have reined in Brazil's president, "Lula" da Silva, who was elected on an anti-neoliberal platform. But cultivating such dependence on world markets may be vulnerable to a counter-strategy of grassroots economic autonomy. By meeting needs locally, Brazil's new democratic economies short-circuit such manipulations. Economies controlled by people, instead of financiers, are being widely emulated, undermining the power of the world bankers who meet yearly at the Davos economic forum.

In 1992, the fraudulently "elected" Salinas government dismantled Article 27 of Mexico's constitution. Henceforth, land partly controlled by local communities or ejidos could be sold for individual profit. The rich bought it. But Mexico is also where Zapata's 1911 demand for land reform impelled a deep revolution that proceeded to nourish the 20th century's redistributive upsurges-including Russia in 1917 and Cuba in 1959. So, after the Zapata-inspired land reform had been undone, and just as NAFTA took effect on the first day of 1994, new Zapatistas rose up in resistance to NAFTA's privatization and marketization. The uprising signaled a need for economic autonomy. It also inadvertently launched the Global Justice Movement. The 1999 Seattle anti-WTO protest grew from this movement and has gone on recently to win presidencies in Venezuela and Bolivia.

Participatory budgeting and the MST

Brazil has been a pioneer in solidarity economics with its "participatory budgeting" and its Landless Workers' Movement, known as the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra; see www.mstbrazil.org ). 

Participatory budgeting was introduced in Porto Alegre in 1989 and has spread to over 100 cities in Brazil and beyond. The idea is simple: Citizens, not just politicians, get to participate in allocating each year's capital expenditures budget. Neighborhood associations and civic groups of all kinds send delegates to regular meetings, charged with prioritizing spending on streets, water, education or any city government matter. This blurs the line between social property and public property, using the latter to strengthen the former. And it answers neoliberalism, which advocates privatizing and marketizing not only public but also social property. Marketizing inevitably introduces hierarchy by undemocratically and tacitly excluding and marginalizing all who lack the cash to start a business. Participation of those who are not politicians or business owners replaces such marginalization with autonomy of a collective sort. And it works! Porto Alegre's participatory budgeting has resulted in scores of successful 
worker cooperatives, regular budget surpluses, designation as a model city by UNESCO and emulation by places as far away as Canada and Scotland. 

It is little wonder, then, that in February 2000, when a Brazilian delegation met in Paris with leaders of France's main alter-globalization group, Porto Alegre was chosen as the site for the first World Social Forum in 2001, held in opposition to the World Economic Forum in Davos. As of its sixth meeting, which we describe next, the WSF has almost eclipsed Davos and may become what George Monbiot calls "the world parliament in exile." 

We arrived at a friend's home in Sao Paulo's upscale Itaim Bibi district. Across town were the MST offices. Between them lay the sociological chasm in the world's second most class-polarized country. Crossing it, we met Gerardo Fontes of MST's international affairs, a Mexican from Sonora. Gerardo's fluency in Spanish is slightly weakened after 18 years with MST.

Brazil, with a population of 186 million, is the world's eighth largest economy, and Mexico, with a population of 106 million, is the eleventh. Their economies rank first and second in Latin America, before Argentina. They experience neoliberal globalization differently, but their responses are converging and already spreading to much of the global south, where similar policies are being imposed.

As we've seen, Argentina's recuperated factory movement took the slogan "Occupy, Resist, Produce" in 2002. But this had been the MST land occupation's cry since 1987. In 1984 it had started with the slogan "Without land reform we have no democracy." Later, in 1995, it proclaimed "Agrarian reform-the struggle of all," reaching out to the urban unemployed. So, in shifting from Argentina to Brazil, we move from the movement's flowers to its very roots.

Brazil's wealth, especially in land, was intensively concentrated in the 10 years prior to Lula's election. Over 900,000 farms of less than 10 hectares each went bankrupt, and 2 million rural workers lost jobs. 

Intimately connected with this, transnationals acquired million-hectare latifundos and set up soybeans, corn and other monocultures for export. Prior to Lula, MST had already said "basta" to this republican recycling of "coronelismo," the system that had ruled Brazil for centuries. Based on gigantic land grants to a dozen favorites by Portugal's king, "coronelismo" included a quasi-sovereign hereditary power to make laws. Backed by an estimated base constituency of over four million landless, the MST has demanded a cap of 1,500 hectares on all landholdings. It speaks with authority. Its 12,000 or so activists have resettled over 450,000 families on unused land since 1984. It invokes Article 184 of the 1988 constitution, which states that the government may expropriate "for purposes of agrarian reform, rural property which is not performing its social function." Governments persist in shying away from land reform. But Peter Rosset of Food First notes, "with a well-organized social movement finding land that me
ets those [constitutional] conditions and occupying it to force the government to act, [land reform] works quite well." 

As an act of civil disobedience, the MST secretly assembles groups of up to 10,000 who, under cover of night, move by foot or truck to a target site. The MST itself neither forbids nor encourages firearms. One leader, João Pedro Stedile, insists that a Gandhian strength in vast numbers is really what discourages repression. Still, paramilitaries and police have killed some 1,000 occupiers since 1984. Ongoing occupations attest to the desperate need that stems from real poverty. When they arrive, the occupiers spend the night taking possession and raising shelters. Proprietors awaken to a functioning, if muddy, encampment. MST lawyers argue that the land is large and unused, and hence in breach of the constitution. They often win, but not always. 

Each encampment is its own autonomous unit. Groupings of 30 or so families, formed beforehand, govern the encampment. They nominate committees for health, security or women's issues and send delegates to campwide assemblies. Decisions are made by construção, construction in debate and consensus-building. Producer co-ops are quickly organized, but meeting occupiers' own needs may take a season or more. (Knowing that some may die from starvation, some judges delay expropriation.) Surpluses go to networks of secondary MST marketing co-ops run by ex-landless farmers. It is expected that 2% of all sales go back to MST. Governance units usually assign a member as an activist to plan more occupations, maintaining ongoing solidarity with those who are still landless. Perhaps for these reasons Noam Chomsky, calls the MST "the most exciting popular movement in the world."

The MST participated in the founding of Via Campesina in Nicaragua in 1992 (see www.viacampesina.org). This coalition of over 100 farmers' groups on all continents represents millions of small and medium-sized farmers. All commit themselves to agrarian reform based on "food sovereignty." As Stedile puts it: "We maintain that every people, no matter how small, has the right to produce their own food. Agricultural trade should be subordinated to this greater right." 

Next week, part 2. Focuses on Zapatista economic autonomy