Lula’s “land shelf” is expensive and does not solve poverty in the countryside

The National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra) is running out of time to present, in the coming weeks, the details of a new project for rural settlements in the country, which meets the determination of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to create a “shelf of unproductive lands” in partnership with the states.

Amid criticism and political distress due to the resumption of land invasions by his allies from the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), Lula had his “eureka moment” on the subject in the weekly live “Conversation with the President”. “Why do we have to wait for the movement to invade a land so that we can send Incra to assess whether it is productive or unproductive for us to expropriate? Why doesn’t the State put together a shelf of unproductive land projects? It makes an agreement with the state secretariats and presents an available land bank to the Union. Instead of people invading, we offer, organize. This is a novelty that I did not think about in the first and second terms. I thought now and we are going to do it”, said Lula.

The “novelty” intended by Lula represents, in fact, the return to an agrarian reform model adopted until the early 2000s, but abandoned after it became unviable in the face of the new competitive reality of Brazilian agriculture. From 1995 to 1998, around 72% of the settlers received lots of land expropriated by the Union, based on a declaration of unproductivity and expropriation. From 2003 to 2006, during the first Lula administration, the scarcity of unproductive areas forced 71% of families to settle in properties purchased by the government, which made the operation more expensive by 70%.

Land shelf will require billions of reais

To form such a shelf of land, a lot of money from the Treasury will be needed. In 2005, the average cost of settling each landless family in the country was R$65,000, which included, in addition to the price of the land, expenses with civil servants and the implementation of the project. In 2018, the value of land acquisition alone reached R$108.9 thousand, which, in corrected values, represents today R$145 thousand. Adding the operational costs of infrastructure, implementation and management, the total cost of each settler is currently R$ 217,000. It would pay a minimum wage for each family settled for 164 months, or 13.7 years. In comparison, the estimated net agricultural income in the settlements is R$3,455 per year, or R$288 per month.

During the hearing of the MST’s CPI in which the former president of Incra, Xico Graziano, presented these data, the commission’s rapporteur, deputy Ricardo Salles (PL-SP), questioned whether it is worth resuming an agrarian reform with such cost- benefit. “We are putting public money, generating expectations for these people, making a whole movement that reaches the legal stability of property in Brazil, to make these settlers earn R$ 288 per month. It is something that makes no sense”, emphasized Salles.

If one considers the MST account that there are currently 100,000 families camped in the country waiting for an agrarian reform lot, the cost to settle everyone would reach R$ 21.7 billion.

Miserable life in the settlements

The average evasion rate in settlements is around 30%, and in more distant locations, it can reach 50% and even 70%. And most of the settled families, 64.3%, are in the Amazon biome, while another 12.1% are in the northeastern caatinga. “It is unequivocal, life in agrarian reform settlements is not an easy life. It is a miserable life, the government cannot, no matter how hard it tries, provide the conditions. Sometimes they are settlements far from the production areas, the technology does not reach there, which makes that family give up. It is a serious problem, which in my opinion could be solved by a more technical, more careful selection, which could be done through courses and training that we do not have”, said Graziano to the CPI.

This reality was confirmed by a study by Incra in 2022, based on the 2017 Agricultural Census, which showed that in the Amazon biome, in practically all municipalities that have agrarian reform settlements, the average income of settled families is half a minimum wage a month.

For the president of Incra in the Bolsonaro government, Geraldo Melo Filho, any new settlement policy cannot ignore this reality of extreme poverty. “You move these people to a place far from urban infrastructure, where there is no hospital, no security, no education. In other words, it even complicates the lives of municipalities. It puts people on the land and does not give conditions for them to produce. They have this income, which is actually non-income, and you end up having to give these people a type of support, assistance and social programs, which make no sense. It is not worth the investment of having them placed in rural areas”, he emphasizes.

Most unoccupied lands are in the Amazon

A “land shelf” cannot be created, as Lula wants, without high expenses. For Melo Filho, finding large unproductive areas in the Center-South is a difficult task, due to land appreciation. “No one has such a valued asset and stops producing it by choice. There is usually some problem such as the estate, sharing of goods, some dispute. And even if you find a significant amount of unused land after surveys, there is another main problem. You will need to budget. These lands are not simply taken over by the State. It is a private good like any other, it needs to be paid for”, he underlines.

Could the way out, then, be in the Union’s vacant lands? Yes, if it is the case of sending almost everyone to the Amazon. But most of the people who intend to be settled are in other regions. “Are these people who dream of their piece of land willing to move to the Amazon, to receive a plot where they will only produce 20%? It is not a matter of having only the land. It is the land being available where you eventually have this qualified demand”, says Melo Filho.

The former Incra leader notes that since 1994, under Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s government, around 3,500 agrarian reform settlements have already been made in the north of the country. “We are talking about almost two million people placed in the rural zone of the Amazon to produce without structure, without any support, and who today face all kinds of difficulties. So are you going to expand this? We know what happens: without conditions for production, for the disposal of production, these people will end up increasing deforestation. I don’t know if this is what the government intends to do, ”he underlines. According to data from the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), land reform contributed to 25% to 30% of deforestation in the Amazon between 2003 and 2014.

Agrarian reform based on the MST is a “recipe for failure”

For Xico Graziano, the government will only find unproductive land in environmentally fragile regions, covered by forest or with caatinga. In current reality, a distributive agrarian reform would no longer fit. “If it’s an agrarian reform based on land invaders, like the MST, it’s a surefire recipe for failure,” he says.

A feasible hypothesis, however, would be to encourage agriculture practiced by agricultural technicians or children of unemployed producers. “Malaysia and Indonesia did that. They decided to expand oil palm production, the governments made projects and selected people to do that. It’s not giving a piece of land and telling people to get by, raising chickens, ducks or horses, or renting it out to a neighbor. These are projects with a beginning, middle and end. Never based on land invaders, on agrarian bandits”, he says.

The government of Jair Bolsonaro spent BRL 6.2 billion to pay precatories of compensation for agrarian reform land suspended by previous governments. Melo Filho warns that the Lula government revoked Incra Memorandum 01 of 2019, which established that to start any expropriation process, it would first be necessary to point out the source of the existing resource. “The environment is being created exactly to go back to doing what was done. In other words, ‘buying’ land without actually having the budget or resources to pay for this investment. And that cannot. Article 1516 of the Fiscal Responsibility Law says that even for issuing a court order, there must be a budget”.

More land in settlements than in grain production

Melo Filho points out that the focus of the previous government was to provide dignified conditions for families that had been in the settlements for decades. “Agrarian reform is a set of actions, which normally starts with the expropriation and creation of settlements, but goes through infrastructure, the development of the settlement and its consolidation. This is in the Land Statute, in article 64, it is not my invention. The previous government continued to pay the previous bills for this initial part of the creation and settlement projects, but invested in the development and consolidation part. With the title, investments and infrastructure. That was the focus, trying to improve the quality of life and production for those who are already settled”, he points out.

Over the last 40 years, Brazil settled almost 1 million families through agrarian reform in an area of ​​87 million hectares. It is more than all the space occupied by the Brazilian grain crop, currently at 64 million hectares.

Contacted to detail how the “land shelf” project ordered by President Lula will be, and to inform if there is already any stock available, Incra only said that “this information will be detailed when the announcement of the actions to resume the National Reform Program Agrária (PNRA).” And that disclosure “will take place soon”.