Fostering sustainability in Brazilian agrarian reform: insights from assentamentos and ecovillages

3.3 | Public policies for agrarian reform in Brazil

<<< 3.2 | Assentamentos: Rural Settlements of Brazilian Agrarian Reform

According to the same INCRA document that includes the definition of assentamento,

“rural workers that receive a parcel commit themselves to live in it and exploit it for their own livelihood, on the basis of family agriculture, supported by credit, technical assistance, infrastructure and other benefits for their development” (INCRA, 2015a).

There are two points to be made here. First, interestingly, not all those who receive a parcel can be straightforwardly classified as rural workers at the outset. Although some assentados may have been workers in large rural properties, others have lived most of their lives in the poor outskirts of cities, with little access to education and often working in low-paid positions or simply being unemployed [1]. For these assentados, obtaining a piece of land comes hand-in-hand with the necessity of developing capabilities and skills to effectively work on it and use it as a source of income.
 
Second, the quotation signals the governmental duty to provide the basic conditions for the development of assentamentos (“credit, technical assistance, infrastructure and other benefits”). The credit programs offered by INCRA to assentados were recently redesigned to achieve what the agency describes as a “more sustainable model” (INCRA, 2015e)—although the reasons why previous models were less sustainable are unclear. One of the implications of the “redesign” was the division of credit transfers in three separate “cycles”:
  1. Installation,
  2. Productive Inclusion
  3. Productive Structuration.

Each “cycle” is spread across several modalities that can add up to a maximum of about R$50,000 (approximately U$15,000) per family. Funds given under INCRA’s credit programs must be repaid by assentados within a fixed number of years, with payment conditions that are relatively favorable for the Brazilian context. These include the possibility of waiving a significant portion of credit payments, depending on a number of conditions (Art. 3º, Law 13.001/14). A similar model is used to provide housing credit under the program “My House, My Life” (Minha Casa, Minha Vida), which grants up to R$28.000 (approximately U$8,500) to rural beneficiaries, with up to 96% of the credit value waived (Caixa Econômica Federal, 2015). Following the model adopted in Bolsa-Família—a direct cash transfer federal program to fight poverty—credits for assentados are now transferred via the use of magnetic cards, which allow access to the funds without further intermediaries.


Despite the availability of these programs, interviewees reported that credits are simply not enough to cover expenses for construction, given the combined costs of materials and workforce [7:83, 9:78]. Therefore, assentados usually have to resort to jointly provide workforce by themselves (a system traditionally called “mutirão” in Brazil) and exchange services among them. In addition, in order to access housing credits, assentados informed that they had been requested to present an architectural project beforehand. The job may be performed by INCRA technicians, but apparently many times it is accomplished via MST partnerships, for example with architecture departments at public universities [7:82].


In addition to providing funding and assistance, government also plays a key role in legally defining land ownership in assentamentos. Assentados only enjoy partial property rights over the land units (parcels) that they receive: they may use and earn income from them, but are legally restricted to transfer them to others (by selling, exchange or other means). This is achieved by means of a legal structure in which INCRA holds ownership over the entire land of the assentamento, whereas assentado families hold particular legal instruments—known as a CDRU (“Concession over the Real Right of Usage”) or a TD (“Dominion Title”)—which permit usage and income-generation over the parcel, but not free disposition or “alienation” of it. In principle, holding these documents allows assentados to access government-supported credits from public finance institutions, but not always from private finance institutions, such as banks, which usually require full ownership rights, including transfer rights, as collateral for credit (Rezende, 2006).

The legal restrictions for transfers are strict. For the first ten years, assentados cannot transfer their parcels in any way. If they wish to leave, all they can do is ask INCRA for a refund of investments over the parcel (such as housing). After the ten-year period is over, and only if a number of “resolutive conditions” from the CDRU are fulfilled, the assentado may apply for a definitive transfer of the TD and a property title with full alienation rights. If the application is accepted, the monetary value of the parcel is calculated on the basis of what INCRA had to pay for the land at the time that it was expropriated—with maximum limits depending on the region (MDA Ordinance Nº 7/2013). The assentado has the possibility of negotiating the payment in annual installments for up to 20 years (with no payments for the first 3 years).

As with any other titles, the parcel is transferred to the assentado’s heirs when (s)he dies; however, they cannot fragment the inherited property. Therefore, not all heirs may be able to join the assentamento. [2] Finally, even with a definitive property title, there is one further legal restriction: if the parcel is sold, the new owner will not be able to merge it with any other property larger than two “fiscal modules”—a measure of land size that varies from region to region, ranging from 5 to 110 hectares. This restriction was implemented to prevent the accumulation of agrarian-reform small parcels by big landowners, a possibility that would manifestly defeat the land redistribution purposes of the reform. According to INCRA’s former President, such a measure bears great relevance for preventing the “reconcentration of land”, and represents the first time that Brazil has explicit dealt with legal limits on land property [33:13].


INCRA itself is the organization legally responsible for infrastructure provision, with priorities set on roads, water and sanitation systems, and electricity networks (Law 4.504/64, Art. 73). Construction may be carried out via public tender processes administered by INCRA or, as is more frequently the case, via partnerships with ministries at the federal level or government agencies at the state- or municipal-level. In theory, INCRA has a period of three years after the PDA is done for guaranteeing the provision of basic infrastructure (INCRA, 2015d). However, some assentamentos visited for this research still lacked basic infrastructure even after ten years of completion of the PDA, revealing the complexity and magnitude of the task and the deficient capacity of the governance system to address this critical issue—a point we will emphasize in subsequent analysis.

Moreover, and as could be reasonably expected, assentados can in principle benefit from a number of additional government policies, which are available either exclusively for themselves or for small farmers in the whole country. Among those policies, we highlight PRONAF, PRONERA and PRONATER:The actual results of these broad and ambitious government programs are particularly hard to evaluate (Guanziroli, 2007). Given the scope and time limitations of the research project, we decided not to focus on a detailed evaluation of these programs. The links between our findings and the results of these government initiatives constitute a topic for further investigation.

>>> 3.4 | Phases of an assentamento’s history: how does an agrarian reform settlement come to be?
 
[1] For more information on the profile of assentados, check INCRA (2010).
[2] For a discussion on succession and other related legal issues for assentados, see Souza Siqueira (2011).

 

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