3.4.3 | Phases of Assentamento: Establishment
The next step, an assentamento’s actual establishment, marks the end of what is seen as a long fight “for land”, but represents the beginning of yet another, and perhaps longer, struggle. As described by INCRA’s former president,
Part of the difficulty of this process consists in working against the potential isolation of the assentamento in relation to its surroundings. Although some assentamentos are located in remote locations, others are established very close to or even within the space of pre-existing rural communities. The acceptance and incorporation of a large number of “newcomers” thus becomes a challenge [33:44, 36:3].
As noted before, the formal starting point for the establishment is the issuing of an Ordinance by INCRA and the subsequent creation of a PDA (Assentamento Development Plan). The PDA document specifies development guidelines for the assentamento’s specific case, and includes provisions for building basic infrastructure and stipulations about access to credits. INCRA representatives and assentados work together in drafting the PDA. During this process, assentado families also choose among possible options for agricultural production set forth in studies conducted by INCRA and MST [7:56, 9:75].
In this moment, a critical process takes place: the division of the assentamento land into distinct areas, with different uses and property right structures. In principle, land areas are differentiated in the following categories:
- parcels for individual assentado families to live and work on;
- parcels for collective enterprises, which may include areas for collective production and processing of agricultural goods, for shared leisure spaces (e.g. soccer fields), or for other collective activities (e.g. an area for a community-meeting building); and
- areas dedicated to environmental preservation (e.g. forests, water springs and their surroundings).
Figure 1. Map of Assentamento Dom Tomás Balduíno
Although the formal division of the land is officially “set on paper” by INCRA technicians, the process contemplates the input of the community of assentados, who decide the specific spatial distribution and uses of the different areas [9:72]. In the cases visited for this research, two different general scenarios were found:
- Separated/individualized family production and living: each family is located within a separate parcel on which their house is built, and where they produce agrarian goods for self-consumption and eventual commercialization—i.e. each family holds[1], for ‘their’ parcel, legal instruments granting partial property rights, as described above. In this type of scenario, assentado houses are located relatively far away from each other, and collective areas are located in other, usually central or accessible, locations.
- Agrovillages: families live in houses that are relatively closer to each other, in an arrangement known as agrovila. Family-specific parcels for agrarian production, as well as collective areas, are located around the agrovila (and people do not live over them). Families hold legal instruments granting partial property rights for the land on which their houses are built and for the land on which they produce.
In any of the two types of cases, assentados usually decide among themselves who will get each of the parcels that will be assigned to single-family living or production. Although this is a decision with a high potential of conflict, interviewees reported that consensus was easily achieved, and that in the very few cases in which disagreements arose, they were either resolved among the parties or put to vote in an assembly that heard each party’s arguments and took a decision afterwards that were respected by assentados [9:73]. Apparently, the division performed in collaboration with INCRA employees results in parcels with a distribution of pros and cons that can accommodate assentados’s preferences with relative ease [7:53].
Furthermore, when areas are designated for collective agrarian production, assentamentos develop different mechanisms to structure responsibility of labor over them, and these vary intensely between the two types. In one telling case of an assentamento with separated/individualized family production and living, a relatively small area that had been chosen for joint production was simply informally divided into smaller parcels for individual assentados, who took them as “bits of extra land” to produce their own goods. The quality and quantity of agrarian production were manifestly different across the smaller parcels. This particular assentamento had non-existent collective enterprises, suggesting that conditions for sustained cooperation had not been achieved.
In contrast, in one agrovillage case, labor in the “collective land” was divided according to family capacity and updated according to performance:
This assentamento exhibited strong collective enterprises in other areas, including a system of participative research in agrarian technologies for producing and processing cocoa, and a collectively-run technical school that had students from different cities of the region.
In both types of cases, an important phenomenon that was consistently reported was the negative effect of the division of parcels for organizing collective initiatives. When the objective of ‘conquering the land’ is achieved and each family receives ‘its own’ parcel, the priority quickly shifts to financially supporting one’s family through production in one’s ‘own’ parcel:
Another interviewee described it thus:“in the beginning we all had the collective [initiative] and some profit. In the beginning… before the land was divided. But then I got my parcel, my neighbor got his own, and after the division of the land it was all over. Everyone was left with just her own" [13:14].
In other words, the pressure of addressing the immediate need to produce and earn income “for one’s own” seems to hinder efforts for building collective initiatives that could be more beneficial to everyone in the long run [9:96].
>>> 3.4.4 | Phases of Assentamento: Maintenance
[1] More precisely: “[titles] will be granted to the man or woman, or both, irrespectively of their marital status, in the terms and conditions stipulated by law” (Federal Constitution, Art. 189, §1).
