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

INTERVIEW 13 | Quote 19:34

"O grande fator que leva a juventude para cidade, é que no campo não tem atrativo. Não tem nada de esportes, cultura, esportes, teatro, dança. As oficinas são muito fracas nessa área de cultura no campo. é fraco em geral. No campo nem tem. Então nós temo só campo de futebol, e só. E mais nada. Então um desafio da cooperativa e do MST é trazer para o campo. é debater com os órgãos públicos, de quem comanda as políticas públicas, que é para trazer aqui para o campo. Parquinho. Vocês não viram a professora falando aqui. Vocês tem que construir um parquinho aqui! O custo de um parvoinho (??) não significa nada. E não tem aqui. Então tem que ir na secretaria de educação, tem que ir no prefeito. Tem que trazer o parvoinho para as crianças. Tem um parvoinho. As oficinas que a secretaria da cultura banca às vezes, é lá na cidade. Você tem que ir lá na cidade participar de oficina. é muito mais fácil trazer oficina para cá. Não dá não no período de aula, faz nas férias, férias de julho, férias de janeiro, traz umas oficias aqui. Consegue um grupo aqui. Oficina de dança, teatro, cultura, arte. Esse é o nosso debate com a políticas públicas, com o poder público. Debater com eles, convencer que tem que trazer para cá para o campo."

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4.3 | Creating attractive conditions for the youth <<< 4.2 | Building infrastructure for sustainability

Several interviewees stressed that “keeping the youth on the land” (i.e. in assentamentos) is a prominent shared concern among assentados [17:69, 19:34, 31:124]. The problem was usually framed in terms of life in an assentamento being perceived by youth as “less attractive” than life in urban centers—a description consistent with the strong pattern of rural-urban migration that has characterized Brazil and other Latin-American countries during the past five decades (Dufour & Piperata, 2004). Given the scope of our research, our intention here is not to discuss rural-urban youth migration in depth, but simply to highlight the common elements associated with this topic in assentamentos, derived from our data.

Migration of youth threatens the endurance of assentamentos for obvious demographic reasons. However, the presence of youth in these communities can contribute to their sustainability prospects not just because it represents the very possibility of having a “future generation”, but also because it can influence the social dynamics of an assentamento in ways that are potentially conducive to enhanced sustainability. The clearest example raised by interviewees was that young individuals could function as vectors of new knowledge for the community, bringing in fresh ideas that may improve the community’s capacity to meet its needs (and continue to meet them in the future) [7:97, 17:22, 17:75, 19:33, 23:70].

Young people can also question established belief systems working against the development of more sustainable living or production methods, and may play a relevant role in bringing about change. This was suggested by one assentado who favors organic production methods and who explained that, in order to convince neighbors to stop the “inertial practice” of using “agrotoxics”, he had realized by experience that it was better to approach his neighbors’ children [17:76].

We identified three main sets of challenges related to creating attractive conditions to the youth: providing attractive jobs, offering leisure options and creating room for them to build their houses.

4.3.1 | Providing attractive job opportunities for youth
Interviewees reported that children in assentamentos have, in the vast majority of cases, access to basic (primary) and secondary education—usually in the public schools of the nearest town or, in the case of one relatively large settlement, in a public school that had been built specifically for it. However, they also reported that the process to secure that access can be hard, involving long negotiations with local government authorities [7:90]. An even more critical challenge may appear in the case of access to technical or professional education programs, for which there are only limited opportunities in rural areas. Interestingly, however, assentados did not raise this point in interviews, emphasizing instead the challenge of providing attractive job opportunities for qualified youth within assentamentos. After all, most of those who receive higher education do not necessarily want to directly work with agriculture, but still could bring their acquired skills to improve the communities in which they grew in and their parents still live on.

Offering those jobs, however, is not easy, as it seems to require forms of collective organization—such as cooperatives and associations—that are not always present in assentamentos, and tends to be stronger in those communities that do not rely only on the primary sector. For example, in one case in which the assentamento had developed strong cooperatives for production and commercialization (COPAVA), interviewees noted that challenge and proudly highlighted that assentados’ children had temporarily left to pursue programs in agronomy, accounting, pedagogy, and medicine—but then had come back to work in the assentamento as service providers or technicians in cooperatives or agroindustries, notably in the production of cachaça [17:26, 19:33].

4.3.2 | Offering leisure options for the youth
Another challenge is the provision of leisure or cultural activities in assentamentos, where “today, leisure just means soccer on Sunday” [17:70]. “There is no sport, culture, theater, dance. Workshops and cultural activities are scarce in rural culture and in general. So we just have a soccer field and that is it, nothing more.” [19:34]. Currently, in order to obtain those, young people need to travel to nearby cities and, sometimes, just end preferring to move there [9:111]. As clearly stated by assentados, there seems to be a widespread perception of isolation in rural areas, and more strongly so for the youth. If leisure options are not provided, it becomes harder to maintain attractive conditions for young people in an assentamento.

4.3.3 | Finding space for the youth to stay (or move in)
Finally, we identified a structural problem deriving from the particular property rights arrangements present in almost all assentamentos we visited. As the design of assentamentos is based on the notion of family as the fundamental unit, only the parents are granted partial property rights over parcels of land in the assentamento’s establishment. At this stage all available parcels are granted to families and none are reserved to the future generations, making it very difficult to accommodate new residents thereafter.

There are only two alternatives to hold property rights over land in an assentamento after the initial distribution of land: by inheritance (a case in which land cannot be divided in smaller portions) [1] or by buying land from an assentado that acquires full property rights. However, as explained in the previous chapter, there are strong legal restrictions over this last option. As a result, grown-up adolescents might not stay in that specific assentamento and look for housing in a urban or rural area nearby, or may even take part in the process of becoming assentados themselves at other locations (interview 11).

>>> 5 | Two domains for the design of solutions to sustainability challenges in assentamentos

[1] Law 8.629/93, Art. 18-A.