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• 1 2016-03-18T15:41:01-07:00 5.1 | Access, use and dissemination of sustainability know-how 5 plain 2016-03-29T18:45:22-07:00 <<< 5 | Two domains for the design of solutions to sustainability challenges in assentamentos
  
  Access to knowledge seems essential for developing sustainable assentamentos for various reasons. First, as most assentados come from very underprivileged backgrounds, many (especially older adults) are illiterate, and most of the things they have learned are connected with practical know-how acquired by experiences they had in the past. Assentados who have lived in the city their whole lives probably know little about agricultural techniques or life in a smaller community. If an assentado lived in rural areas, chances are high that she used to be an employee in a large farm and, as stated by an interviewee, “was born with a poison pump on their back” [17:76]. If she is to change towards more sustainable methods, others will need to somehow convince her of the benefits and teach how it can be done.
  
  Access to knowledge, however, goes beyond formal education and learning, because knowledge required for sustainability comprises skills, practices, capabilities and technologies that can empower assentados to produce, build, communicate and live more sustainably. Many of these capabilities are not included in the official school program and are not disseminated in most big agribusiness farms or in cities. Examples of knowledge assentados could learn include techniques for energy production [19:38]; processing of agrarian goods [7:33]; organic fertilizers [13:19]; bio-construction techniques [23:75], and agroecological practices [19:20, 21:9]; and about relevant public policies available to them [33:27]. Although we found these sorts of knowledge to be relevant for fostering sustainability in agrarian reform, they were often missing and not always easily available for assentados.
  
  Our data shows that knowledge in assentamentos is usually accessed by means of (i) courses offered directly or indirectly by MST; (ii) residents taking part in external courses and returning to the community [19:38]; (iii) technical assistance provided by government or universities [33:27]; (iv) by assessing and experiencing the positive results from others (learn by seeing others do); (v) through partnerships with national and international organizations; (vi) or simply obtaining information from internet.
  
  In Terra Vista, the use and dissemination of ecological know-how was especially present through participative research for organic cocoa production, a collective initiative that has led to results enabling them to move towards organic methods while increasing their production and revenues, reforesting their land, and recovering their natural resources while deeply involving the youth. Terra Vista also hosts a technical school that offers courses on agroecology and rural technologies with students from all ages from seven different municipalities in the surroundings. The school constantly hosts events, which help to diffuse knowledge and learning from others, and act as touchpoint between the assentamentos and local communities. Instituto Cabruca—an NGO of which some Terra Vista residents are members—has become a partner institution providing them with technical assistance and, with knowledge produced in Terra Vista, promoting sustainable economical development consultancy for other small farmers and traditional groups. Another noteworthy spillover from this knowledge dynamics was in the audiovisual sector, which was recently created and employs mainly the youth, who produce videos and broadcast music, talks and news on the Internet and in their recently-acquired radio station.
  
  Accessing, using and disseminating sustainability know-how as a way to address those challenges became an even more salient topic after our interaction with ecovillages. All ecovillages that we visited exhibited high stocks of sustainability know-how and an explicit intention to translate them into practices, as well as disseminating them as part of their model. Two big strands of know-how seemed more prominent: knowledge for ecological sustainability—such as bioconstruction, compost toilets, agroforesting, permaculture—and knowledge for community- building. These types of know-how were used in different forms: as source of income (through courses and workshops); as enablers for building more sustainable infrastructure; and as drivers for creating a stronger community and for attracting new residents and visitors who can learn, implement and disseminate this knowledge in their own environments. Finally, sustainability know-how is also appealing to young volunteers and can help to attract and keep the youth.
  
  >>> 5.2 | Enabling cooperative collective dynamics through conflict resolution
• 1 media/establishment.png 2016-03-18T11:28:58-07:00 3.4.3 | Phases of Assentamento: Establishment 4 image_header 2016-03-29T18:20:10-07:00 <<< 3.4.2 | Phases of Assentamento: Occupation and Encampment
  
  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,

  “when people enter the assentamento, their objective of ‘conquering land’ is achieved, but this is not the end, it’s just the beginning of a story with all the contradictions and dialectical processes that we know occur in the implementation of a rural community" [33:27].

  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:
  1. parcels for individual assentado families to live and work on;
  2. 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
  3. 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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  Interestingly, agrovillage cases consistently exhibited stronger collective enterprises—such as long-standing cooperatives for production and commercialization of goods—than separated/individualized family production and living cases. This suggests that the spatial distribution of an assentamento and the development of strong collective enterprises are somehow related. One possibility is that spatial distributions have a direct influence in the development of collective enterprises. Another possibility is that assentamentos that choose agrovillage distributions in their establishment phase already have, at that point, conditions favorable to sustained cooperation (such as shared trust or a strong common identity)—and then manage to maintain these conditions in time, thanks to a variety of factors (including the chosen spatial distribution). This was indicated by an interviewee who reported that the “agrovila” arrangement had been decided upon in the encampment phase, when some of the families decided that they would establish a cooperative for agrarian production and commercialization, and that infrastructure (such as water and sanitation) would be easier and cheaper to build and maintain for all if their houses were closer together [19:36].
   
  
  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:

  “So if I we have a family that has a capacity to produce in a certain area, they will have to take care of that, otherwise it will be reduced. If my family is small and I can only take care of a small piece, so I will be assigned just the small piece” [21:13].

  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:

  “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].

  Another interviewee described it thus:

  “You can still mobilize people, but you created that difficulty. That difficulty is real. It’s not that the guy says ‘I abandoned the struggle’. No! Far from that. It’s just that now you have that difficulty that is work. You go there and you get “does it have to be now? I’m here planting, I can’t stop, I can’t leave my tractor here…” [11:57]

  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
   

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  [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).