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An Exception to Lula’s Rule |
by Sue Branford
Now and then there emerges somewhere in the world a social movement that is really exceptional for its integrity, astuteness and mass appeal. For me one of those rare movements is Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST, the Landless Workers’ Movement). Ever since it was founded in the early 1980s it has confounded predictions of its imminent demise. In the early days academics said that it was doomed because the peasantry was dying out all over the world. And today economists say the MST is fighting a lost cause because of the rapid and apparently unstoppable expansion of agribusiness in Brazil. Yet, against the odds, the movement has not only survived but steadily expanded. And, who knows, its ‘historical moment’ may yet come with the looming crisis in destructive, energy-profligate industrial farming.
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