togetherTV videos - Adalton Santiago Binas

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Adalton Santiago Binas

With help from Brazil’s MST movement, Adalton now has a home and some land to farm

Promised land
With help from Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, Adalton now has a home and some land to farm

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Adalton Santiago Binas
Age: 18
Home: Brazil
Although Brazil has one of the world’s strongest economies, an estimated 39 million people live on less than $2 a day. The distribution of land in Brazil is similarly unfair. One person can own a piece of land the size of Belgium, while 4.8 million farming families have no land of their own and 60 per cent of Brazil's farmland lies idle.

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or Landless Workers’ Movement was set up in 1985 in response this inequality. MST organises camps next to unused land. It then campaigns for the land to be given to the occupiers so they can set up farming settlements.

Adalton tells us how the MST helped his family set up home in Santo Amaro, near the metropolis of Sao Paolo.
Filed in: Latin America & the Caribbean, Trade

Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement

The MST is the largest social movement in Latin America, with 1.5 million members
According to the Brazilian constitution, land that is not being farmed can be used for 'social purposes', but it takes concerted campaigning from organisations like the MST for these principles to be put into practice
MST helps its members set up co-operative farms, build houses, hospitals and run schools
It has won land titles for more than 350,000 families and a further 180,000 families are awaiting government recognition
MST has made these gains despite fierce, and sometimes violent, resistance from the government and landowners

Brazil

Brazil
Population: 184 million
Population living on less than $2 a day: 21%

Filed in: Latin America & the Caribbean, Trade