ANOTHER MODERNIZATION IS POSSIBLE: From Land Conquest to Agro-Ecological Experiment

摘要

For over half a century agricultural colleges throughout the world have been teaching succeeding generations of agronomists that agricultural modernization, based on increasingly sophisticated technology, follows a linear path. Through a barrage of scientific propaganda, peasant farmers have been led to believe that their profound knowledge of plant lore, handed down from generation to generation, has been rendered redundant. Brazil's peasant farmers and landless rural workers, organized into the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Rural Workers' Movement, initially accepted the dominant ideology. After occupying unproductive large estates and enduring systematic violence, they began in the 1980s to gain control over considerable stretches of land. Believing somewhat naively that their problems were over now that they had won land, they began to farm using chemically-intensive methods, aiming to prove to Brazilian society that they could beat the big farmers at their own game. The experiment was not a success. This article tells the story of how many MST settlers are learning to develop their own form of ecologically-informed farming, much more suited to their own needs.