Landless Persons

The plight of landless persons is a global issue, as they are found all across the global South, especially South and Central America, Africa, and South Asia. The term landless persons usually refers to agricultural workers who do not own their own land. More specifically, the concept covers a heterogeneous category of people: not just landless agricultural laborers but also part-time sharecroppers, small farmers who live on the margins of large farms or plantations where they work but are allowed to have a small piece of land for themselves, at the discretion of the large farm owner. Also under the umbrella of landless persons, one finds farmers who own their own land but cannot survive exclusively on it and therefore have to work for wealthier farmers. It is thus hard to quantify how many people are landless in the world. For all of them, access to land is a life-and-death issue.

Access to enough quality land is a subset of the larger global issue of agrarian reform, which, in addition to land redistribution, also includes sustainable subsistence agriculture and eco-farming. Indeed, landless peasant movements—such as the Via Campesina—have been prominent actors in the larger agrarian social movements to resist the neo-liberalization of agriculture in the global South. For these movements, the neoliberal approach to agriculture involves large agribusinesses growing export crops that are in high demand on the global market, such as corn, soy, or sugar, as well as cattle ranching, using chemicals. Such a model of agricultural production is capital and technology intensive, reduces biodiversity, and requires a low level of agricultural labor, pushing small farmers and farm workers off the land, to the slums of the global cities, where they join the crowded cohorts of urban poor. This agricultural model has been strongly supported by global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Peasant rebellions are not a new phenomenon, but the contemporary landless persons movement is at the heart of several global dynamics that reflect the contested nature of globalization: the multilayered nature of global governance perceived to impose its dictates from above with the cooperation of national governments; the global issue of food sovereignty and the right to food versus a new land grab for cash crops; the contradictions between the need to protect the environment, biodiversity, and sustainability (including the rights of indigenous peoples) versus the market demand for specific crops in the global North (such as biofuel crops); the rise of the global civil society against the forces of the transnational state (alongside with the transnational corporations and the transnational capitalist class) and its democratic deficit.

The landless movement that has achieved the most visibility in its struggle for land reform has been the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) or Landless Workers Movement in Brazil. Since its creation in 1984 in Brazil's southern states, this movement has grown to include over a million people distributed across most Brazilian states. Its main tactic has been through land occupations (either public land or unused private land) and roadside encampments in order to obtain land for its members from the state or federal authorities through expropriation. In addition to local land occupation, the MST also engages in political action to obtain significant land reform at the national level and to globalize peasant and landless struggles for agrarian reform, against marginalization and displacement on a global scale.

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