On behalf of Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement (MST), I come before you today to set out how we are building Popular Agrarian Reform, and the part it plays in social transformation, around three fundamental themes: land, food and the environment.
To understand our proposal, one must first understand the conditions in which we live today, which lay bare the dependent and unequal character of Brazil's development. Brazilian agribusiness stands as a living expression of the contradictions running through our country: a model of production that marries all that is most modern, vast investment in science and technology, cutting-edge machinery, 5G-enabled agriculture, and full integration into global markets, with all that is most archaic, precarious labour relations bordering on slavery, and the concentration of land in the hands of the few. In Brazil, 1 per cent of rural landowners hold 50 per cent of all arable land.
Such concentration breeds social exclusion and environmental destruction, borne out in burning and deforestation. It is a model that produces commodities for export yet fails to produce food sovereignty for the Brazilian people, which compromises progress and spreads inequality in its wake.
We hold agrarian reform to be a structural question, one that lies at the very heart of the fight against inequality. At the MST, we have built Popular Agrarian Reform as an alternative that fights for the democratisation of land, for the preservation of nature's commons, and for the production of food through agroecological transition: a development project that places life, rather than profit, at its centre. We believe that this is the true modernisation our country needs.
Our organisation, the MST, is a mass popular movement, autonomous and democratic in character, built on a structure that runs from the local level all the way up to our National Directorate. We are present in 24 of Brazil's 27 states, numbering more than 450,000 families already settled on land and a further 100,000 families still living in encampments; altogether, we number more than 2 million working men and women.
Brazil, for all that it ranks among the largest agricultural producers on the planet, has once again found itself on the world hunger map. Today, more than 20 million Brazilian men and women go hungry, and a further 50 million live with food insecurity. The climate crisis, together with the advance of agribusiness, has turned food into a commodity controlled by major transnational corporations.
In our country, often without support or access to credit, 70 per cent of our food is produced by people like us: peasants, farmers, Indigenous peoples, and quilombolas. This is why we defend food sovereignty, the right of every people to decide what to produce, how to produce it, and for whom, and why we resist the commodity export model, which concentrates wealth, destroys the forest, contaminates the soil with agrochemicals, and threatens life itself.
Ecology, for us, means caring for life and for the land. The climate crisis cannot, in our view, be met with false solutions such as the carbon market, which turns nature into a commodity and deepens inequality still further. For the MST, the answer lies in a popular agroecological transition, built up from within our own territories, with peasants, Indigenous peoples, and quilombolas themselves at its centre. Agroecology is, for us, a path towards climate justice, one that weds ancestral knowledge to a science committed to life.
We believe that we are not alone in this struggle. What we are building in Brazil forms part of a larger struggle that spans the whole of the Global South, from Latin America to Africa, and from Asia to Palestine; ours are peoples confronting the concentration of land, the destruction of the commons, and the domination of great corporations over life itself. Popular Agrarian Reform is thus an international project, one that speaks to every struggle for life wherever capital threatens existence.
We have established important international exchanges, building brigades of mutual and lasting solidarity with Haiti, Venezuela, Zambia, and Cuba, and we are now building a cooperation with China as well. To bring agroecological transition to scale, bio-inputs and mechanisation stand as fundamental pillars of our work, and our partnership with the Institute of Organic Recycling at China Agricultural University offers a fine example of such cooperation. We have also signed a digital agriculture agreement with SINOMACH and with our own cooperatives.
Solidarity-based cooperation between Brazil and China represents a historic opportunity to strengthen peasant agriculture, promote the sovereignty of peoples, and confront the challenges of the twenty-first century together. May our experiences meet one another, flourish, and bear fruit, in solidarity, dignity, and an abundance of life for our peoples.
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