Agrarian Moral Economies and Neoliberalism in Brazil: Competing Worldviews and the State in the Struggle for Land

The 1990s was the decade of neoliberalism in Brazil. During the successive administrations of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2003), public enterprises were privatized, import tariffs were slashed, regional free-trade markets were established, and fiscal discipline was prioritized in an attempt to control a massive public debt. As his first term progressed, however, Cardoso was forced to respond to the insistent popular demand for reform of the country's inequitable land-tenure structure. The issue became increasingly visible in the 1990s because of the strength of a grassroots social movement, the Movement of Landless Workers (MST). In response to the demands for agrarian reform, the government offered its support for an essentially neoliberal, market-based alternative to state-led distribution—an alternative favored by official development organizations throughout the Third World at this time. In this paper, I argue that the support for a market-led agrarian reform privileged the agrarian elite in Brazil and delegitimated the MST's struggle, not only because it reinforced the elite's claim to land but also because it legitimated the elite's particular interpretation of productivity and property rights. The claims put forward both by the agrarian elite and by the MST members in the southern state of Santa Catarina derive from what can usefully be considered ‘agrarian moral economies’.