On Wednesday, (11/26), during a seminar at the Chamber, the chief-assistant of the Institute of Lands of Pará (Iterpa) and Professor of the Federal University of that state, Girolano Tracanni, affirmed that “analyzing the issue of the agrarian reform in the Constitution means analyzing its most retrograde and conservative space".

The debate about agrarian issues was held during the seminary “20 years of the Constitution: challenges to ensure the applicability of human right to land and to territory”, proposed by the Deputy Adão Preto (PT-RS), the President of the Committee for Participative Legislation.

Mobilization
Tracanni reminded that, although social movements have conquered the largest amount of signatures for a popular amendment to the Constitutional Convention (1,200,000), the device which provided for the limit to rural territorial property was rejected.

The expert from Pará highlighted that, although the Constitution associates the ownership of land to its social function, ruralists got to include in the text the qualification defining that “productive properties” cannot be expropriated for agrarian reform. “The agrarian issue, despite all popular mobilization, ended up in a black hole”, he affirms.

Retrogression
According to Deputy Adão Preto, though, if the Chart were elaborated by the Current Parliament, “it would come out much worse”. At that time, the agrarian fight was in its climax. We have now the discord among social movements and the strengthening of the caucus of the ruralists. We are horrified with what we have perceived from our congresspeople”, he highlighted.

The General Deputy-attorney Déborah Duprat added that this “retrogression” does not happen only in the Parliament, but in all society. She mentioned the Public Prosecutor’s Office for the state of Rio Grande do Sul, which has recently brought a lawsuit aiming at prohibiting the existence of the Landless Rural Workers´ Movement (MST). “The Prosecutor’s Office, which, after 88, has been acting on behalf of children and teenagers and fighting violence against women, now proposes such an action”, she lamented.

According to Duprat's opinion, the explanation for this social change “is inherent to this generation”. She thinks that, after 20 years of the enactment of the Constitutional Chart, “the conservatives have had time to reorganize themselves, because they perceived what the new conceptions provided for in the text meant.”

The Sociology Professor of the University of Brasília and representative of the Not-for-Profit Organization Terra de Direitos (Land of Rights), Sérgio Sauer, has a similar hypothesis. For him, “in Brazilian society, which is marked by huge social differences and by political exclusion, when legal advances happen, the reaction to them is violent”. As an example, he mentioned the creation of the Democratic Ruralist Union, in 88, and the increase in the amount of murders related to the agrarian issue in 2003, after the election of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva.

Advances
Despite these reserves, the experts recognize that the Constitution of 1988 has brought advances. Tracanni himself highlights some aspects, such as the consolidation of family agriculture and the creation of conservation and sustainable-use unities. Déborah Duprat highlights also the change in the concepts of land and territory inscribed in the text.

According to her, although the Constitution is centered on the principle of human dignity, and therefore, on the individual, the new chart considers that individual in the context of collectivity. “Individual, group and territory are inseparable”, she adds. Thus, the role of the State changes from the concession of lands to traditional populations, to the promotion of the agrarian reform, according to her.

Sérgio Sauer added that, because of that conceptual change, the fight for land is no longer limited to the fight for property. “When it is talked about social function and territory, the fight for the agrarian reform becomes the fight for rights, related to identity. It is about the right to work, to an address, to be”, he affirmed.

Brazil does not know who owns half of its territory
Girolano Tracanni also highlighted that it is impossible to enforce agrarian politics if the Federal Government does not know the legal situation of more than half of Brazilian territory. He reminded that in 2003, the Brazilian Agrarian Diagnosis showed that Public Power did not know who owned 51% of Brazilian territory, which was not registered. That document was produced by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and by the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra).

Notarized titles surpass the existing area
Tracanni also highlighted another aspect of the agrarian situation of Brazil: according to him, there are some cases in which the amount of land having notarized titles is 15 times larger than the territorial area of the municipality.

As an example, he mentioned the municipality of Moju, in the state of Pará, whose area is smaller than 1,000,000 hectares, but which counts with 14,500,000 hectares of registered property titles. In São Félix do Xingu, another municipality in Pará, the area registered in notary-public offices is 3.5 times larger than the actual area of the municipality, according to the expert. “We are not as large as the state of Mato Grosso, which has 16 floors, but we are almost there”, he added sarcastically.

Administrative cancellation of titles
According to Trancanni, the best way to solve this situation would be the approval of the Bill 5632/01, which allows the administrative cancellation of ownership titles. “The other option would be to judge millions of lawsuits, which would load the judicial districts. How many decades would it last?

Report - Maria Neves
Editing - Newton Araújo Jr./Rejane Xavier
Translation: Positive