Brazilian attitudes toward agrarian reform: a Q-methodology opinion study of a conflictual issue.

Abstract

Concentration of landownership in the hands of a small oligarchy is a structural constant in Brazilian history. Such concentration does not mean rational productive utilization. Currently 1.6 percent of owners control 47 percent of productive land; yet farms of under 20 hectares provide over half of Brazil's food crops. Because of this unproductive land concentration, the output of basic foodstuffs has declined since the 1920s, as export and industrial crops such as coffee, soybeans, and alcohol for fuel received the bulk of fiscal incentives. With the opening of the Amazon to corporate development and colonization by the military state (1964-1985), the violence typical of such pioneer efforts brought much of the agricultural frontier under direct army control, in effect, militarizing a question of political economy and converting peasant resistance into a police problem. The New Republic, installed in March 1985, announced an agrarian reform based on the Land Statute of 1965 (Estatuta da Terra) as a programmatic priority. The main instrument of this reform was to be the presidential decree of disappropriation for social interest with compensation provided in titles of public debt indexed to inflation. A conservative backlash, strongly supported by the Brazilian press, however, defeated the reform in the Constituent Assembly and led to the replacement of four ministers of agrarian reform and the death of the fifth in a suspicious plane accident.