The numbers are impressive: 580 tons of food of 1,920 different types, produced by 180 cooperatives all over the country, offered to 300,000 people who spent the last four days at Água Branca Park in the city of São Paulo. And the balance of the 5th National Agrarian Reform Fair, organized by the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST, in Portuguese), is even greater than that.
“Our assessment is very positive,” says Ceres Hadich, from MST’s national coordination. “That’s how we are consolidating this political culture here in the city of São Paulo too, by holding the National Agrarian Reform Fair. In these days [of the fair], we make a joint effort to bring all the diversity, all the intensity, all the power, the daily strength of agrarian reform in our territories to one of the largest urban centers in the world,” she sums up.
In addition to these results, 40 tons of food were donated and an agreement with the National Supply Company (Conab, in Portuguese) guarantees that all the food left over will be bought and used to feed public schools through the National School Feeding Program (Pnae, in Portuguese).
At the end of the event, the MST announced that a new edition of the fair will be held in 2026.
Diverse and native production
Diversity is one of the hallmarks of the work brought to the fair by Claudinei Barbosa Medeiros, dubbed Zeca, who is also a member of the MST’s national leadership. He and his colleagues from the Indaiá settlement came from Aquidauana, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, “to show what Mato Grosso do Sul has actually produced in the agrarian reform settlements, because everyone thinks that Mato Grosso do Sul only produces soy and cattle”, according to Zeca.
He says that the settlement has been preparing to take part in the fair for over a month, organizing the logistics to move activists and 12 tons of food from Mato Grosso do Sul to São Paulo.
Zeca highlights the work done by settlement communities to process the products. The honey is bottled in a honey house in the Rio Feio settlement. The 8 de Março Association works with honey, manioc and cachaça, a Brazilian alcoholic beverage. Baru flour is made by organized groups of women in the São Manuel settlement. “They produce everything from flour to baru paçoca, bonbons and truffles,” she says.
Baru is a nut native to the Brazilian Cerrado biome, not so well known in other regions of the country. In a production that includes vegetables, sweets, pepper, cachaça, honey and dairy products, Zeca mentions Cerrado’s typical products, such as baru nuts and flour and jatobá flour.
“What’s left of the Cerrado is where the settlements are, because agribusiness has destroyed everything. What’s left standing today is in the hands of the settlers, Indigenous and Quilombola communities in the state,” he says.
“Therefore, bringing these products [to the fair in São Paulo] is very important because we’re showing, once again, that agrarian reform works. And never forget to say that the products being put on the table here are born out of the struggle for land that took place on the unproductive large estate.”
