‘Drought Industry’ Feeds a Hunger Crisis

Drought and hunger have haunted the arid wasteland of northeast Brazil, the nation’s poorest and most backward region, for centuries.

The cyclical scourge has cultivated a “drought industry” run by political bosses and landowners, who keep peasants dependent on emergency food and resources in order to control their votes.

So this year’s drought was no surprise. But the reaction was.

The poor of the northeast--neglected by a slow-moving federal government, rallied by well-organized leftists, driven by hunger and rage--rose up as never before. Systematic looting of supermarkets, food warehouses and trucks swept the region.

The despair and determination of the looters stunned Brazilians.

Images of food riots and emaciated children created a major crisis for President Fernando Henrique Cardoso as he embarked this month on a campaign for reelection. Although Cardoso is still expected to win in October, his poll ratings dipped to their lowest point in four years--a period during which his reforms have made him consistently popular.

Not only has the northeast become a symbol of social injustice, but the plight of an estimated 10 million peasants in the region is a particularly uncomfortable issue for the president.

Key allies in his center-right ruling coalition include power brokers from the northeast who are blamed for preserving semi-feudal social and agricultural conditions that cause drought and hunger.

The looting has shown once again that many Brazilians live dangerously close to the edge. There have been no deaths directly blamed on the drought, but hunger has taken a debilitating toll on its victims.

Some church leaders and politicians justify the theft of food in cases of true need.

“The looting is because of necessity,” said Luiz Soares, 53, a rural activist of the Landless Workers Movement, known as the MST. He gestured at a dusty expanse of ruined crops outside this city in the interior of Pernambuco state. “If we have to, we will loot. We are not going to let our families die of hunger.”

Toothless and thin, Soares has a brown face seared by the sun and desolation of the sertao, the wilderness that covers the interior of nine Brazilian states. Historically, the apocalyptic-looking landscape of this scrubland has been fertile ground for messianic religious movements.

Soares is a typical product of the sertao. As a young man, he migrated to Sao Paulo to work as a truck driver. Then he returned to the northeast to join a farming cooperative on a rich man’s estate that was occupied by squatters outside Caruaru.

Soares is a disciplined soldier of the left-wing MST, whose audacious offensive here has reinforced its status as Brazil’s most effective and polemical social organization. The landless movement’s participation has made the hunger-related uprisings the most widespread in memory.

“Seventy percent of the looting was done by the MST,” asserted Amaury de Souza, a political analyst. “They are probing limits. They want to know how far they can go.”

De Souza criticized both the militants and the government. Although he called the more than 100 looting incidents “organized crime,” he also described the crisis as a symbol of Cardoso’s neglect of domestic politics.

The administration responded ineffectively to the drought despite warnings provided by satellites and agricultural experts, critics say.

“The government knew the drought was coming,” said Ivanildo Sampaio, the editor of Jornal do Comercio, Pernambuco’s biggest newspaper. “It was no mystery. But the government was not prepared. They took no preventive actions. You have to have a project. You have to have infrastructure.”

This drought has been especially severe because of El Nino-generated climatic conditions and because high urban unemployment has blocked the possibility of migration to cities such as Sao Paulo, usually a social safety valve for the region.

The fundamental problem is an authoritarian system in which immensely powerful landowners control water, agriculture technology and other resources, critics say.

The landed oligarchs command political machines and private armies and are known as colonels, a term from the Portuguese colonial era that refers to their ancestors’ military service.

Today’s rural strongmen resist efforts to modernize farming and reclaim the land, as has been done in desert areas such as Israel, because their power depends on a vulnerable and submissive population, said Father Everaldo Fernandes, dean of the college of philosophy here.

In this context, the failure of the government to rush emergency relief to the area pushed hungry people to break the law, the priest said.

“We make a difference between a legal position and an ethical position,” Fernandes said. “Life is a fundamental ethical value. Beyond the law, the looting is ethical because it is the only path for survival. . . . People question the looting. Why don’t they question the system that creates the looting?”

Such outspoken sentiments on the part of the church, expressed also by the National Council of Bishops of Brazil, angered President Cardoso. He condemned the landless movement and its allies, calling them a new drought industry.

“Promoting looting assaults the interests of the people,” Cardoso said. “It has only one meaning: It is disorder, it is a mess, it is posturing for the media. And even worse, calling the media to advise them that there will be looting is a crime.”

Last month, some opinion polls showed Cardoso in a virtual tie with Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva, the leftist candidate who lost the last presidential election.

Interestingly, analysts say, the president’s popularity has suffered mainly in the more economically robust south, where middle-class Brazilians reacted with a display of solidarity for the hungry.

The president struck back. He announced a $500-million aid program for drought victims: food baskets, irrigation projects, temporary jobs and an ambitious effort to provide job training and literacy for a million people.

And he soon surged in the polls. The government’s response reduced the lawlessness, although sporadic looting continues.

Showing its sophisticated grasp of media relations, the MST also apparently pulled back its shock troops because it sensed public opinion souring as the food riots spread through rural towns toward big cities.

Nonetheless, the conflict still simmers.

A group of youthful, clean-cut activists is hard at work in the landless movement’s state headquarters in a low-income neighborhood here, a small two-story house decorated with posters of Paulo Freire, a revered leftist educator.

Many MST leaders are veteran rural organizers tied to Brazil’s activist Roman Catholic Church.

They espouse a left-wing ideology critical of inequality, especially in land ownership: Brazil’s distribution of land is among the most unequal in the world.

The MST has gained international attention with its organizational precision and hard-nosed tactics, such as invasions of farmland and occupations of banks and government offices. Its actions have provoked deadly attacks by police and private gunmen hired by landowners.

The MST’s criticism of Cardoso’s neoliberal economic policies has won considerable admiration among voters, who nonetheless support the president as well.

Jaime Amorim, the movement’s statewide coordinator, said the federal relief program for drought victims is a superficial approach lacking structural reforms such as technology and credits.

The government has abandoned peasants in favor of sectors such as tourism and agribusiness, he said, pausing intermittently to communicate by cellular telephone with leaders of 10 new occupations of land carried out by MST squatter teams.

“The government is rejecting the interests of the people and favoring a small elite,” he said.

Amorim and 53 other militants have been charged in looting-related crimes in Pernambuco. Two have been jailed. In addition, an activist died when he was run over by a food truck that he was trying to stop and ransack.

In many states, including Pernambuco, governors have restrained police from all-out clashes with looters. Even some victims, such as truck drivers and managers of food warehouses, express sympathy for the ragged crowds.

“The government has tried to criminalize and isolate the MST, but happily for us, that has not worked,” Amorim said. “The society understands us. And any popularity we may have lost with the middle class, we have gained with the people of this region.”

Although the landless movement supports the candidacy of Da Silva, he is an underdog, Amorim acknowledged.

Da Silva has failed to capitalize on Cardoso’s troubles and stumbled, according to political analysts, when he chose as his running mate Leonel Brizola, who is seen by many as an outdated nationalist.

The specter of hunger in the northeast will persist regardless of the election results. Acknowledging that July and August are likely to be the worst months of the drought, Cardoso promised: “Nobody is going to die of hunger here.”

As for Soares, the father of four who left the sertao and then returned to join the landless movement, the drought struck just as his cooperative was getting off the ground.

In 1993, he took part in the MST invasion of a large estate that a landowner had built--complete with mansion and a private church--and then left empty.

After five years of conflict, the 46 families won ownership of the land from a judge who ruled that the original owner had in effect abandoned it. The MST flag now flies from the balcony of the mansion.

But the drought wiped out the cooperative’s modest crops of corn, beans and cotton and left them with big debts. Soares asks: How long will the government food baskets last? What happens if they are not enough?

“The government has to act,” he said. “Because if it does not, the people will choose the other alternative, and then things will get even worse.”