President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will participate in the closing ceremony of the 14th National Meeting of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), this Friday (23), at 3 pm, in Salvador.
The event brings together around 3,000 peasants from across the country, at the Agricultural Exhibition Park in the capital of Bahia, to discuss the direction of the fight for agrarian reform in Brazil and the organization’s strategies in defending the production of healthy food and sustainable development in the countryside.
A historical ally of Lula, the MST has been critical of the government’s actions in family farming, especially in relation to the settlement of new families in expropriated areas.
“What the Lula government has done, once again, are regularizations of families in old settlements, inflating the number of families settled as if they were new lots. This does not mean advances in the number of hectares of land allocated for agrarian reform”, says the movement in a text published on its website last month, with a balance sheet for the year 2025.
“Currently, the MST still has 100 thousand families camped out which, added to other popular movements, reach 142 thousand across the country, with registrations at the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra), waiting for agrarian reform”, he adds.
Last year, the government promoted the delivery of 12,200 new lots distributed across 385,000 hectares of land in 24 states in the country, to landless farming families in 138 settlements. Deliveries are part of the Terra da Gente programwhich foresees the settlement of 295 thousand families in new areas by the end of 2026.
