Research Paper on:
Brazil's Landless Workers Movement Overview

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
charge of land distribution, pursued a policy of settling landless families in frontier lands that were inconveniently distant from markets and that was malaria-infested land (Petras, 2000). Over 30 years  of its existence, INCRA settled less than 7 percent of landless rural families (Petras, 2000). To understand the landless workers movement, it is important to take a brief peek  into the history. In 1965, a military coup put an economic and political model in place that subordinated Brazil to the interests of international finance capital at the expense of  the Brazilian people and specifically, at the expense of the Brazilian poor (Plummer and Ranum, 2002). The poorest people work the land but do not own any of it, hence  the term "landless" (Plummer and Ranum, 2002). There are currently 4.8 million landless workers in the country (Plummer and Ranum ,2002). In the pursuit of modernizing, the country of  Brazil transformed from being a 75 percent rural society to 75 percent urban, having had half the population migrate to cities in search of better jobs and a better lifestyle  (Plummer and Ranum, 2002). Most of the people did not realize their dreams (Plummer and Ranum, 2002). The majority simply moved from rural poverty to urban poverty (Plummer and Ranum,  2002). Between 25 and 50 percent of every citys population live in shantytowns (Plummer and Ranum, 2002). There is a huge disparity in the society today - 1 percent of  the landowners own 44 percent of all the land in Brazil (Plummer and Ranum, 2002). The agriculture resources in Brazil have been allocated primarily to subsidize and promote agro-business  and large export-oriented farmers (Petras, 2000). This promotion and subsidizing has been called "agricultural modernization" by political, military and government leaders in the country (Petras, 2000). The result was