By JEAN MARC VON DER WEID*
At the MDA, Minister Paulo Teixeira simply “ran the usual spreadsheet” and did more of the same
1.
It has been 22 months, 98 weeks or 684 days since the MDA (Ministry of Agrarian Development) was recreated and Minister Paulo Teixeira was sworn in. To be fair, the time elapsed was a little less, since the calculation above is from the zero mark of the Lula III government, January XNUMXst.
For almost half of its term, the Ministry of Agrarian Development spent a considerable amount of time simply reconstituting itself as a ministry. Secretariats and departments were created and the organizational charts were filled with contractors. There were many good people, but few people who lived through the 14 and a half years of popular governments. There was a great loss of memory of the processes of policy development. And, even more seriously, there was no evaluation of the policies implemented in the aforementioned governments.
The transition group linked to the agrarian and agricultural theme (read: family farming) proclaimed, in a virtual meeting with more than 500 attendees, that the new Ministry of Agrarian Development would focus on promoting the development of family farming based on agroecology. Neither the texts produced nor the program presented at the January meeting made it clear how the policies under the control of the MDA would adapt to adopt the agroecological transition. It was necessary to evaluate the previous policies and reformulate them for this new paradigm, but this did not happen.
Pressured by the only program of the Ministry of Agrarian Development that has been implemented through all governments, from FHC II to Lula III, including Lula I and II, Dilma I and ½, Temer ½ and Bolsonaro, the PRONAF, Minister Paulo Teixeira simply “ran the usual spreadsheet” and did more of the same. He presented the 2023/2024 harvest plan for family farming in exactly the same format as all the previous ones, claiming the increase in resources from 30 to 72 billion as a victory. If any change can be noted, it refers to the volume of resources made available for each contract directed at the most capitalized sector, with the ceiling rising to 120 thousand reais.
PRONAF (National Program to Support Family Farming) began in 1996 as a program of easy credit focused on farmers with capital and integrated into the market, especially in the southern region, with some 400 contracts, essentially financing inputs such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides and “improved” seeds. Under popular governments, it was opened to a much wider audience, reaching just over two million farmers at its peak. The scope of credit also expanded, introducing marketing and agro-industrialization contracts, purchase of machinery, and adding specific audiences such as women, young people, indigenous people, quilombolas, agroecological and organic producers.
The total value of the harvest plans rose from less than 5 billion to 29 billion, from the last year of FHC to the last of Dilma. It fell a little in the following years and more than doubled in the first year of Lula III.
Throughout this period, the bulk of the resources, close to 80%, were invested in the initial target audience, the capitalized agriculture of the south and part of the southeast. The contracts in the northeast were for much smaller amounts, averaging R$7, while those in the south reached more than 10 times that amount, on average. It can be said that the program was the driving force behind the formation of what has come to be called “small agribusiness.”
In the first harvest plan of this government, around 400 thousand contracts were for the south/southeast region and 1,1 million for the north/northeast, the latter largely focused on cattle raising. Agroecology has been almost unnoticed in these 28 years of PRONAF, including in this first harvest plan of the new government.
Despite the transition group's radical definition, agroecology remains outside the PRONAF and government priorities. Let us remember that the budget of the Ministry of Agrarian Development is focused on the equalization of PRONAF interest rates, another way of speaking of the treasury subsidy for agribusiness. This is 9 billion out of a budget of around 12 billion for final expenditures. I do not know how much the ministerial bureaucracy costs, but what is left for other actions is not much, less than 3 billion reais. These resources should be spent rationally and prioritizing those who do not benefit from PRONAF, that is, around 2,5 million farmers, but this was not the case.
The second most important program (in terms of expenditure) of the Ministry of Agrarian Development was the PAA, the Food Acquisition Program, of CONAB, which had a budget of around R$750 million, directed at a public of 250 thousand farmers. These resources, however, are provided by the Ministry of Social Development. It is a program with a bias less focused on agribusiness (but focused on food production and acquisition) and which allows for the promotion of agroecological and organic production, paying 30% more for the products. However, the share of purchases in this category was less than 5% of expenditure. In this program, the priority for agroecology is also not working.
From this point on, spending begins to spread out: 30 million for the Productive Backyards program, to which the MDS added 60 million to benefit 90 women by the end of the government and which has not yet managed to reach an audience greater than 5 women in one year; 200 million for rural extension programs; 100 million for the ECOFORTE program, managed by the BNDRS and aimed at territorial agroecological development projects, involving some 50 farmers, to be spent over 3 years.
Although it is related to policies under the responsibility of the Ministry of Agrarian Development, the resources and management are completely autonomous in relation to this ministry. In fact, this item should be left out of this presentation on the MDA budget, but it serves to show that the little that the government does to support the agroecological transition occurs outside the ministry.
To summarize this brief assessment, it can be said that the Ministry of Agrarian Development is repeating past policies without evaluating them, and this is happening when many people in civil society and academia point to the serious negative impacts of PRONAF, the tremendous obstacles in the ATER programs, and the limitations in the design, implementation, and budget of the backyard program. The PAA, despite being less questioned, also suffers from bureaucratic obstacles that hinder its widespread implementation.
2.
After almost two years, the Ministry of Agrarian Development announced the launch of a document defining its mission, goals, objectives, etc. But these are generalities that do not affect the orientation of current policies.
While meaningless formalities are discussed and triumphantly propagated, the minister spends most of his time on what he himself defined as the search for “technological solutions for family farming.” During his travels throughout Brazil, the minister visits Embrapa centers and universities, trying to identify what I call the “silver bullet,” that is, a technology that can be used widely by the target audience and that can solve problems quickly and easily.
At some point, he flirted with widespread irrigation, without realizing that it is not enough to provide energy (solar panels), electric pumps, pipes and artesian wells. In the northeast, where the impact of irregular rainfall is more significant, non-brackish water can only be found in wells over 500 meters deep and the solutions for irrigation are very varied and based on rainwater capture.
What the minister has not yet understood, and apparently will not understand, is that there is no single generalizable solution, not even in super-simplified agrochemical systems. Even more so in super-diversified agroecological systems. The search is futile and leaves the Ministry of Agrarian Development adrift, without goals, objectives or well-qualified priority programs.
We have just over two years to change the course of the Ministry of Agrarian Development. I was hoping that CONDRAF, the Rural Development Council for Family Farming, would be able to take the blame and put together a coherent proposal to put pressure on Lula. I don't think it's worth wasting time trying to convince Minister Paulo Teixeira, a likeable, progressive and intelligent figure, but who is in the wrong place and should have realized this and asked for his hat a long time ago.
Imagine my surprise when I learned, while participating in an event commemorating the 25th anniversary of CONDRAF (incorporating the years of the previous council, created by FHC, the CNDRS, National Council for Sustainable Rural Development), that the council will focus, until October or November of next year, on organizing a national conference on sustainable rural development, the third under popular governments.
Even if this conference is a huge success in terms of participation and content; even if it is able to put together a concrete action plan for the future, there will only be a little over a year left of Lula's government, unless they are counting on the president's reelection as something certain (which seems increasingly complicated to me).
This is not the time to hold generic conferences (as was the case in the past). It is time to define an emergency program to take advantage of what is left of the government. If we win the 2026 elections, so much the better. But we need to leave a program in place that is significant enough to not be swept away by a Bolsonaro supporter or another right-winger who wins the elections.
I have already dealt with this topic in other articles (see, among others, “Ministry of Agrarian Development or Ministry of Agribusiness?”), but now I will focus on defining the priority.
I assume that this government does not prioritize family farming or agrarian reform in the next two years, at least. Money is tight and increasingly tied to what I call the “confetti budget,” a mountain of money distributed in small amounts to irrigate the electoral bases of their parliamentary excellencies.
3.
The first definition to be made is about the priority audience (who they are, how many there are, where they are) and what the objective of the program is.
For a government that puts the issue of hunger first, including in its international initiatives (see the alliance proposed at the G20), it is absurd that more than 1,9 million family farmers are beneficiaries of the Bolsa Família program and that they depend on this and school meals to feed their families.
The “narrative” showing a hypothetical role of family farming as the one that brings “food to Brazilians’ plates” is in total contradiction with the fact that almost half of this category does not produce enough to feed their own families. As a result of public policies over the last 30 years, family farming has reduced its share of the basic value of production (VBP) in the 2017 census to 23% of the total, and a large part of it is directed towards export commodity crops.
The explanation for this tragedy is historically known. The vast majority of these needy people have little land (smallholders with less than 10 hectares available), are located in biomes with severe restrictions on water supply, such as the semi-arid region of the Northeast, with soils worn out by constant use without replenishment of nutrients, low level of education and access to information and undercapitalized.
The ideal for this segment would be a radical agrarian reform program, distributing land in the quantity and quality necessary as a starting point for the implementation of sustainable production systems. But as we have seen above, this will not happen in the coming years.
This population is aging and many receive a minimum wage retirement benefit, BPC (Continuous Benefit Payment) or PBF (Family Grant Program). Others depend on contributions from family members who have emigrated to the cities or even on salaried work outside the property.
A production program for these producers to achieve food self-sufficiency is not a strategic solution for family farming as a whole or even for them, but it could be an important step towards future measures that expand their production conditions, including more land. The current proposal serves to overcome poverty and prepares future advances.
The alternative would be to treat them as a “social problem” and wait for them to disappear, supporting them through social programs. This would be a “rational solution”, transferring their responsibility from the Ministry of Agrarian Development (MDA) to the MDS (Ministry of Social Development). It would also mean accepting that family farming will be reduced to less than half its current number. This reduction would be disastrous when we know that, in the long term, it will be necessary to increase the number of family farmers fivefold to make sustainable agriculture based on agroecology viable.
If the target audience (1,9 million mini-funders, PBF beneficiaries) and the objective (food self-sufficiency) are adopted, it will be necessary to define how public policies can produce the expected result, in what timeframes and at what costs.
4.
The only new initiative of the MDA in its new version was the formulation of the Productive Backyards program, demanded by last year's Marcha das Margaridas and which was aimed at the priority public defined above.
The proposal is based on experiences from civil society and social movements over the last few decades. They show that, with very little external support, almost always in the form of innovations focused on agroecology and collective self-financing of infrastructure, it is possible to produce in sufficient quantity and quality to feed these families well and still have some surplus to sell.
The only public support for (part of) these experiments was a program from the Dilma government, proposed by ASA (Articulação do Semiárido), and called “One land and two waters”, which provided non-refundable financing for a cistern made of plates for domestic use and a sidewalk cistern to irrigate up to one hectare of diversified crops in each backyard.
The many practices adopted in the semi-arid northeast also allowed for a significant surplus of food production to be placed in local or neighboring markets.
The problem with the government program, besides its ridiculous execution (5000 backyards in one year), is that it was designed by people who are not familiar with the experiences, better known as “around the house”, in Paraíba. The resources budgeted for infrastructure are minimal, far below what is needed. Ten thousand reais per backyard is less than a fifth of what is needed (according to the calculations that can be found in the article cited above). It is also necessary to budget for the cost of technical assistance and social organization so that the program can gain scale.
Agroecological backyards depend on the introduction of agroecological practices which, as always in this paradigm, are not a set recipe. Each backyard has its own dimensions and composition of crops and livestock that do not follow a single model, although they have many similarities.
And who will take these proposals to the target audience?
The Achilles heel of agroecology at this time is the lack of extension workers trained in agroecological methods and techniques. How can this limitation be overcome? I will immediately dismiss the model adopted during the Lula I government, when the Ministry of Agrarian Development promoted 40-hour courses to train agroecologists en masse, with very limited results.
Training courses should be held in each area where the program is implemented, based on the systematization of ongoing experiences in existing gardens. A first step should be the production of methodological guidelines for extension workers and the distribution of systematizations of the most successful cases that can serve as a reference for new gardens.
The work of disseminating these new practices should be carried out in groups of women farmers who should permanently discuss the problems and solutions found, aiming to help each participant find the most appropriate solution for their specific case.
In my opinion, although each backyard is different from the others, the technological solutions of agroecology will be more similar than in the experiments in the fields, where the variability of conditions is much greater. Even so, given the novelty of this proposal for most technicians, which is necessary to apply it on a large scale, it will not be possible to assign each technician more than 5 groups of ten women, on average. With the multiplication of experiences, expansion can accelerate, as practice shows.
One thing is the size of the target audience, 1,9 million families, which could be the medium-term objective. This audience is located mainly in the semi-arid region (northeast and part of the southeast), approximately 1,5 million families, while another 400 thousand are distributed across other biomes.
Another thing is the process to be defined and adopted, and its initial dimensions.
Inevitably, we will have to start with fewer women's groups and fewer backyard projects, accelerating expansion as more technicians are trained and more groups are organized.
The baseline for this program should be expanded (in relation to the government's Productive Backyards project) from the 100 families in three years initially defined by the MDA/MDS, to 75 families per year in the next two years, expanding to 150 families per year in the following two years and 300 in the two years after that, for a total of 1,05 million in six years. From this point on, the increases should be exponential to reach the entire target audience in another two years.
5.
Mobilizing and organizing women's groups is a function of the family farming movements, but the State must provide financial resources to make this possible. From the outset, a program of this type will have to be formulated with the participation of these organizations and their engagement in the action.
Technical assistance will be provided by teams from social organizations, ATER NGOs and, if we can interest them, from EMATERs from state governments. City governments can provide support, either by mobilizing parliamentary amendments from their partners in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, or with local support when they have technicians for this (which is rare). The number of technicians in the next two years should be proportionally higher than in the final phase, when the generalization of collective experimentation is effective. In my approximate calculation, there would be 3000, plus about 200 coordinators and advisors in the next two years.
The cost of each backyard, including infrastructure and supplies, is estimated at 50 thousand reais (see article mentioned previously), that is, 3,75 billion per year over the next two years.
The cost of rural extension would be 624 million in wages, plus operating costs of 200 million or a total of 824 million per year for the next two years.
That is, the cost of this program in each of the next two years would be 4,574 billion per year.
It is certainly a lot of money, but it represents half of what is currently spent on equalizing interest rates so that approximately 350 capitalized family farmers can produce animal feed. By reducing the subsidy for small-scale agribusiness by half, it would be possible to start a medium- and long-term program to make the poorest category of family farmers viable. The annual costs will be higher as the project expands to include the entire category of small-scale farmers or producers focused on food self-sufficiency and supplying local markets with occasional surpluses from this production.
These costs should include the costs of systematizing experiences and producing teaching material, as well as training technicians, which I cannot estimate, but which will be minimal compared to the total values.
The public policies implemented by the MDA have a structural problem. They divide the resources needed to promote the development of family farming into several boxes. There is one box with resources for credit, another for rural extension, another for insurance, and others of much smaller size. Everyone who has had the experience of promoting local development processes has had to face this fragmentation of resources, which implies the formulation of an infinite number of projects for the assisted farmers.
The ideal solution is to pool these resources into a single paying source, as is the case with the BNDES program, Ecoforte. All the resource needs of farmers in the program are part of a single budget for each financed project, resources managed by the responsible entity.
How to make this change? To unify development resources (there is no credit in this proposal), rural extension, training and others, the BNDES could once again be used, or everything could be put into ATER projects, in a broader concept of scope. This solution would be more agile than negotiating yet another program with the BNDES management. The Agroecological Backyards program would be under the political responsibility of DATER and managed by ANATER.
The first step to formulate this program in a more studied and comprehensive manner would be to convene a working group comprising social movements, NGOs with experience in agroecological backyards and experts in participatory development and agroecology from EMBRAPA, universities and civil society, staff from DATER (Department of Technical Assistance and Rural Extension) and the MDA agroecological knowledge generation program. This working group would formulate the program proposal that would be presented to CONDRAF.
In my opinion, the main adjustments will be made to the initial size of the program, which will have implications for its costs and the mobilization of extension workers and ATER organizations.
Once the project has been formulated, it should undergo presentation and invitations to join from EMATER, Embrapa, universities and technical schools.
Access to resources would be through calls for territorial projects, with initial priority given to locations where advanced backyard farming experiences already exist. Projects should be presented by entities from social movements and ATER organizations (state or civil society).
6.
I do not have very optimistic expectations regarding this proposal. Unfortunately, the same old nonsense that has been going on since the beginning of this government will probably prevail. I did not expect much (in fact, nothing) from the minister and the ministry's leadership, but the second and third-tier officials are capable of understanding what I am proposing. However, they are incapable of impacting the ministry's directions or misdirections.
As I said before, I was expecting CONDRAF to play a more incisive role in helping to overcome the MDA crisis, but I see that they are more concerned with the appearances of a Conference. I say appearances because I think these exercises serve more for the self-satisfaction of the participants than for any concrete effect.
Finally, there is only one hope: what are the social movements, especially those with a national reach such as CONTAG (National Confederation of Agricultural Workers), MST (Landless Workers' Movement), MPA (Small Farmers' Movement) and CONTRAF (National Confederation of Family Farm Workers), expecting? Are they happy with this MDA? What are they achieving in terms of programs and policies?
To complete this rant, I cannot fail to point out that PLANAPO, the National Plan for Agroecology and Organic Production, the most comprehensive initiative in this government to address the issue of agroecology, is even more empty than the Ministry of Agrarian Development. With the ambition of addressing all policies that affect the advancement of agroecology (production, research, education, environment, health and nutrition, and others), the committees of both the government and civil society involve dozens of technicians and representatives of civil society linked to almost a dozen ministries. These committees duplicate CONDRAF, as well as other councils linked to other ministries.
This was an initiative that was also contaminated by the pretension of macro-definitions of universal policies seeking to articulate everything in a coherent way. It became a major producer of more or less learned documents, also without any practical effect on guiding the flow of resources in all the ministries involved.
As I have been saying for some time, this is the ministry of agribusiness and serves the interests of a small portion of the peasantry. It is not with these policies that Lula will be able to galvanize the country's rural electorate in the 2026 elections.
*Jean Marc von der Weid is a former president of the UNE (1969-71). Founder of the non-governmental organization Family Agriculture and Agroecology (ASTA).
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