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Brazil Rural Groups
Rural Groups
Some groups in rural Brazil merit special attention. Although there
has been massive rural to urban migration in Brazil, nearly 40 million
people still live in the countryside, and another 10 million live
in towns with a population under 20,000. There are also signs of
urban to rural migration as a result of exhaustion of employment
and income opportunities in large cities.
Many of the inhabitants of the countryside are rural workers in
agriculture, with permanent or, more typically, seasonal employment,
particularly in harvesting, an activity in which women and children
are also involved. Although a large number of small family farmers
have land of their own, millions of rural workers are landless because
land tenure is extremely concentrated in Brazil. In the face of
slowness of official land reform, they began to invade unproductive
properties in the 1990s. As a result of their organization and massacres
of their activists in Rondônia and Pará, they entered
the political limelight, and land reform was placed high on the
political agenda.
In addition to farmers, Brazil has various kinds of traditional
populations--including rubber tappers, Brazil nut collectors, caboclos
and other traditional riverine dwellers, small fishermen, and others--who
became a new social category in the late 1980s. Some of them received
land from the government in the form of extractive reserves, meaning
land containing valuable natural resources such as rubber-yielding
trees, hardwoods, and so forth, ceded to their associations on the
condition that they use their natural resources in a sustainable
way. For some rural Brazilians, sustainable extraction presents
an alternative to rural exodus and structural unemployment.
Data as of April 1997
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