Brazil’s Landless Workers Rise Up

The MST movement has helped educate a generation of Brazilians about the struggle for land and, consequently, about the need to transform the model of development that has privileged urban areas and industrial growth, and exploited rural areas for natural resources and cheap labor. For over thirty years, the MST has argued that this transformation is necessary if issues such as inequality, violence against the poor, and environmental harm—from deforestation to climate change—are to be addressed. There is much that the MST could teach the international community as we take up the gauntlet of imagining a sustainable future.