• Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) has been organizing landless families to occupy, settle, and farm throughout the country since the dictatorship ended in 1985.
• Agroecology–a highly sustainable form of agriculture–has become increasingly central to their platform of land reform, and it is taught in 2,000 schools that have been established in MST encampments nationwide.
• In the four decades since its creation, MST has organized more than 350,000 families to create communities, cooperatives, farms, small-scale food processing enterprises, and farmers markets increasingly based on this sustainable method of food production, which is also good for the climate and biodiversity.
• In an interview with Mongabay, three leaders of MST’s agroecology education program share their philosophy, accomplishments and goals.

The Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (or MST, its acronym in Portuguese) is one of the largest social movements in the world. Born in the early 1980s at the end of the country’s 21-year military dictatorship and in the midst of persistent land inequality, the movement has been at the forefront of land reform in Brazil for decades. Their work is focused on making a reality of the country’s constitutional promise that land should ‘serve a social purpose.’ Against a backdrop of great inequality – 10% of the largest farms occupy nearly three-quarters of agricultural land – the MST has been organizing families to occupy, settle, and farm throughout the country.

In the four decades since its creation, the MST has organized more than 350,000 families to create communities, cooperatives, farms, small-scale food processing enterprises, and farmers markets. An additional 90,000 families still live in informal encampments on contested land, struggling for official land title.

Education and training in sustainable agricultural practices have always been core to the movement’s work, with its commitment to agroecology deepening in 2000 when the MST identified agroecology as key to its strategy of building resilient food systems. Since then, the MST has been developing training centers for agroecology for its members, and beyond.