Karla Emmanuela Ribeiro Hora

Karla Emmanuela Hora's collaborative approach to involve families on rural land reform settlements in planning their future production and constructing their new community is creating more productive and sustainable land reform in Brazil.

Through an extensive series of workshops, meetings, negotiations, and courses, Karla brings families together at the earliest stage of forming a land settlement. Together, they begin a process of community building to create understanding, collaboration, and identity among families originating from diverse geographical and cultural backgrounds. The families become active agents in the land reform process and coauthors in the appropriation and planning of the land where they and their families will live. The result is improvement in the productivity and economic viability of land reform settlements that guarantees the conservation and sustainable use of the natural resources, as well as an engaged, interacting, self-managing community that moves onto the land. Karla's work is promoting necessary change both to decrease the cycle of migration and to increase sustainability in national land reform policy.

Brazil's government agency responsible for managing land distribution (INCRA) boasted in a 1999 report that twice as many families were resettled on rural land holdings–and thus were benefiting from agrarian reform policies–during the last eight years than in all previous governments since 1964 combined. However, land reform policies in Brazil have fallen short of their aims at providing new productive futures for landless families. Much of this progress in numbers of settled families has come about through pressure from the Landless Movement that grew in Brazil in the 1970s and formalized in the 1980s. Through protest and occupation, members of the Landless Movement forced the government to accelerate land distribution. Many families fought for, and camped on, idle land and beside highways to wait for land titles. However, instead of being an end to a long struggle, receiving the land title represents the start of a new struggle to live and produce on the land.

Rural land reform settlements or assentamentos are notorious for low production, poor land quality, and environmental degradation. The difficulty for families of producing and making a living on these settlements has led to a new form of exclusion, one that results from inadequate productive processes, market fluctuations, lack of technical, social, medical, and educational assistance, and insufficient access to information. The fact that land reform settlements are created in areas with poor conditions for production, lack of effective planning, and lack of interaction among families being settled has led to a high percentage of land abandonment. The reality is a vicious cycle in which families that have migrated to urban centers are unable to sustain themselves, spend years struggling for a new title, and end up returning to the city because of their inability to make a living on the land.

What is missing in the process of land distribution is the participation and interaction of families in the process. Families coming from diverse regions and backgrounds are forced to become neighbors through often arbitrary land parceling that takes into consideration neither the human and natural resources of the settlement nor the needs and priorities of the families. Too often, the land being granted is in a state of severe environmental degradation or needs careful consideration in production planning. Without planning and without a sense of community and cooperation, the individual families cannot attack the macrochallenges that keep them from benefiting collectively off the land.

A prime example of this is land reform settlements in the state of Goias where cattle raising and aggressive land use have destroyed a large part of the cerrado, a biome rich in biodiversity and cradle to some of the most important river basins in Brazil. The site of the Canudos rural land settlement is an example of this. Located 90 kilometers from Goiania, the capital city of Goais, a property of 12,770 hectares was owned by one family. Some of the land was rented out to 15 to 20 families that used the land primarily for raising animals. The technology employed in the preparation and cultivation of the land had a highly negative environmental impact. When the process began for redistributing the property under the government land reform policies in 1998, the land was suffering from high degrees of soil degradation, erosion, deforestation, and water contamination due to the intensive use of agrotoxins. This environmentally valuable area was harshly damaged because of poor planning.

Karla began working with the families of the Canudos presettlement in 2000 because of their ties to the Landless Movement and proximity to Goiania, where she lived and was in school. The Landless Movement has a defined proposal for organization of settlements and the settlements linked to the movement have a cohesiveness that allows for maximizing the process of community planning, so Karla felt she would have most to learn from this type of settlement. In fact, at first, the Landless Movement wanted to have no part in her ideas and sent her home. Karla continued to go to the community to learn and talk with people and began to realize that little real planning was actually being done. Through hours, days, and months spent speaking with the community, Karla developed a methodology to involve the families in planning for a productive and sustainable future.

The Landless Movement has now taken notice of, and is incorporating, her methodology. The goal of the planning process is to make the individual women, men and young people of the community active agents in the process. Karla begins the process by holding meetings and workshops in which she encourages families to share their origins and recover the knowledge they once had about family, community, and the land. It is a stage of getting to know one another that is fundamental in beginning a process of community building. Soon after, families begin to organize and decide the location for the provisional settlement where they will start producing during the settlement planning period. To begin the macrostrategic plan for the settlement, families are asked to raise issues that will be important to their future community relating to infrastructure (highways, electricity), society (school, health post, community center), and the environment (preservation of natural resources, sustainable production). Karla then works with the families to systematize the proposals and find alternative solutions to proposals that are not technically feasible. After each step, the group evaluates the work together with the coordinating body of the settlement and defines the next steps.

Once a plan is complete, the next step is creating detailed sectoral plans–productive, environmental, and social–in which the members of the settlement families are trained to coordinate and implement the next stages. The sectoral projects include implementing schools, housing, production processes, and health programs. The focus throughout the process is always to increase the knowledge of the families so that they can design their future with informed confidence. Courses and exchanges through partnerships with universities, EMBRAPA, and the Ministry of the Environment increase the families' access to technical support and information. Karla acts as a catalyst and resource for the families, introducing new information and building their knowledge about sustainable farming techniques, environmental recuperation, and social organizing. Once they have command of the topic, the same participants that coordinated the plans implement the projects. In this way, the methodology becomes self-fulfilling and adapts to the reality of each community.

Two years after the process began, the families of Canudos have completed and are implementing their strategic plan with the parceling of land. As a result of this participative process, a property that once served 15 to 20 families inadequately prior to resettlement, is now home to 330 families or 1,400 individuals. The family housing units are being planned, taking into consideration the environmental makeup and including techniques for recuperation and conservation of the soil. The production patterns are being directed at implementing agroecology with the help of government programs like EMBRAPA that promote agriculture experimentation. As a result of the planning process, the Ministry of the Environment chose Canudos as an exemplary settlement for sustainable land reform in the Cerrado Biome to follow and learn from.

Karla is already spreading the methodology to another presettlement called Oziel in Goais that has a population of 2,600 people. She is beginning the process of community building with 10 percent of the population who are acting as multipliers of the process within the initial stage. Various counties are being affected by the Canudos and Oziel settlements. Beyond these counties, the level of exchange with communities and settlements in other states increases this impact.

Karla plans to replicate this experience in rural land reform settlements across the cerrado biome including the rest of Goias, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Tocatins, and the Federal District. To spread her idea, she is working more closely with a network of environmental, citizen sector organizations. She is involving the research center of the Catholic University of Goias and building partnerships with state agencies such as the Secretary of Education, Secretary of the Environment, IBAMA, and the county governments of the regions where rural settlements are located. Further, the Landless Movement is now coming to Karla to learn how to spread her methodology in other parts of the country. Karla's plan is to spread her methodology directly to rural settlements throughout the cerrado biome, joining the settlements in a network to create services and joint projects. Overall, she wants to demonstrate the effectiveness of the process, which is already recognized by the Ministry of the Environment, to promote changes in national land reform policy.

Karla grew up in a community on the outskirts of a town. As the town grew, people knew each other less and less and eventually her family moved to a larger city. She wanted to bring community back into people's lives, but found in talking to people in the city that many were there because they had not been able to make a living on the land–either in resettlement or in original homes. As a natural leader early in her life, Karla stood out for her ability to mobilize, captivate, and instigate her peers and colleagues. In school and university, she participated in diverse student organizations and many times ended up being chosen as their representative. Through this leadership, Karla always incorporated the participation of her colleagues to transfer these elements of leadership to others. With this, she has been able to ensure that the process of social change continues its momentum with or without her presence.

At university, Karla turned her urban architecture graduation project into a "rural architecture" project where she looked at how land resettlements were established. She found that the government often sets up what people call "stupid squares," a dividing the land on straight lines regardless of topography or "farm-ability." The Landless Movement, on the other hand, often advocated collectives. The people in the community approved of neither and so her school project idea was a "semi-collective." She graduated based on this idea, but when she took it back to the community, they rejected it completely. Rather than move on, Karla decided to figure out what they really wanted. She began speaking with more community members and drew maps of their ideas–on paper, on boards, on the ground, whatever was available. She would spend days with the community, staying with families who would invite her to spend the night. In drawing these "maps," Karla found she needed more than architecture; she also needed knowledge of the land, its environmental characteristics, and its uses. So she got a graduate degree in geography, while spending all her time with the community, learning and drawing and talking and drawing and showing and drawing. She earned the nickname "The Map Girl" from the community.