Impacts of rural settlements in Brazilian rural development

Abstract This paper aims to portray short, medium and long-term change processes brought about by the establishment of rural agrarian reform settlements in Brazil. The goal was to present the transformations in the lives of the settlers, in the agrarian reform settlements and in the regions where these are located. The article is based on a selection of academic studies, carried out on different country regions and shows that obtaining land allows families to gain greater stability and rearrange the strategies of family reproduction that result, in general, in an improvement of revenue and living conditions, especially when one considers the situation of poverty and social exclusion in which many of these families were before they entered settlement projects. The researchers also show that the experience of struggling for land, the existence of the settlements as reference spaces for public policies, and the precarious infrastructures, among other problems, make the settlements a starting point for new demands, propitiating the affirmation of new identities and interests, the appearance of forms of organization and the search for places where they can make themselves heard. In this way, settlements bring some changes on the local political scenario. Finally, the article highlights the inherent difficulties in the Brazilian agrarian reform process. In this country the struggles for land have assumed over time a series of limits imposed by the successive victories of the sector linked to large-scale business production. This segment has managed to progressively protect the right to property, at the same time as it have given itself social legitimacy through its capacity to produce exports, fuel, etc., imposing itself as the real image of 'progress' and 'development'. It also sought to delimit the possible universe of agrarian reform that has come to be seen more as a social compensation policy than as an important axis of development policy. In the last thirty years Brazil has implemented a rural settlement policy that has given around one million families access to land. Although there are divergences about the use of accounting criteria and the precision of the numbers, there is no doubt that the question of agrarian reform has entered the policy agenda, creating initiatives aimed at both trying to resolve the land conflicts that have exploded, with different degrees of intensity, throughout the country and at creating conditions to improve the living conditions of the people covered by the program