"Reforma agrária de mercado" ou atualização do clientelismo?: o Programa Nacional de Crédito Fundiário e o assentamento de família sem terra no cariri ocidental paraibano.

Abstract

In the late 1990s, the instruments to treat land conflicts in Brazil, which were aimed at the settlement of families of landless rural workers via expropriation of unproductive areas, are being questioned by proponents of what came to be called "Market-Based Land Reform”, under the auspices of the World Bank. Under this new guidance, the end of the first and during the second term of the Cardoso administration (1995-2002), some governmental programs were created. In 2003, already in Lula's government (2003-2010), it created the National Land Credit Program (PNCF in portuguese), which should be complementary to other agrarian reform actions. In Cariri region, Paraíba state, and in particular in the city of Sumé, which was experienced throughout the 2000s was the abandonment of the settlement strategy to families via expropriation of unproductive properties. Between 2003 and 2008, 30 settlement projects of PNCF (541 households in 16,842.95 hectares) in the Cariri region were created, of which nine projects in Sumé (133 families in 4054.590 hectares). These 30 operations are exclusively in a special line of PNCF to rural poverty reduction (CPR in portuguese). The analysis will be on the CPR line that has promoted changes in the forms of mobilization of landless families and social actors responsible for mediating between families, owners and government. This dissertation analyzes these changes and reveals how local elites impose its own logic to the actions of the program, instituting what they call a "rational land reform", which means without conflicts, updating the debate on clientelism in the semiarid northeast.