Pólo Sindical

I believe peasants from Northeast Brazil have a few important things to tell us about climate justice. For starters, the majority of the Northeastern region is dry. And it has been dry since the last glacial period. Also, the Northeast region where I come from is the largest and most populated semi-arid region on the planet, home to 20.5 million people mostly of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian descent.

Because of droughts and lack of water in the past, masses of hungry peasants were forced to migrate to other regions in Brazil.

Brazil's northeast, with the biggest population of any arid region in the world, is home to many of the more than 10 million Brazilians who live without regular access to clean and safe drinking water. For years the people of the region struggled to survive with no help from national public policy makers. Now policy makers are pursuing two very different approaches to the problem of the northeast's water insecurity: a community driven, grassroots public policy that supports building low-cost cisterns to provide water to the families who need it most, and a top-down mega-project to redirect the São Francisco River through a massive series of dams and canals.

We have documented several cases of land conflicts in Brazil, a country of considerable territorial dimensions. Land conflicts are not the only contradiction in the largest South American economy. Brazil is also facing a growing problem of water conflicts, despite the fact that Brazil holds 8% of the world’s freshwater reserves.

Free translation from the Landless Workers Movement (MST’s) website

In times of war and institutionalized terrorism, examples of solidarity between people in the United States and the Global South give us hope for a better world. In fact, it is only through solidarity with people that we will never actually meet that we can build the "global movement for social justice".

Here is a case that has re-energized us at Grassroots International this end of year.

Last spring, Grassroots made a brief presentation to students of Boston's Philbrick School about our work to support rural communities throughout the globe to reclaim their rights to land, water and food.

Pólo Sindical, (the Coalition of Rural Workers' Organizations) is a federation of 13 independent rural workers' unions striving to improve living conditions in the São Francisco river valley region in the states of Pernambuco and Bahía. Pólo was formed when a coalition of rural workers, the Catholic Church's Pastoral Land Commission, and agricultural unions came together in 1979 in opposition to a government plan to build a huge hydro-electric dam. The World Bank-sponsored dam eventually displaced 70,000 families in the region. Strong organizing efforts on the part of Pólo Sindical secured a resettlement agreement for the communities in 1986.