This is one of a series of conversations on Covid-19, the right to food and radical politics. Andrew Bennie, a co-founder of the food justice collective, We Will All Eat, spoke to Jade Percassi, who works with development projects in the team of the National Secretariat of the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) in Brazil, the world’s largest land rights movement. Jade spoke about the very difficult context the MST is currently having to deal with under the neo-fascist president Jair Bolsonaro and how it continues to advance its work of land occupations together with the construction of agricultural and social alternatives. However, key for the MST in the current context is for all organisations to strengthen grassroots work, so that people are organised and democracy can be rebuilt in the Brazil. And with that, resume public policies to combat social inequality on all fronts – access to land, work, health, education, culture, and decent life in the cities and the countryside.
To access the MST’s Emergency Plan for People’s Agrarian Reform, which puts forward a set of concrete demands to address the current COVID-19 situation, based on its historical work and demands, click here.