MST and agroecology: a day at the most depressing June festival in Brazil. Or rather, the world
nradmin
I woke up earlier than usual. I had a strong coffee. At the table, the best of our agribusiness: coffee from the cerrado of Minas Gerais, milk and butter from cows well fed with corn from the Midwest, bread made with gaucho wheat, sugar from the mills in the interior of São Paulo, where the orange juice. Duly and abundantly fed thanks to the wickedness of the farmers and ranchers, here I go to the ª Jornada de Agroecology, carried out by the Federal University of Paraná, with ostensible but informal support from the MST.
At 8:00 amof a sunny Thursday (23) I register and receive a kit (who pays for all this?) containing a rubber band folder, a notepad, a pen, a journal, stickers, a sheet with the event’s schedule and a booklet whose subtitle is an abundance of exclamation: “Land Free of GMOs and Pesticides! Caring for the Earth, Cultivating Biodiversity and Harvesting Food Sovereignty! Building the Popular Project for Agriculture!”. On the back cover, there is a “poem” by a geography teacher, which reads:
In Paraná, as in Brazil the latifundium reproduced its fruitless but tired logic of producing commodities and not food.
I’m in a trance for a moment, as if the ignorant lines, unable to perceive the relationship between commodities and plenty, were a sign that I was about to enter a bubble. A different bubble than mine. A red bubble. Where food abundance is harmful, where genetically modified food is a dirty word, where capitalism is the enemy and where Holodomor and Lysenko are just bogeymen stories invented by a colonizing, racist, sexist and transphobic society.
At 9 am, I have to choose between two unmissable events: the seminar “Agroecology and Popular Agrarian Reform: a project of the Agroecology Journey” or the seminar “Plenary Education of and in the Field: Stories of struggles and demands of the present. Right our State Duty”. I opt for the first one, but, as I get lost in the university labyrinth, I end up entering the auditorium where the second will be held.
I sit behind a teacher from the Paulo Leminski State College. She took the students to attend the seminar and feel a little bit of the university environment that awaits them – if they pass the entrance exam. Which shouldn’t be that difficult. That’s what I conclude after reading self-help notes scattered around the hallways. There are many Portuguese mistakes and clichés, not to mention the paulocoelhiano/harrypotterian tone of the texts. “The world has become one big kindergarten”, I think. Keep that thought. It will be important at the end of the text.
“Don’t give up, all the situations we go through make us grow!!!”, reads one of these notes. The childish handwriting almost overshadows the error in conducting and punctuation. “You are not your granddaughter”, reads another, enigmatically. It must be a meme I’m too old to understand. “Lift your head, princess, or else the crown will fall,” reads another. There, as if by a miracle, I find a phrase by a well-known author. “May your life not be a barren life. Be useful”, wrote someone on a pink piece of paper, daring to give due credit to Saint Josemaría Escrivá. The phrase even seems ironic at an MST event.
But now let me enter the auditorium where the seminar will begin. The master of ceremonies is there introducing the people who will make up the plenary.
You’ll forgive me, but I lost the names . All I know is that the panel was composed of a professor from UFPR, a representative of the Union of Teachers of PR (history teacher), a public defender, a representative of the MST, a representative of the NGO Assesoar and a person who defined himself as a transvestite. quilombola. All were enthusiastically applauded by the students.
The UFPR professor started by saying good morning to “everyone, all and all”. And at that moment I realized that I was in the middle of a great caricature. The problem is that this caricature is very similar to the drawing I mentally compose of Venezuela and Cuba today, of Albania in the 1990s 60, from China from the 1980s 1960 and from the Soviet Union from the 1990s
. Overkill? Leave it to condemn or exonerate me after I tell you what was said in that plenary session (not to be confused with planarian).
After the “all, all and all”, the teacher apologized and said she had to be present at another event at the same time. Before leaving, however, she took the time to speak at the University as a “latifundio of knowledge” and on the importance of “in this moment of resistance, rewriting one’s own history”. And for about thirty seconds she talked about the “importance of occupying spaces”.
For a moment, I agree with the learned academic leftist. I think of the great failure of the Brazilian right, incapable of occupying spaces even under a theoretically liberal and conservative government. And since we are talking about land use, even in a country where agribusiness is so rich. I note the idea for a future text, on the Marxist education to which the heirs of agribusiness are subjected.
When I return to the plenary (which is basically a sequence of minimonologues full of clichés) ), who is speaking is the representative of APP Sindicato. Amazingly, she criticizes around the face-to-face classes, which would have been done “to meet the interests of the private sector”. Then she explains that the union is classist. Classist or Fascist? Sorry, the acoustics in the auditorium are not very good. And, with a smile that I will describe as macabre, but my editor can delete it if he wants, he mentioned “times of hope that will follow the current resistance”.
The microphone changes hands. The NGO representative now has the floor. On the website of the Association of Studies, Guidance and Rural Assistance – ASSESOAR, it is quickly discovered that the institution “has the financial support of Bread for the World-PPM/Germany, and the Catholic Committee against Hunger and for Development-CCFD/ France”. Aren’t Germany and France two countries that are always in trouble with our agribusiness? Curious.
More excited than the teachers, the subject started saying that they are not there “to discuss soy. And yes real food, that goes to people’s tables”. I immediately remember my breakfast and all the things that occupy my fridge and pantry. It is difficult to find a food there that does not contain, directly or indirectly, soy in its composition. I want to raise my hand and ask him the price of peroba oil – which probably also has soy in the formula.
The tone of criticism of the government rises. And here is an interesting fact: all plenary members avoid mentioning the names of President Jair Bolsonaro and Governor Ratinho Jr. Not recognizing the mere existence of the adversary is an ancient tactic of the extreme left. But when used like this, in an orchestrated way, it draws attention for its ridiculousness. Then he says that Brazilians only died of Covid because there was no investment in national vaccines and I want to scream “help!”.
Jones do MST
I am about to curse my editor, Jones Rossi, when I see an opportunity to get revenge on him. Because the MST representative is also called Jones. Ready. I feel vindicated. The Jones-do-MST begins by quoting a Paulo Freire who seems to be sobbing, there are so many commas, and addressing “the ragged people of the world and those who discover themselves in them and, thus discovering themselves, suffer with them, but, above all, with they fight.”
There are no rags in the auditorium. And I doubt if anyone there has discovered themselves in the real world recently. Except for the students who are victims of the high school teacher’s sadistic pedagogy, my impression is that everyone in that auditorium is living a manufactured nightmare, for which the only hope is the tragic utopia of communism. Reality is what the MST tells them reality is.
Jones, from the MST, talks about the importance of “socialist pedagogy” and is proud to be part of an organization that “ built a pedagogy of its own. The talk drags on and I discover that indoctrination has changed its name and is now called (write it down) “pedagogy of human emancipation”. Oh, I forgot to say that Jones, despite being the representative of the MST, does not wear red and, if I may be allowed the fashion-critical moment, he is the best dressed of all. If I was pointed out on the street, he would say he was a startup or even a lawyer from a smaller law firm. Never a landless person.
The microphone is now in the hands of the trans person. Whose name I didn’t write down because I was busy not showing my surprise (?) when, after also saying good morning to “everyone, everyone and everyone”, he raised his voice to reaffirm: “I’m trans; I like to leave it darkened ”. Then he taught everyone present not to use the word “slave”. Because? Not to naturalize slavery. (But there was no alternative). He then criticized agribusiness, monoculture, large estates and structural racism. He cited Abdias do Nascimento, Djamila Ribeiro and Paulo Freire. Finally, speaking again about racism, he said that “we we are majority. This needs to be well darkened”.
The last to speak was the public defender. A young man who, at first glance, I mistook for Jean Wyllys. I almost went there to ask for an autograph and do selfie, can you believe it? He began by apologizing for representing the state. And, like the others, he began to unravel a rosary of communist commonplaces. I got up.
Fide’s cap
And I went out to enjoy a little bit of what looked like a June party of deeply unhappy people, but full of social conscience. With a very nervous girl, I learned to make bait to have a jataí bee hive at home. Around me, some people were amusing themselves by perforating plastic bottles. It even looked like Daniel Azulay’s show. For the second time in a few hours, I thought the world had turned into one big kindergarten. It wouldn’t be the last.
Speaking of bees, from a suspicious looking lady I received samples of five different honeys (or meles), while listening to a lecture about the impending extinction of insects. “We also have to fight our extinction,” she said, her eyes fixed on Fidel Castro’s cap that denounced me as a stranger in that place. Or maybe I was getting paranoid, I don’t know. I even wanted to buy some guaraipo bee honey. But the price… It must be Bolsonaro’s fault too.
In fact, the “agroecological journey” is nothing more than a large shopping mall for agricultural products with a stamp of social and political conscience. And with the same hint of primitivism that must have enchanted Bolsheviks and Maoists, to the point of causing them to provoke two of the biggest famines of the 20th century. It is also worth mentioning the nativist-nationalist character (which borders on the old integralist doctrine) in the merchants’ talk. In every stall, I saw the myth of the noble savage adding value to trivial products. Including (and above all) those that sold beer and cachaça with the image of Lula on the label (see photo gallery below).
Palhaçada
I listen to music (although “music” is too strong a word for what I hear) and make my way to a tent full of children. A singer invents a poor melody to say that poison is bad and the children repeat: “Poison is bad!”. Then children are taught how to use soil to make a “seed bomb”. Did I say bomb? Pardon. Someone teaches that “bomb” has a very pejorative character, associated with war, and that’s why children would make “balls of life”. Óin.
Children under four years old dance to slogans against agribusiness. One of them wears the “Fight Like a Girl” T-shirt. In fact, all over the communist camp, there are children learning that agribusiness is bad and that the MST is good. What GMO Foods Are Silly, Ugly, and Papaya Expensive , while organic foods, no matter how thin they may seem, will end hunger in the world.
I leave my musings aside and remember that I am at work. I run to watch a “conversation round” that is nothing more than a sermon.. The title is “Transgenics: how to get rid of this plague?”. Transgenics, huh! If you read it wrong, the STF can arrest you. Once there, I hear nothing new. GMOs are bad, pesticides are bad, dismantle public policies, Monsanto, agribusiness, large estates. The speaker then invites those present to taste the “chemical-free” cakes and coffees. I try a savory pie – R$5 a little piece of nothing. The pie tastes like any savory pie I’ve ever had. But that others taste as if it were leftist manna.
While I decide whether to continue facing the summer sun in Curitiba in order to participate in the launch of the book “LGBT Sem Terra: breaking fences and weaving freedom ”, I sit in the shade to watch the show by the clowns Filhas da Fruta (!). First they sing a little song that calls on the sleepy audience to fertilize a world of s. fine thing. Then come the jokes. “What did a gaucho tomato say to another gaucho tomato?”, asks one of them. “Tó, kill”, replies the other. I laugh because my sense of humor is out of whack. The clowning continues and, for the third time, I think the world has become one big kindergarten.
Kindergarten
I’m almost leaving. Heartbroken for not being able to attend the class “Crisis of Capitalism today and the need for a new economic model with National Sovereignty”, with the economic flat earther, professor at Unicamp and future minister of the economy (knock, knock, knock) Márcio Pochmann . Before, however, I have time to listen to one of the “daughters of the fruit” clowns saying that she was being baptized after receiving an MST cap.
The image of this heresy works as a revelation. Only then do I understand what I meant when I thought and rethought that we live in a big kindergarten. Children are utopian and tyrannical. The most tantrums want everything for today, now, now! And they don’t hesitate to turn their parents’ (or nannies’) lives into hell to see their wishes fulfilled. Not your needs, but your wills.
“There are few settlements. Most of them are college people,” observes someone next to me. In fact, what is least seen at the “party” is people with calloused hands. A little Indian girl with a Lava Jato shirt passes by and I go out behind to photograph her and nobody says I’m making it up. An out of tune duo sings “Tocando em Frente”, by Renato Teixeira, without letting go of the cup of cachaça.
Tired of living in that condensed version of hell, I call my wife and do a basic drama : “We are screwed. Let’s really turn to Venezuela. Better start stocking up on supplies!” She, used to my exaggerations, first asks me if I’m hungry (I am) and then says no, we’re not going to turn to Venezuela, that’s just a tiny slice of the population, a bunch of radicals, etc, etc.
Calmer, but still hungry, I consider eating a bogged down cow that looks not good when I am questioned by a militant journalist, known from not-so-old times and who, if he doubts, even considers me Nazi. I’m nice. I start conversation. I comment that my stomach is growling, I need to eat something. To which he says: “Get out of here! Go eat at the Outback. It’s more your face”. You know it’s not even a bad idea? I think, but I don’t say. And that’s how, with the bourgeoisie rubbed in my face, that I leave the 23 th Agroecological Journey, also known as “the most depressing June fair in Brazil”. Or rather, the world.
Despite the aura of ideological purity, the MST has become just an industry that appeals to the “communist consumerism” of sympathizers.
It’s all Bolsonaro’s fault.
Tent offers alternative therapies: one more aspect of primitivism on which the MST’s ideas are based.
Pale ale beer with Lula’s face on the label.: another piece of PT political propaganda.
I was invited to participate in the intervention. I thought of writing “caviar”. But I thought better not.
Shop selling LGBT-themed MST items. Another facet of consumerism adapted to the Age of Ideologies.
Cartoon showing Bolsonaro as a bogeyman who uses pesticides for people.
Egolatry anti-agribusiness plenary: clichés, clichés and more clichés.
)Just one of several stalls selling MST items. A cap costs BRL23.
And I thought that eating was a physiological act.
A student’s backpack. Who will she vote for?
Singer sings an anti-pesticide modinha using that cap there.
A little Indian girl walked quietly with a t-shirt from the time when Lava Jato mattered.
Miracle was to have found this ticket in the corridors of UFPR.
Motivational tickets in UFPR corridors. What has the university become?
For each cause a t-shirt sold for R$60.
Few tents offered food. Nothing looked appetizing.
