5.000 families occupy 12 Brazilian farms

More than 5.000 families from Brazil's Landless Workers Movement occupied a dozen farms to pressure the government to act on land reform, the BBC reports.

Nearly half of all farmland in Brazil is owned by just 1 percent of the population, a nation with one of the biggest wealth gaps in the world.

Red-brick favelas, or slums, inhabited by squatters are a frequent sight in the South American nation.

The Landless Workers Movement accused the government of failing to live up to its pledge of settling 400,000 families by 2007. It also criticized the government's recent cut in Brazil's land-reform budget in favor of repaying its debt.

Even so, officials of the group occupying 12 farms in the northeast state of Pernambuco said they still had hope in Brazil's first working-class president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The president promised to buy and redistribute land to poor families with no home of their own.

(From Big News, April 6, 2005)
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