Learning from Brazil’s Social Movements

In September, we held our latest Solidarity Encounter on “Learning from Brazil’s Social Movements.” The event included a sharing of reflections by delegates from our July 2024 delegation to Brazil, during which Grassroots International staff members and donor-activists connected directly with some of our long-term social movement partners on the frontlines of resistance to industrial agriculture, land grabbing, mining companies, and more.

Check out some highlights of what they shared and watch the full recording below.

Joelle Chase: The Power of Collectivism

“Almost everything boiled down to collective decision making. Collectivism is hard but doable… It’s really challenging, I think, even in our movement spaces, to do things truly collectively. So I think we can learn from Brazilian movements that we need a culture shift. We need to build practices and skills around restorative justice, around distributed decision making and communication — more than we need a new tech tool, etc… 

We’re all in this together, and when they model the path forward, it benefits all of us.”

Olivia Meehan: Seeing Food Sovereignty at Scale

“I was having trouble understanding what food sovereignty could look like at scale because it’s so much about localizing production. I feel like this trip really showed me… MCP is all about saving Indigenous seed, and so they’re taking corn seeds from hundreds of different farms in the area and collecting them at this huge seed processing plant and then selling these seeds in bulk as a means to compete with the traditional seed market. 

MST as a movement is 1.5 million people who have occupied and reclaimed 7.5 million hectares of land from industrial agriculture… The fact that MST produces food in such uncertain and precarious contexts and yet they can still feed their people, they can still feed the urban periphery, and they can still send food to Gaza should squash any uncertainty that small-scale agriculture can and is feeding the world.”

Casimiro Peña: Pursuing Pathways Out of Capitalism

“The capitalist systems have really robbed us of our land, and they’ve robbed us of our relationship to the land. MST and MCP are living examples that it’s possible to strive towards food sovereignty and eventually a higher level of autonomy for ourselves as individuals seeking self-determination and also for the collective.

Across the world, there is a movement emerging around the pursuit of finding reasonable pathways to rid ourselves of the extractive capitalist economy and replace it with a better, more regenerative one… We need to go and meet these folks in person, have real relationships with them, and integrate all of their learnings from what they’ve done in the past 20-40 years.”

Eliza Parad: A Living Example of Solidarity and Power

“These movements are demonstrating real solidarity. I was blown away by the level of self sacrifice and risk and real time and resources given to support others. For me, the call of how we can stand in solidarity is, if folks with a lot less resources than myself are showing up in these ways where they’re growing, cooking, distributing food to folks in their own country, to folks they’ve never met before, to folks around the world who are in moments of crisis, then I can step in and also show solidarity.

The demonstration of solidarity that I saw was really a living example of what it means that ‘Nobody is free until we are all free.’”