Brazil is one of the ten wealthiest countries in the world. Yet 58 million ordinary Brazilians survive on less than 60 pence a day. The gap between rich and poor is one of the greatest in the world.
This gap is at its most extreme when you look at land ownership. While one percent of Brazil’s wealthy landlords own a staggering 50 percent of the country’s farm land, nearly five million Brazilian families have no land at all.
CAFOD has been working with local partner organisations in Brazil for many years to try to right some of the injustices in a country that is rich in resources yet poor in rights for the landless, the homeless and the dispossessed.
One of the partners CAFOD works with is the Pastoral Land Commission (Comissão Pastoral da Terra or CPT) – an organisation that works alongside the rural poor across Brazil to guarantee access to land.
It is a dangerous job. CPT has counted more than 1,000 murders in the past two decades linked to the struggle for land. Millions of families are forced to lead a precarious existence on land that does not belong to them. Often they find themselves violently evicted by landlords.
With CAFOD’s support, CPT works with threatened communities like these to defend them from eviction and harassment and helps them to develop income-generating projects that will help them to support themselves and their families in the longer term.
CAFOD also works with some of the 215 indigenous tribes remaining in Brazil to improve their land rights. Only around 350,000 indigenous people survive in Brazil today and most of their traditional land has been taken away from them.
