We, the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty or PCFS, support the Brazilian farmers led by the MST or the Landless Workers Movement in launching protest actions in time for the country’s Agrarian Reform Day against the government’s efforts to roll back agrarian reform and further privatize government-owned lands.

The farmers’ marches and occupations of farms, highways and government offices is most just. They show farmers’ resoluteness and militance in opposing government measures that will further take lands away from them and further impoverish them, and that will further attack their right to livelihood and right to food.

The government’s measures and the farmers’ struggle against these clearly show the intensifying neoliberal attack on the farmers and other peoples of Brazil and the world. These also highlight the anti-farmer and anti-people nature of the Michel Temer government, which is backed by the US and was installed through a parliamentary coup.

We are joyful over news reports that the MST’s membership is growing amidst the intensifying attacks on farmers and agrarian reform in Brazil and amidst the worsening crisis in the country. We are confident that MST will continue to expand and strengthen itself in the course of the struggle for land and food sovereignty.

We are calling on the farmers, indigenous peoples, small-scale food producers and peoples of the world to support the farmers of Brazil and, more importantly, emulate their decisiveness and militance in fighting for land and food sovereignty. The intensifying landgrabs and attacks on agrarian reform call for nothing less.