Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, March 16, 2023 (Press Mincomunas) – A delegation from the People’s Power Ministry for Communes and Social Movements visited Rio Grande do Sul state, in Brazil, to exchange productive experiences with the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) of the neighboring country.
In this sense, the national representation learned this Thursday about the healthy food production in the MST’s Coopan cooperative in the southern Brazilian state. The meeting opens a new period of cooperation between the popular organizations of both countries.
Hernan Vargas, Vice Minister of Communal Economy, explained that in this new stage of the rebirth of the Bolivarian Revolution, the participation of the People’s Power is central. “We are here in Brazil sharing with the members of the MST, resuming a historical relationship to learn about seed certification processes, production of bio-inputs, productive chains of value and marketing, technological innovation processes for machinery in agricultural production, the issue of the cooperative method as a heritage of many years that the MST has.”
He indicated that they are learning with the Venezuelan Communes how, from this exchange, to strengthen the collective brand “Made in Commune,” created by President Nicolas Maduro last year, which groups the communal circuits of the country.
From the giant of the south, the Vice Minister for Communal and Social Organization and Participation, Cesar Carrero, also considered something essential, as the MST has organized itself to defend each one of those moments in the productive chain; “it is to be able to understand that to dispute with capitalism it is necessary to organize first of all and to start placing the alternatives that also allow to produce life and not to reproduce capital.”
Last year, the head of state asked the communal office to replicate the experience in Venezuela of the record production of organic rice of the MST in Brazil.
In 2005, during his participation in the 5th World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Commander Hugo Chavez opened an unprecedented relationship between a head of state and a social movement with the signing of a formal agreement with La Via Campesina, which resulted in the creation in the Barinas state of the Latin American Agroecological Institute “Paulo Freire” (Iala), which trains professionals for healthy agricultural production, free of agrochemicals.
In 2014, the Ministry of Communes signed a memorandum of understanding with the Landless Movement of Brazil, which derives the alliance to improve the organizational practices for production.
By the end of last February, the Alcaravan Electronic Complex of Technological Systems, in San Juan de Los Morros, Guarico state, hosted a meeting of the cooperation program of the Political Strategic Alliance between the MST and the Ministry of the Venezuelan Executive, with the participation of community members, producers, and peasants.
