Fewer People Own More Land in Latin America-UN

Landless Brazilian peasants and rural workers demonstrated this week to demand swifter land reform.

Latin America's poor should be given more land but ownership is increasingly falling into the hands of big companies, a senior U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization official said on Thursday.

"The concentration of land ownership is increasing in several countries in the region," said Jose Graziano, FAO head for Latin America and the Caribbean.

"There is a need for agrarian reform, it's necessary to ensure better access to productive resources in Latin America," Graziano said at an FAO conference in Brasilia.

Landless Brazilian peasants and rural workers demonstrated this week to demand swifter land reform -- part of broader protests this month including ranch and power plant invasions.

Activists of the Landless Rural Workers Movement on Thursday blocked the main railway used to ship iron ore from the interior to a port on the Atlantic.

In Brasilia, some 3,000 activists marched through government quarters. Fifty presented their demands at the FAO conference, including a cap on the size of property in Brazil.

"Brazil cannot continue with scores of people marginalized, families living under plastic sheets in humiliation," Maria da Graca Amorim, head of the family farm federation, told FAO delegates. She drew their attention to homeless families camped out at road sides in plastic tents demanding a piece of land.

Delegates joined protesters in a minute of silence to commemorate the killing of 19 land reform activists in 1996.

"Unfortunately, Latin America has the highest rate of property concentration in the world," Graziano said.

"We don't think inequality can be reduced or extreme hunger and poverty eradicated if you don't facilitate access to the means of production," he said.

Land distribution and rural development aid could help slow excessively rapid urbanization that created sprawling shantytowns throughout Latin America, Graziano said.

Industry and agriculture leaders in Brazil complain that land invasions have increased in recent years because the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva raised expectations of giving more land to the poor.