SOWING CHANGE
HOW LANDLESS WORKERS CREATED
LATIN AMERCICA’S ORGANIC RICE EMPIRE
Organic rice fields after harvesting.
From sowing to packaging, every step of the rice chain is powered by the hands of workers—all members of the Landless Workers cooperative, cultivating not just crops, but a shared future.
The Landless Workers Movement has become the major organic rice producer in Latin America, and it is entirely farmed by rural families through a collective cooperative system.
Detail of organic rice in the Landless Movement organic rice fields.
LEFT: Leomar, a rice farmer, poses for a portrait while rice is being harvested
RIGHT: Detail of organic rice being loaded into a truck
Once harvested, the rice is transported to a cooperative-run facility, where it undergoes a meticulous process—cleaning, drying, peeling, and packaging—before reaching consumers.
But what sets these monocrops apart is not just that they are 100% organic, but also the Landless Workers' commitment to forest restoration and agroforestry systems, which help them produce their own food alongside rice cultivation, while diversifying their lands.
Teca, a Landless Workers Movement farmer, walks through the orchard she cultivates alongside her husband and parents. Their harvest not only feeds their family but also supplies fresh products to street markets near Viamão.
LEFT: María Medi and Maristela Ramos reforest an area near Maria’s house. Maria Medi lives a settlement in Viamão. She lives with his son Leo, who harvests organic rice. Maria has been reforesting the area, once a naked, poor land used for cattle ranching. Today, of her 5 hectares, 3.5 belong to agroecological forest. RIGHT: A cluster of bananas recently harvested from Maria’s land.
Everything on the table was grown and harvested by Maria and her friends. As they take a break from preparing a tree nursery, they share a quick, homegrown snack,
A view of the thriving forest that Maria Medi has been restoring on land once degraded by cattle ranching. Today, 3.5 of her 5 hectares are dedicated to an agroecological forest.
Leonardo and Leomar harvest rice during the day, at their parcels of land.
A worker collects rice samples to analyze quality, ensuring that each batch meets the cooperative’s high standards before processing.
Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Leonardo and Leomar harvest rice while there is no nighttime dew. They belong to the MST (Landless Movement of Workers). This Brazilian political organization has been fighting over the last 4 decades to grant land to people without access to property. In these lands, they produce food, they say, and no commodities. The territory they occupy used to be unproductive large estates that are now turning into agroecological farms supporting thousands of families.
To prevent rice from spoiling, it should be harvested while still dry. In the absence of nighttime dew, harvesters need to act swiftly, gathering the rice either in the early morning or late at night.
Nobody expected a social movement to become a breath for the overexploited land, but it happened. Land for those who work it! This was the motive that brought to life a movement that gathered thousands without land during the expansion of large estates in Brazil to provide well being and a decent life for low income farmers. Born in the 70s, the MST (Movement Landless People, in Portuguese) jumped on a quest to make justice over land tenure during the green revolution, where rural families were losing space to big, mechanized, agribusiness.
By occupying unproductive large estates, they settled camps with hundreds of families. Once there, they faced extreme heat and cold under tents made out of plastic canvas and wooden poles to do what they do best, producing food.
After being criminalized and facing many threats, the MST kept standing and became one of the biggest food producers in Brazil. With 363 families producing rice, from 13 different settlements, the MST combines food production with land sharing for small farmers.
In a few decades, they’ve become the largest organic rice producer in Latin America. But besides being a monoculture, these families don’t see this as a one solution for producing such an amount of organic rice. They see the land as one and rather than building strong, modified plants that tolerate the poison that is then needed to make it successful over all other species, they think of building a strong, full of life soil, that regenerates while sustaining a crop among other unwanted species. And this paradigm goes beyond the rice plantations. Next to the rice, there’s plenty of patches of forest and other native species are protected, while a vast diversity of orchards create a belt of biodiversity around the crops.
Understanding the land as one connected entity, producing organic without the use of agri-chemicals is just the first step towards mitigating the effects of large-scale food production. Orchards, native forest to build safe space for pollinators and even natural homeopathy for the plants become tools for a better interaction with the land, which consider global warming and climate change not as a threat, but as a reality.
Workers harvest rice under the cover of night, taking advantage of the cool, dry conditions to prevent moisture from spoiling the crop.
