The absence of updated and trustworthy statistics from INCRA doesn't make the debate any easier. The main debate inside the government around the modalities of agrarian reform was limited to a dispute between granting access to land by means of redistribution (after expropriation) and granting access to land by means of the market (with reimbursement through a special credit line). The agrarian reform plan was entrusted to the Agrarian Reorganization Bureau (Secretaria de Reorganização Agrária – SRA) – notice the disappearance of the word reform – of the Ministry of Agrarian Development (Ministério do Desenvolvimento Agrário – MDA), which houses the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e de Reforma Agrária – INCRA). Surely, the pace of such distributions was difficult to maintain during the two first years of the Lula Administration. In fact, taking advantage of a depression of the agrarian market in the end of the 1990's, the Cardoso Administration distributed land to almost 400.000 families, often in precarious conditions of settlement and support to production. Its objectives were to rectify property deeds, to make familiar units viable and to support production, instead of limiting itself to distributing land which would take years to be assigned and regulated, which was the main mistake of the Cardoso Administrations' agrarian policy (Sampaio, 2001 INCRA, 2003). The Second National Plan for Agrarian Reform (II Plano Nacional de Reforma Agrária - PNRA), designed by the Worker's Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT) and the first Lula da Silva administration, was ambitious and aimed at innovation. Key words: Brazil, agrarian reform, Government Lula, public policies, rural development. How to explain that this seems at first to be a contradiction and, furthermore, how do we evaluate debates within Brazilian society and the federal government on this theme? The article analyzes the tensions, debates, advances and impasses of the past ten years of agrarian reform policy in Brazil looking at the interaction between social movements and public policies. Paradoxically, the support to the agrarian reform seems to have stagnated even with the great influence of landless workers' movements. President Luís Ignacio Lula da Silva was elected with the proposal for an important program of agrarian reform, family agriculture support and struggle against poverty. Translation from Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura, Rio de Janeiro, vol. Translated by Giuliano Olivatti Menegazzi

Agrarian Reform in Brazil: a series of missed appointments between social movements and state policies

Nucleo familiar en brasil