Challenges for feminism in relation to public policies in rural areas.

"Every person has the right to life, liberty and security of person" - Margarida Alves

I have always believed that the countryside is a good place to live. My inspiration is the struggle of Margarida Alves, which is why I quoted her at the beginning of the text. A warrior woman, a symbol for us women of the countryside, who throughout her life fought to advance Brazil in the fight against poverty, in confronting violence against women, in defending food and nutritional sovereignty, and in building a society without prejudice based on gender, color, race, or ethnicity, and without religious intolerance. One of the first women to hold a leadership position in a union.

My name is Edjane Rodrigues Silva, I am 29 years old, daughter of Maria Joseneide Rodrigues Gomes and mother of 8-year-old Nicolas. Like Margarida Alves, my mother Joseneide fought for the dream of acquiring her land, where she could plant, raise her animals and live peacefully in the beautiful backlands of Alagoas. And that's how I was raised, participating in union meetings in Ouro Branco, because it was through collective struggle that my mother acquired the land through the Land Credit program.

In this movement, I became interested in the agendas of the labor movement and at 18 I joined a union, becoming the first Youth Coordinator of the rural workers' union of Ouro Branco/AL and, later, General Secretary. In 2013, I was elected Secretary of Women of the Federation of Agricultural Workers in the State of Alagoas (FETAG-AL). In 2015, I was elected National Secretary of Youth of the Unified Workers' Central (CUT) and currently I am the Secretary of Social Policies of the National Confederation of Rural Workers, Farmers and Family Farmers (CONTAG). Thus, I am building my history in pursuit of actions and public policies that contribute to the construction of sustainable development with democracy, justice, autonomy, equality, and freedom for the countryside. That is why I challenged myself to write this text, which is part of the roadmap I presented at the panel on the challenges of feminism in Brazil. The focus of this text is to examine the field and, primarily, rural public policies that contribute to the empowerment and leadership of women farmers.

The Brazilian countryside and the labor movement are no different from the city and other urban movements, having patriarchy and conservatism as their starting point in their historical context. However, through the struggle of women farmers for emancipation, we have gained respect, autonomy, and political spaces. The first was the right to unionize, and one of the most recent was guaranteeing, through congressional resolution, gender parity in the composition of CONTAG's leadership, implemented from the 2017-2021 term. At the same time, we continue to seek better living conditions in the countryside. We fight for credit, for education from early childhood to higher education, and for health and social security, among other policies. According to the Feminist Political Platform, from 1990 to the early 2000s, rural women workers organized themselves at the local, national, and international levels through struggles that guaranteed them rights, materialized in effective policies and actions. In 2002, Brazil was undergoing an electoral process, and in 2003 a democratic, left-wing government took office. The introduction to its government plan stated, "Our government will act to strengthen and expand the achievements made so far by women and work to promote the construction of a new order in relations between men and women. More plural and democratic relations, based on equity, without prejudices of race and ethnicity, and with equal opportunities in all aspects of social life." Thus, for women farmers and young people living in rural areas, the Second National Agrarian Reform Plan was launched at the beginning of 2003. This plan included guarantees of rights for rural women workers through policies that would provide opportunities for their participation in various spheres of life.

The National Agrarian Reform Plan embraced the challenge of confronting the centuries-old pattern of subordination and denial of rural women as political and economic agents in the rural world, acknowledging that it is the State's responsibility to implement policies aimed at overcoming this situation of social inequality.

 In the same year, 2013, the First National Policy Plan for Women was launched, implemented by the Special Secretariat for Women's Policies (SPM). Within the scope of the Ministry of Agrarian Development (MDA) and the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra), the Program for the Promotion of Gender, Race and Ethnic Equality (PPIGRE) was also created, which later became the Directorate of Policy for Rural Women. Its purpose was to develop public policies that seek to promote the economic rights of rural women workers, indigenous populations, and quilombola communities, through support for production, access to and guarantee of land use, and citizenship through access to civil documentation, participation, and social control. These institutionalized spaces within the government demonstrate how much we were growing and occupying space in society in the pursuit of gender equality. We were aware that we still needed to advance significantly.

Beyond these spaces, rural people were gaining more social public policies such as education, health, rural housing, among others. It wasn't yet the countryside we had hoped for, but it had already advanced significantly, especially regarding the issue of hunger: Brazil was removed from the hunger map and experienced economic growth.

In public policy, I take rural education and health as examples. Rural education policy celebrates 20 years of existence in 2018, through the National Program for Education in Agrarian Reform (PRONERA). It was created during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration and consolidated during the Lula administration with a budget and guaranteed by law². In 2004, the Secretariat for Continuing Education, Literacy, Diversity and Inclusion (SECADI) was established within the Ministry of Education (MEC), where it develops PRONACAMPO. This program aims to provide technical and financial support to states, the Federal District, and municipalities for the implementation of rural education policy, aiming to expand access and improve the quality of basic and higher education, through actions to improve the infrastructure of public education networks, initial and continuing teacher training, and the production and provision of specific materials for rural and quilombola students, at all stages and modalities of education. The program is divided into four pillars, and one of the most significant for the field is the second: Initial and continuing teacher training, in which universities offer undergraduate courses in rural education. We need professionals who speak our language, who demonstrate to our children and young people that the countryside is a good place to live, and who do not encourage rural exodus.

In the area of ​​health, Contag has always defended the Unified Health System (SUS), as 100% of its members are served by this system. The Mais Médicos program was of paramount importance for rural areas, just as the Reference Centers for Rural Workers' Health are essential for the lives of rural women and men. Even if they don't function as we would like, the existence of these reference centers, which we advocate for in all municipalities, is already a great step forward.

We were fighting to improve upon these achievements and gain many more. However, the legal-parliamentary-media coup removed President Dilma, legitimately elected in the 2014 elections. And with her, without allowing us to argue back, they took away the Secretariat for Policies for Women, the National Youth Secretariat, the Ministry of Agrarian Development... They began working to implement a pension reform that blames rural workers for the deficit they claim exists in their accounts. They say they want to equalize the retirement age for women with that of men, knowing that we women have two jobs, since in most Brazilian homes women are the ones who take care of domestic chores. The pension reform was not implemented, but it is targeted to be carried out soon after the elections.

The Temer government initiated a movement of setbacks in the social achievements of the last period, as well as those guaranteed in the 1988 Federal Constitution, which were not even fully implemented to the necessary quality. They managed to place the country on a new level of dispute over a national and sovereign project. And they demonstrated to us that the impeachment constitutes a coup d'état promoted and sustained by the corporate patriarchy, the mass media, especially Rede Globo, and sectors of the bourgeois parliament, the deputies of the so-called "Beef, Bullets and Bible" caucus (landowners, businessmen and fundamentalist religious figures of various backgrounds), in addition to the legal system. The coup was carried out against the Brazilian nation, in the countryside and in the city.

For 13 years, we have lived through a time of rights, of exercising rights, and of accessing constitutionally guaranteed rights. We will fight with even more strength and wisdom. We will not accept any setbacks and we will walk together until everyone is free, with no rights taken away.

Bibliography:

NASCIMENTO, Silvana Magali Vale. The development of capital and its impacts on gender relations. CARMUÇA, Silva. Patriarchy and the situation of women. Documents: Lula's government plan – 2002; II National Agrarian Reform Plan; I National Policy Plan for Women.

Publication of Perspectives No. 19/2018 - Challenges of Feminism in Brazil by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, referring to pages 18 to 20: Challenges of feminism in relation to public policies for the countryside. December 2018.