Agroecology at the core of the ecosocial transition: understanding the production project of the Rural Landless Workers Movement in Brazil

The Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil is one of the largest social movements in Latin America and the world. Its struggle has become a reference point for social and peasant resistances, demonstrating how land occupation can constitute a far-reaching organisational strategy that not only advances a horizon of land redistribution, but also opens new possibilities for the collective organisation of life. Under the motto Occupy, Produce, Resist, the MST has developed a production project grounded in agroecology and food sovereignty as emancipatory pathways to achieve social justice. This is a project that extends beyond the sphere of production alone, making space for alternative paradigms and everyday practices of care, reciprocity, complementarity, cooperation, and solidarity. The MST’s production project emerges from the proposal of Popular Agrarian Reform, which seeks to move beyond the redistribution of unproductive lands towards the construction of a new model of society. In this sense, production and reproduction seek to transform social, economic, and society–nature relations, giving rise to new forms of relating that depart from capitalist rationality. Within this framework, this research examines the MST’s production project and its contribution to the eco-social transition. Through a qualitative ethnographic methodological approach, and drawing on a theoretical framework grounded in historical materialism and political ecology, this study analyses the case of the Cristina Alves settlement, located in the northeastern Brazilian state of Maranhão, with the aim of understanding the MST’s production project and examining how it contributes to the construction of socio-environmental justice horizons and eco-social transitions through its agroecological practices.