CPI will show MST as a major food producer, says Pimenta

On a visit to the 4th Agrarian Reform Fair, promoted by the Landless Workers Movement (MST), the minister of the Social Communication Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic, Paulo Pimenta, said that the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (CPI), opened at the end of April in the Chamber of Deputies to investigate the social movement, will show that the MST is one of the largest food producers in the country. Pimenta stated that he is not worried about the opposition using the CPI to attack the government. “I don’t have that concern, on the contrary. I think a lot of people don’t know the MST as the biggest producer of organic rice in Latin America, the MST as a great producer of food, food”, he said in an interview, in Parque da Água Branca, in the capital of São Paulo, where the fair. “The CPI will be a great opportunity for Brazil to get to know the MST. The MST will come out of this CPI more respected, bigger, having more visibility and being more admired”, he added. The minister pointed out that the MST fair is a demonstration of the production capacity of healthy foods by producers linked to the movement, as a result of the agrarian reform. “This fair has 1,600 items, an impressive variety, quality food, at a fair price, the production of food that the Brazilian people need.” Pimenta also said that the current federal government is plural, and that it offers space both for business agriculture and family agriculture. “We are going to work for what is best for Brazil and for the Brazilian people. There is room, in our project, for family farming, for business farming. This contradiction does not exist and occasional noises, those who live in democracy know that this is part of the political game, of the democratic game, ”he said. In a speech on the fair’s main stage, the minister said that the message sent by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was to reaffirm the government’s commitment to ending hunger in the country. “The message is to give back to the Brazilian people the right to eat three meals a day. It is not possible for a rich country, a country like ours, to live with a reality in which more than 30 million people go hungry every day, and tens of millions more do not know what they are going to eat the next day”.

Agência Brasil