“No One is Against Healthy Food”: Land Reform and Consumption in the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement

• In Event: Sustainability, Climate, and the Politics of Consumption

Abstract

Contemporary research has generated important insights into how social movements target markets as arenas for collective action, while critical consumption studies highlight the contradictions of consumer activism. Building on these debates, we examine how the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)—Brazil’s oldest peasant movement—has expanded its support in urban centers by selling and promoting its products as ‘healthy food,’ framed as sustainable and organic. Drawing on discourse analysis of the movement’s online materials (2016–2025), visits to local stores, and archival documents, we ask how a historically socialist peasant movement mobilizes market participation without diluting its political project. We show how a discourse around consumption is mobilized to construct the movement’s identity not only as rural workers, but also as producers of healthy food. Healthy food becomes a nodal point linking urban consumption to agrarian and environmental struggles. At the same time, MST’s market engagement sustains adversarial attributions toward corporations and agribusiness, contributing to the ongoing politicization of consumption and to efforts to secure support for land reform. Our findings highlight the centrality of consumer activism for understanding not only corporate and lifestyle branding strategies but also the evolving discourses of progressive social movements and how an adversarial stance toward corporations can coexist with engagement in market strategies. Market participation, then, does not erase political and environmental conflicts; it reorganizes them along moralized consumption lines.

Authors

• Brody Trottier, University of Toronto

• Roberta S Pamplona, Mount Royal University