Sugar, Tea, and Markets: Selling the MST

The Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement, known more commonly by their Portuguese initials MST, offers up an alternative model to the predominant development model based on export-led economic growth. The MST is the largest social movement in Latin America with hundreds of thousands of active participants, which for more than twenty years has been the lead advocate in Brazil for the continuing viability of small-scale agriculture in opposition to the increasing consolidation of agricultural lands in the hands of highly-mechanized industrial farms.  The objective of the workshop was to conduct a feasibility study of the MST’s opportunities for entering the US fair trade market. This feasibility study presents an analysis of the supply and demand-side for entry into the fair trade market as well as detailed recommendations for immediate and long-term activities that can make the MST’s commercialization efforts successful in the short and long term.