In May of this year, the Catholic Church's Land Commission (CPT) met to discuss human rights as related to the sugar cane industry. Below is their summary statement on the issue Called forth by the cries of excluded women and men of the earth, and by the voice of the Prophet who says "You who buy more houses and fields to add to those you already have: soon there will be no place for anyone else to live, and you alone will live on the land" (Isaiah 5:8), we have gathered on these days of Pentecost in Camaragibe, Pernambuco. We have come from 12 regions of the Land Commission who are most afflicted by the single-cropping of sugar. We have come to reflect and to strategize plans for confronting the problems which have come with the expansion of the sugar industry in our country, an expansion fueled by international policies demanding an increase of use of alcohol as a source of fuel.

We denounce this process as intrinsically flawed as it is based on exploitative practices and the violation of human and environmental rights, which serve as a basis for the financing of the expansion of the farming, industrial and technological sugar-alcohol sector. We denounce agribusiness as an economic generator of social inequalities, of environmental degradation, and slave labor. We denounce the support the current government is giving to this process, such as forgiving or refinancing current debts and the various forms of subsidizing and financing big businesses that are growing as a result of these practices. We condemn other practices such as land grabbing, frauds, embezzlement of public money, and impunity in cases of violence against workers.

We identify the consequences of this model: a growing precariousness of the life conditions and work of salaried, rural employees and the continuation of the migration of workers. Of special concern are those in the Northeast, who provide cheap labor for the wealthy sugar cane factory owners and who leave behind their families, community and cultural roots. In the face of new technologies and new labels which try to hide the perverse face of this colonial system, rural areas continue to see violations of workers rights, illiteracy, hunger and increasing unemployment as a result of mechanization and the maintenance of an archaic, conservative model of the agro-industrial system.

We reaffirm the necessity for rural workers to continue a methodological struggle against this model. We reaffirm the urgency of an effective agrarian reform and the valorization of rural workers as part of the process of constructing another model of agriculture and society in general. We reaffirm our commitment to struggle against violence aimed at sugar cane workers, and we renew our commitment to prevent and combat slave labor. We support and invite all to adhere to a campaign in favor of a law which expropriates land where slave labor is happening. We reaffirm the necessity of all national and international organizations to align themselves with the defense of the rights of the poor of the land, especially those being crucified in the sugar fields.

We feel the challenge of articulating effective actions which denounce the pernicious results of the so-called sugar agro-business, just as we do the call to intensify our work together with the poor of the earth so that these may live with dignity in the new heaven, the new earth, the new time in which "the old ways will never again be remembered" (Isaiah 65:17).

Camaragibe, Pernambuco, Brazil, on the feast of Pentecost, May 30, 2004