Inequality in access to land and food and nutritional insecurity: an overview on the political, legal and institutional frameworks from the second half of the Empire to the first government of Getúlio Vargas (1850 - 1945)

Abstract

The central analysis of this article is the debate of the historical frameworks in the period from 1850 to 1945, which encompasses the end of the Monarchy until the first Vargas government. This period had an impact on the development of public and social policies for the reduction of hunger and poverty in Brazil. The purpose of this reflection is to understand the permanence of a social structure that justifies the maintenance of food and nutritional insecurity of the population, which was possible through a bibliographic and documentary research. Political, legal and institutional frameworks were listed to explain the issue of access to land and the new labor relations that emerged during this period, such as the Land Law of 1850, which contributed to the transition from the export mercantile system to the political/economical capitalist model, widening inequalities in access to land and strengthening the large agrarian land properties; the 1891 Constitution, considered as a mark for agrarian oligarchies; and the first public policies on food and nutrition of the Vargas government, created by studies of social medicine that justified the phenomenon of hunger and malnutrition through the biological bias of the emerging science of  nutrition, bypassing the structural issue of access to land. The final debate brings to light elements of Brazilian social formation, in order to allow the understanding of the exclusion from access to land as a structuring factor in the phenomenon of food and nutritional insecurity.