The largest producer of organic rice in Latin America, over the last decade, is the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Rural Workers Movement, in Brazil. They have 1.5 million members, in 23 of 26 Brazilian states.
Article 5, Section XXIII of Brazil's constitution mandates that land serve a social function. I gather that MST was formed by peasants occupying unused land. They have a radical democratic organization, with some practices that remind me of the 1871 Paris commune. Their base consists of many small settlements working together.
They grow more than rice. Their goals include self-sustaining, self-managed agriculture. They avoid pesticides and use bio-fertilizers. (I guess this is a nice way of talking about manure.) This is a model opposed to a few large business owning huge tracts of land dedicated to production for the export market.
Since I have a vestigial interest in software, I'll mention work by Prof. Celso Alexandre Souza de Alvear and others to develop Sementes, a plugin for web sites designed especially with marketing products from the solidarity economy. There is also Ciranda. If you are going to market organic food, you want the customer to be able to easily access information about ingredients and organizations that grow it. The Arvoredo app (I have not read that paper) "facilitates documentation, monitoring, and evaluation of grassroots environmental governance activities, including tree planting, agroforestry practices, tree nursery construction, and seed collection efforts". Recently, MST has launched Iaraa, an AI tool. The software must be in service of the collective's larger goals.
A corresponding urban organization exists, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto (MTST) or Movement of Homeless Workers. And MST seems to be networked with other organizations providing models for a post-capitalist society.
As usual, I disclaim much knowledge of these organizations. You can check out an article in Jacobin by Joao Paulo Rodrigues, the write up for the 1991 Right Livelihood Award, or a write up from Grassroots International.
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