Most of their towns are very depressed economically, and occupations can give local economies a much needed boost. Typical occupations consist of 1,000 to 3,000 families, who turn idle land into productive farms. They sell their produce in the marketplaces of the local towns and buy their supplies from local merchants. Not surprisingly those towns with nearby MST settlements are better off economically than other similar towns, and many mayors now actually petition the MST to carry out occupations near their towns. Local and regional economic development benefits from a small farm economy, as do the life and prosperity of rural towns.
Squatters occupy land owned by the wealthy absentee landlords in Acre, Brazil.
In every case of genuine land reform, real, measurable poverty reduction and improvement in human welfare has invariably been the result. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Cuba, and China are all good examples. Mexico and the Philippines are typical cases of the latter. Another way of looking at it is in terms of the cost of creating a new job. Estimates of the cost of creating a job in the commercial sector of Brazil range from two to twenty times more than the cost of establishing an unemployed head of household on farm land, through agrarian reform.