We met with the federal government in order to present alternative proposals crafted by more than 50 groups.

Our country has an important opportunity—we must take advantage of the world economic crisis to leave behind the neoliberal economic system and take measures to adopt a new model of national development, based on a fair distribution of income, job generation and the strengthening of the industrial plant and the internal market, and, in general, bettering the living conditions of the Brazilian people.

The crisis has shown the entire world that neoliberalism is incapable of sustaining social, environmental, and economic development, and it has shown the necessity of regulating the economy and strengthening the State. That economic model, characterized by the hegemony of finance capital, high rates of interest, a primary surplus, and the prioritization of the expert sector, is broken.

We will not find the solution in policies that reinforce neoliberalism or ease its inherent problems, such as supporting banks and large corporations. Rather, we should look to initiatives that aim at structural change. In Brazil, we need to immediately reduce interest rates and control the movement of speculative capital, impeding its free circulation, by instituting new taxes and quarantining capital.

The government must re-evaluate the misguided decisions taken by the IMF, one of the parties implicated in the crisis (it did much to put in place a policy of running a primary surplus).  In the first four years of the Lula government, the National treasury spent close to $R 600 billion in interest payments on the public debt. We must use those resources to construct schools and hire teachers to provide universal access to public education.

In the large cities, investments in public transportation, hospitals, and public housing—urban reconstruction—is urgent. In the countryside, food production through family- and peasant-based agriculture needs to receive public investment, along with increases in the numbers of small and medium-sized farms, and the carrying out of agrarian reform.

The government must establish goals for the creation of formal employment, within a broad program reacting to the increase in unemployment caused by the crisis. At the same time, in order to strengthen the internal market and guarantee consumption, the minimum wage and Social Security benefits must be increased, thereby redistributing income.

These measures will only be viable if public funds are invested responsibly. Subsidies used to bailout banks and speculative enterprises—businesses that did very well in the neoliberal era—would only augment the contradictions of a model already in crisis.

It is incoherent that those who always defended the market as the workings of an "invisible hand" resort to the State in a moment of difficulty. Public banks, such as the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES), Bank of Brazil, and the Federal Savings Bank, need not come to the aid of capital; they only need to approve loans with the aim of zero unemployment.

We are also worried about the predatory offensive against natural resources—an offensive that worsens in times of crisis, because it allows for rapid capital accumulation.

We cannot accept the irresponsible proposals from agribusiness, which aim to change environmental legislation, reducing conservation areas in the Amazon and in what remains of the Atlantic coastal forest. Mega-corporations working in the petroleum industry have fixed their eyes on a gigantic area in the high seas, called the sub-salt zone, and want to maintain the existing concession regime. They are seeking to block legal changes that would guarantee national sovereignty over those resources.

Those who are responsible for the current economic crisis are the core countries and the institutions they run, including the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

We defend a new international order, which would respect the sovereignty of peoples and nations. Brazil needs to strengthen regional integration, paying particular attention to Mercosur, the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), and the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA). With such an institution in place, we could use local currencies in place of the dollar in commercial transactions throughout Latin America, echoing recent policies for bilateral trade between Brazil and Argentina.

We met with the federal government in order to present these alternatives, drafted by more than 50 groups. We are not concerned with elections but with the future of the country. We want to contribute to the debate, so that the Brazilian people mobilize towards a new economic model, capable of confronting the gravity of the crisis.

We cannot lose this opportunity to make the changes our country needs.

- João Pedro Stedile is an economist and member of the national coordination of the MST and of Via Campesina; José Antônio Moroni, is a philosopher and director of the Brazilian Association of NGOs; Nalu Faría, is a psychologist and general secretary of the Sempreviva Organización Feminista (SOF) and a member of the National Secretariat of the World Women's March in Brazil.

(Translation by Max Ajl: Ajl has written on Latin American politics and economics for the Guardian, NACLA, and the New Statesman).