don't know how many excluded there will be". In 2002, João Pedro Stedile admitted that in plotting the movement's politics, one had to keep in mind "that there are a great many lumpens in the country areas". - something that in his view should not be held against the working class character of the movement, because many rural working class had been "absorbed" into the periphery of the urban proletariat. Such a view is shared by some academic authors, who argue that, behind its avowedly "peasant" character, the MST, as far as class politics is concerned, is mostly a semi proletarian movement, congregating people trying to eke out a living in the absence of formal wage employment, out of a range of activities across a whole section of the social division of labour. MST somewhat filled the void left by the decline of the organized labor movement in the wake of Cardoso's neoliberal policies. Therefore, the movement took steps to ally with urban struggles, specially those connected to housing. João Pedro Stedile stated that the struggle for land reform would unfold in the countryside, but would be decided in the city, where "political power for structural change" resides. 2005 - 2010 Lula government and March for Agrarian Reform The Lula government was seen by the MST as a leftist and therefore friendly government, so MST decided to shun occupations of public buildings in favor of actions against private landed states, in a second wave of occupations starting in 2003. However, the Lula government's increasingly conservative positions, including its low profile on land reform, actually somewhat less than achieved by Cardoso in his first term) impelled the movement to change its stance as early as early 2004, when it again began to occupy public buildings and Banco do Brasil agencies. In June 2003, the MST occupied the R&D farm of Monsanto Company in the state of Goiás. On March 7, 2008, a similar action by women activists at another Monsanto facility at Santa Cruz das Palmeiras, São Paulo, destroyed a nursery and an experimental patch of genetically modified maize, slowing ongoing scientific research. MST said they destroyed the facility to protest government support for the extensive use of GMOs supplied by transnational corporations in agriculture. In 2003, Lula authorized the sale and use of GM soybeans, which led MST's Stedile to call him a "transgenic politician". The dominance of transnationals over