By Todd Benson

SAO PAULO, April 10 (Reuters) - About 250 peasants occupied part of a eucalyptus plantation in southern Brazil, the first of several protests slated for April to push for land reform in Latin America's largest country, a spokesman for the group said on Tuesday.

The protesters belong to the Landless Peasants' Movement, or MST, a nationwide social movement that routinely occupies large plantations to lobby the government to grant plots of land and financial aid to poor family farmers.

The latest occupation began on Sunday in Itapetininga in the interior of Sao Paulo state, where peasants set up camp on a farm owned by Suzano Papel e Celulose <SUZB5.SA>, one of Latin America's biggest producers of paper and pulp.

The MST said it chose the target to protest the expansion of eucalyptus plantations at the expense of food crops and to pressure for agrarian reform in Sao Paulo, an agricultural powerhouse where farming is dominated by large agribusiness companies.

"It's time for the government to accelerate agrarian reform," said Joaquim da Silva, an MST spokesman. "We're going to keep invading properties until they do so."

Suzano, which owns other plantations that have been occupied by the MST in the past, said in a statement that it had taken legal action to have the protesters evicted.

MST protesters usually are evicted after a few weeks, then pick a new target. In some cases they have remained as occupiers on abandoned farms their owners are no longer using.

Land squabbles have long been common in Brazil, which is slightly larger than the continental United States. Millions of Brazilians live in poverty but 1 percent of the population owns almost half of all arable land, according to official data.

The disputes frequently turn violent, especially in remote regions of the Amazon rain forest. At least 1,690 violent clashes over land took place in Brazil last year, according to a recent report by 30 local human rights groups.

The MST has traditionally occupied unproductive land tracts. But in recent years it has also targeted plantations owned by large agribusiness interests, a shift that has strained its relations with the left-leaning government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

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