Perfil socioeconômico e ambiental de unidades de produção agrícolas convencionais e em transição agroecológica no oeste catarinense

Abstract

The current agricultural model is characterized by the hegemony of large companies and has been causing the exclusion of family farmers from agricultural activity. Discussions on new forms of sustainable production have emerged in recent years as a possibility for farmers to remain on their farms. One of the alternatives is agroecology, since it uses a multidimensional approach, in which the farmer is inserted into the process of building sustainable rural development. However, for a family farmer to become agroecological, we have a process of transition, through which there is the gradual change of his actions and social processes from the model in which he finds himself to an ecologically based agriculture. This process is fraught with doubts and insecurities, which hinder the transition process, and may lead to withdrawal. For these issues, the objective of this work was to analyze comparatively the characteristics of the Units of Agricultural Production (UPA's) in transition process and those that produce conventionally. The work was based on the MESMIS method (Framework for the Evaluation of Natural Resource Management Systems Incorporating Sustainability Indicators), being conducted from a participatory approach. The information obtained comes from the reports of the farming families participating in the study, which were collected from structured interviews and open questions. It was possible to observe differences between the UPA’s investigated, and the main characteristics that differentiated them were the greater environmental awareness, through practices that aim at sustainability by the UPA’s in transition, which may be related to a greater participation in social organizations. Conversely, conventional UPA’s present characteristics typical of conventional agriculture, with emphasis on productivity and the use of external inputs. From this information, the need arises to introduce effective public policies that enable sustainable rural development, based on local agroecological produtction, in which farmers can assume as protagonists a more productive form of production. sustainable development, with the support of quality technical assistance.