O Pronaf e o grau de diversificação na agricultura familiar nas microrregiões do Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

The political affirmation of the familiar farming in Brazil occurred at 1995-96, when the National Program for the Strengthening of the Familiar Farming (PRONAF) was created. However, many family farmers still living under poverty and vulnerability conditions. Therefore, it is essential that public policies ensure the stimulation of the multidimensional development of these families. Some authors describe that productive diversification is a way to reduce the risks at the field. In this context, the criticism on the PRONAF is that its resources are concentrated in some farming cultures. Possibly, the incentive to access the credit for certain crop can lead the farmer to assign a larger area and most of its productive efforts for this crop, becoming more specialized. This can also generate increased income to the families. However, the utilitarianism view on welfare, which centers the human welfare into the income and the concept of utility maximization, has been overshadowed by concepts that take into account a broad notion of human development, such as the Capability Approach from Amartya Sen. PRONAF is partially aligned to the Capability Approach because it facilitates and ensures the access to credit for small farmers, who have difficulty to access financing for their productive activities when are competing with large producers at the regular banking system. However, this indirect incentive to specialization and intensification of the productive activities can lead to utility maximization, but it does not support the multidimensional development proposed by Amartya Sen. This is because the exclusive focus on access to credit leads producers to guiding its activities almost exclusively in higher profitability function. Thus, this study aimed to answer the following problem: Considering the degree of the production diversification, identified at Agricultural Census of 2006, it is possible to establish a relationship between the evolution of the PRONAF releases and the type of the family farming establishments in the Rio Grande do Sul micro-regions in the period 2006-2012? The methodology consisted of a spatial analysis to verify the existence of spatial autocorrelation and the formation of clusters in the release of PRONAF. Through the maps generated, the productive structure of Rio Grande do Sul was evaluated. Family farming is fairly representative in the number of agricultural establishments, but non-family farming is more representative on regards to area. The microregions with highest density of family farmers do not receive the highest percentage of agricultural credit by the PRONAF. Considering the number of family farms, the microregions that receive more agricultural defrayal credit are microregions that have low production diversification. Therefore, PRONAF as public policy must to be at constant improvement. Thus, it should be improved to ensure the diversification of family farming, and not generate excessive specialization.