Reforma agrária e (des) continuidade na reprodução socioeconômica da agricultura familiar: a trajetória do Assentamento Macali I em Ronda Alta/RS

Abstract

Land reform in brazil is usually one of the central topics on debates towards social inequality in the country. In the late 70s, social movements that fight for the land rise again in Brazil. The Macali I settlement, located in the town of Ronda Alta/RS, has a symbolic meaning in this context, considering that it was the first settlement ever created in Brazil, where the land was claimed through an organized landless farm workers occupation. Over 30 years after the settlement creation, the settled families took different paths, and many of them don’t have bonds with the settlement anymore. That way, the research objected to study the process of permanence or not in the socioeconomic reproduction of the settled families, related to the plot of land received in the Macali I settlement project in Ronda Alta/RS, between 1998 and 2017. In order to allow that, a qualitative methodological approach was utilized, and the data were collected through interviews with key informants, documental and bibliographic research and interviews with a group of former residents from the settlement. The collected material was analyzed from a content analysis methodological perspective, with the aid of a qualitative data analysis software, MAXQDA, version 2018, and MS Excel software. From the analysis, it is highlighted that 55% of the families that were part of the settlement in 1998 still possess the plot of land in 2017. Among the main factors listed as motivators to the plot selling, it is highlighted the lack of family succession, low cost-effectiveness of the enterprise, as well as better education opportunities for children in the city. Ultimately, this research also emphasizes that, from the 56 originally settled plots, only 9 of them still remain in the land of founder settlers and, in large scale, the founder’s evasion happened before 1998. Indeed, in the plots commercialized after 1998, it’s possible to see a grain production predominance, signing a tendency to the expansion of this kind of crop after the plot sale.