Vulnerabilidade da população rural nos municípios paraibanos de Picuí e Sossego frente ao processo de degradação das terras.

Abstract

Variables such as the dynamics and territorial organization, in addition to the different levels of economic and social development are factors that affect the intensity of the risks of social actors to a particular hazardous event and the level of vulnerability of a population or an individual. A significant part of the rural population that lives in semi-arid northeast, historically, lives in social and economic situations of exclusion. Such conditions psychologically influence the perception of risk, doing with which whole families, especially in rural areas, deprived of resources, without access to quality education, credit lines and without infrastructure conditions suffers face a continually exploration of the landscape and so they live resignedly perpetuating a subjective view and dimension of life quality in rural areas of the municipalities of Picuí and Sossego in the state of Paraiba. Inherited and experienced expectations, goals achieved and the balance between them have been mediated by the personality and the social, historical, cultural, and economic base of developing this population. Environmental conditions such as climate dynamics cannot be seen as limiting the social and economic equality. It is not possible to accept and much less to reproduce the rhetoric reductionist of what, in view of a predictable natural phenomenon, like the drought, the poor population resident in rural or even urban areas, they present high levels of social, economic, technological and to the drought vulnerability. The risks resulting from the process of accumulation of wealth, of the relations of capital, of the process of territorial occupation must be considered in a historical perspective, where the economic relations have been leading to the exhaustion of the natural resources and to the degradation of the lands instilling risks to the environment and transforming from the high level of vulnerability of the poor population, the drought not alone in a threat, but in a socially constructed disaster. Social, environmental and economic impacts of industrial activities such as pottery, mining; economic, such as agriculture (with inadequate management practices) installed on territories of Picuí and Sossego are threats to poor and vulnerable population of this region, whose confrontation should take place urgently. The satellite image analysis and interpretation of social, economic and environmental data obtained from the questionnaires to a sample quota of 5% of rural families living in these municipalities showed that land degradation and social and economic conditions are due to the territorial capital (financial, agricultural and industrial) that enhance the vulnerability resigned when the population attaches to their vulnerable condition to a punishment from God.