O empreendedorismo comunitário na promoção do desenvolvimento local: a experiência de extensão universitária do Programa de Estudos e Ações para o Semiárido (PEASA).

Abstract

During the last decades, the rural semi-arid northeast has gone through various forms of tliinking and making its development and, consequently, its modernization. After the wide investment in infra-structure aiming the "combat to the drought", accompanied by the regional industrialization plan, considered the best solution to the development problem in the region, in the 90's the perspective of local development and the living with the semi-arid carne to be. Despite being new, tliis differed look upon the social-economic difficulties of the region, hereby standing out its semi-arid portion, brings in its base a project of modernization, as it proposes a change of behavior which affects the local social and productive structures. The Program of Studies and Actions for the Semi-Arid (PEASA) appears, in 1994, in the middle of tliis changing process, proposing an intervention which alters the path of the development of some localization of the semiarid of Paraíba. Its intervention model, linked to the perspectives of Local Productive Systems (SPS's), proposes as means of agribusiness, the creation of communitarian undertaking in the shape of agro industries, in which the local vocation products would receive logistic treatment within a wide process of rationalization of the production. The present paper investigated this model of intervention, focusing on the construction of its methodology within the perspective of promotion of local development, seeking to realize, also, that the perspective of modernization is built from the actions of this program of university extension. Our research used date collected along with the program and its technical collaborators, in the documental investigation (activity report, foment projects, technical articles among others); and in the accompanying of one of its experiences of intervention, the implantation project of the agro industry of Benefiting of Sisal Fiber for production of handcraft material in the county of Cuiuiú, Barra de Santa Rosa - PB. The intervention model identified as communitarian undertaking lies ineffective in the promotion of local development, shocking against the own local productive system of camping tradition and familiar organization. The focus of the model in the rationalization of productive and social structures ends up not considering the environmental question, limiting the project to development to economic nature questions.