Vulnerabilidade à seca e sustentabilidade nos assentamentos de reforma agrária do semiárido nordestino.

Abstract

The semi-arid region of Northeast Brazil is distinguished by high leveis of social and environmental degradation and by drought's disaster. This situation affects particularly the most vulnerable segments of rural population. This segments are, however, growing up relatively to the total of the brazilian rural population. This study intends to evaluate how the experiences of agrarian reform in this region turned into a strategy for the redution of the vulnerability to drought among the families living there and then being able to represent mechanisms of sustainable development. For this reason, we took an agrarian reform settlement called Quandú, in Barra de Santa Rosa (PB), for field work. We based our analysis on the relations between disaster, environment and development, taking vulnerability as articulator concept of our issues, whitin the construction's dynamic of a new social space. The experience of the 47 settled families in Quandú indicates that the improvement of the living condition in a comunity may create favorable conditions for further actions that will strengthen the local development. However the better living conditions can hide a latent vulnerability to drought that puts in risk the sustainabiliry of these actions. We conclude that the weak communitary organization and social participation make harder the development of the potentialities and capacities of the families living in the agrarian reform settlement and at the same time fortify important fragilities. This way, the settled people loose the opportunity to reduce their high vulnerability to drought and to take the destiny of their own sustainable development in their hands.