Caracterização do processo de diferenciação camponesa na modernização capitalista: o caso da microrregião colonial de Irati-PR.

Abstract

The work was carried out in the State of Paraná, specifically in the Homogeneous (276) Colonial de Irati Microregion, because of the ongoing studies of typology of producers carried out at the Agronomic Institute of Paraná - IAPAR, the agency responsible for state agricultural research. The objective was to explain the factors (processes) that contributed in the dynamics of the differentiation starting from a peasant situation, also making the historical conformation of the categories of producers. The analysis starts from the fact that in the Microregion, even before the expansion of capitalist relations in the 1970s, there was no homogeneity among farmers. These were differentiated by the quantity and quality of natural resources under their ownership and by the composition of the family workforce. These differences, however, did not materialize expressively on the level of production, those who had more land were limited to cultivating what corresponded to the family's work potential. The collective use of farmland expressed this situation and affirmed the limits of the differentiation of producers. The expansion of capitalist relations in the micro-region's agriculture occurred belatedly, compared to the state and the southern region of the country, due to the fall in the profitability of its main crop, the maté herb, and the negative fertility and relief differences of the soils. When these mercantile opportunities developed, the transformations benefited the producers who held the largest quantities of land. Its land position is doubly positive: it allows the expansion of production and via access to rural credit, the change in the technical production base. Landed patrimony, in the first instance, constituted the cause of the process of peasant differentiation, and, in a second, as a consequence, where mechanized peasant producers formally acquire land. The form of access to land shows the progress of the process of peasant differentiation from the commercial valuation of agricultural production. Between 1950 and 1970, inheritance predominated as a form of transference of private land ownership, which is the basic component in the process of differentiation. The increasing disintegration of the Faxinal System accelerated peasant differentiation insofar as it privatized communal land use, affecting farmers who had small plots of land or not. The change in the technical basis of the production of the bean crop occurred by the peasant way, and determined the modification of the system of cultivation of consortium for the simple. The strategies used to increase the income of the production unit consisted of renting machines, exchanging productive services between tractor and workforce, tractor versus tractor, renting the best areas (fertility and relief) and, on the other hand, to carry out the cleaning operations, for later incorporation in its production process. The category of mechanized farmers is one of those farmers who already had the largest amounts of land and took advantage of rural credit to intensify productive activities as a way of remaining in the process of reproduction. The development of productive activities is carried out mainly with the family labor force.