O desenvolvimento sustentável da agricultura familiar sob condições adversas: o caso da comunidade de Caixeiro, em Juarez Távora, PB.

Abstract

Beginning from ideal of an sustainable development, with its multidisciplinary aspects, looking for integrate the political spheres, economics, social and environmental, the familiar agriculture has been considered by its characteristics (productive diversification with low cost and logic of subsistence), as the propeller agent of this intended development. Concerning to the agriculture on the community of Caxeiro, in Juarez Távora - PB, prevails a familiar agriculture on the production of a polyculture, where it stands out, in commercial terms, the cotton; however, that community presents some particularities. First, the land where those families work, generally don't belong to them. There are, in the region, two big latifundium that "give up" the land during two years for those families to work on it. After that period the land returns to its legitimate owners. They agree to give up other lands, configuring a vicious cycle. Second, the EMBRAPA is giving attendance to that locality since two year ago and intend to quit in the final of the third year, when, theoretically, that community would already have conditions to walk on their own. Considering this particular aspects, of a type of familiar agriculture practiced on the community of Caxeiro, in Juarez Távora - PB, it was used the study of case based in a quantitative and qualitative analysi of the data to estimate the possibility of a sustainable development for that community. Therefore, were studied the conditions in which happen the familiar agriculture reproduction in the community of Caxeiro, under adverse conditions. The work was developed based on bibliographic and field research, where it was verified that the majority of the husbandmen is located in small settlement of, at most, five hectares, where they use the land in an intensive way, depleting the soil and begetting at most an revenue of R$ 53,00 a month. Beside that, pluviométrie conditions contributed, on the period in study (2000/2002), to aggravate the conditions of subsistence of those farmers. Added to those factors, the low degree of instruction; the lack of a larger engagement of public institutions for the local development, among others. In an systematic form, attribute to the absence of the land possession by the farmers of the Caxeiro community the largest hindrance for the development for a familiar agriculture with sustainable base, although when compare the community of Caxeiro with Novo Horizonte, the differential is the land possession, where the agriculturists can be able to develop an viable familiar agriculture in an sustainable base.