Proposição metodológica de indicadores de sustentabilidade para avaliação da agricultura familiar em áreas irrigadas.

Abstract

The role of family farming goes far beyond producing food for self-consumption. It is also a source of income for farming families and also helps to strengthen the country's economy. The development of methodologies using indicators to assess sustainability has proven to be quite effective. In this context, the aim of this study was to propose a set of sustainability indicators to assess family farming in irrigated areas, based on the participation of social and institutional stakeholders, addressing the following dimensions: environmental, social, economic, political institutional and cultural. Three questionnaires were used as data collection instruments. The set of indicators proposed in this study was created based on the methodology of the works of Camino and Muller (1993) and Carvalho (2013). The study was carried out in the irrigated perimeter das Várzeas de Sousa – PIVAS, located between the cities of Aparecida and Sousa in the semi-arid region of Paraíba. As a result, a set of 48 indicators was presented, and from this, two models of indicator systems were created, for operationalization of the models with farmers, to evaluate the sustainability of Family Farming in PIVAS. It is worth mentioning that the highlight was the environmental dimension, which obtained the best evaluation among the other dimensions of the systems, with an index of 0.78 and high sustainability; the dimension with the lowest evaluation index was the economic one, with an index of 0.37. These results demonstrated that the set of selected and analyzed indicators was able to identify some points in the system that need to be improved, such as access to government programs to obtain credit for agriculture, better infrastructure for product distribution, public water supply network, among others. It is concluded that the work achieved its purpose by presenting a set of selected indicators, based on the proposed methodology, and the model can be replicated in other perimeters and sectors.