Desenvolvimento rural e pluriatividade no contexto da microrregião de União da Vitória - PR

Abstract

The connection that underpinned the modernization of agriculture was based on the analogy between agricultural development and rural development. It is now understood that where policies have followed this orientation, agriculture has modernized but rural poverty has persisted. This makes it possible to ensure that the principles of rural development go beyond the agricultural sphere, and together, a new set of occupation and labor dynamics are emerging in the rural world. There is also a strong contradiction between the demands of modern and efficient agriculture and those of the solution of economic and social problems in the rural areas, since they are based on strategies with a strong agricultural and technical bias, without the capacity to promote changes in occupations and incomes that would allow an improvement in the standard of living of the less favored groups and the reduction of social distances between them. Thus, we consider it of utmost importance to analyze the changes that have occurred in the dynamics of work in the rural context, regarding agricultural modernization, or the search for new ways of valuing local potentialities, the environment itself, the diversity of agricultural and non-agricultural activities that can be established - with emphasis on pluriactivity - for the permanence of family-based farmers in their rural households. The objective of this thesis is based on this thought. We also highlight that farmers, in the dynamics of their (re)existence, should place themselves as protagonists and active players in this process, even if this process occurs through non-agricultural rural activities, pluriactivity in this case. We identified - using as methodology the quali-quantitative research and as method, the hypothetical deductive - as the main conclusion drawn

from the information analyzed that the combination of agricultural activities with non- agricultural activities (pluriactivity) constitutes an important element for (family)

farmers, either because of rural poverty, the approximation of the rural to the urban, access to new technologies, or the new economic functions assigned to small rural establishments, enabling them to remain in the rural household, in this case, considering the micro-region of União da Vitória as the study area.