O processo de transição agroecológica no centro sul do Paraná: avanços e desafios vivenciados pelas famílias do Núcleo Monge João Maria

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to study the potentials and challenges, experienced by peasant families who chose to carry out processes of transition from conventional to ecological agriculture. This initiative received a boost, starting 1990, in the south center of Paraná, with stimulus of NGOs and the Ecovida Network. Given the exploratory character of this study, qualitative and quantitative methods were applied. The methodological procedures consisted of bibliographical research, document analysis and field research. The participant observation recorded in a field diary and photographs, survey and semi-structured interview was adopted. Data analysis was performed using a set of free softwares, namely: LibreOffice Pack 6.2 / OpenRefine 3.2 / Gephi 0.9.2 / R package version 3.6.0 RQDA – Package for Qualitative Data Analysis / DB Browser for SQLITE 3.11.2. This set of softwares allowed the structuring of the speeches of the subjects in networks of meaningful words which supported the construction of the analysis categories: agroecology and participation; challenges of the peasant organization; planting with or without pesticide; agroecology, work and family; income and women’s lives with the transition to agroecology; markets and the agroecological transition; resistances and contributions of the agroecology to think the countryside project from the peasantry. The results suggest that the choice to carry out the transition to agroecology contributed to the improvement of the peasant labor and improvement in the families quality of life, emphasizing the care with the production of familiar livelihood, health, income and money division in the families. Organizational spaces provided the dialogue of knowledge in the construction of knowledge to an ecologically based agriculture, highlighting the participation as a central element of this transition process. There are some structural difficulties such as lack of technical assistance, difficulty of access to inputs, low quantity of the lands and low level of scholarship. The transition to agroecology, with productive diversification and community organization, reduced the dependence on regular markets and increased the autonomy, typical of the peasantry condition, benefiting specifics markets such as those instituted by public policies in Brazil.