FAMILY FARMING AND THE CHALLENGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY: THE CASE OF SALVADOR DAS MISSÕES, BRAZIL

Abstract

Today's agrifood systems are arrayed between the polarizing forces of homogenizing and vertically integrating agricultural practices driven by agribusiness empires, and those that value local cultures, greater autonomy for farmers, the implementation of biodiverse production systems, and the restoration and preservation of ecosystems. We sought to identify changes in production systems and asked whether these point to constructing biodiverse agroecosystems that conserve natural resources and transition to agroecological practices, or whether these have increasingly adopted the agricultural commercial strategies driven by agribusiness empires. To this end, field research was conducted from a historical and comparative perspective using data collected in 2003 and 2018 from a select group of family farmer near Salvador das Missões. In most cases, we found that the agroecosystems were increasingly constructed along the lines of commercial agriculture beholden to the logic of agribusiness empires and did not demonstrate a transition to agroecological practices. From another perspective, peasant forms of agriculture were found to be more prevalent among families that moved to producing food exclusively for self-consumption, although they did not transition to agroecological practices.