the territory
Territory description
Borborema is a semiarid rural region in Paraíba, Brazil. Its agriculture is characterised by a predominance of family farming (90%), with small farm units and diversified agroecosystems. Key concerns such as water security, resource accessibility, gender inequalities, and rural violence have catalysed the emergence of a strong family farming network as well as a prominent women farmers’ movement.
Originating from resistance and advocacy movements within peasant agriculture in Paraíba’s agreste region, the Polo da Borborema was created in the early 1990s and today brings together municipal rural workers’ unions, over 150 community associations, a regional organization of agroecological farmers, and a cooperative of family farm producers. It currently mobilizes a social basis of around 5000 farming families and over the last three decades supported a continuous process of technical-productive, economic, and socio-organizational innovation while gaining in recognition and legitimacy. The collaboration of the Polo da Borborema with the non-governmental organization AS-PTA, a key actor of the development of the agroecological paradigm in Brazil, has fertilized the construction and permanent renewal of methodological proposals, of training, of production of knowledge and of intervention in the local reality, in an open-ended perspective.
Case study referee
Paulo Petersen
Other participants
Eric Sabourin,
Claudia Schmitt,
Bruno Prado,
AS-PTA,INRAE, CIRAD, Covuni, UFRRJ
paulo@aspta.org.br
Territorial food system
Type of region :
Rural regions with diversified agriculture
Approximate size and population
628,581 inhabitants; 3,341.7 Km2
stable, but with a tendency for depopulation in rural areas
Type of agriculture
27,564 agricultural establishments (2006 IBGE Agricultural Census), of which 24,745 (90.76%) were family farmers; <10% of non-family farmers concentrate 56.88% of the land = large land concentration in the Borborema’s Territory
Diverse. fruit growing, grains, horticulture and cattle
Short circuits (and anteriority)
Main social issues
Unemployment: 15,8% in the state of Paraíba, national average 14,7% (April 2021)
Unequal distribution of land and natural resources; growing violence in rural areas
Presence of agroecologial systems
5,700 families actively involved in processes of agroecological innovation in the 14 municipalities under Borborema Pole area
Network of Community Seed Banks
Specific agri-food system dynamics and initiatives (and anteriority)
Traditional and new short food supply chains X growing presence of supermarkets and consumption of ultraprocessed foods; Active campaigns and communication action around the agroecological network
Agrifood transition
Main stakes for the transition :
Desertification processes, access to water, longer droughts / Poverty, dismantling of public policies, patriarchal culture
Key obstacles to AE transition
Several issues. Emerging discussion on wind energy in the territory, access to land, growing violence in rural areas
Leading actors in the transition
local authorities; universities, AS-PTA, Embrapa; Polo da Borborema (unions network); CSOs
Institutionalisation of the agrifood transition
Regional networks such as ASA PB
Trajectory
Method
The construction of this timeline was carried out thanks to ATTER secondments and based on various reports of ASPTA and articles; elaborated in interaction with the ASPTA local team and leaders of the Polo da Borborema.
Detailed timeline
In progress
The social and political construction of the Borborema Agroecological Territory: a look at the trajectory
Drawing on movements of resistance and struggle of peasant agriculture in the agreste region of Paraíba, in the early 1990s, the unions of the municipalities of Solânea, Remígio, and Lagoa Seca took on the challenge of putting into practice a strategy of innovative action aimed at generating socio-organizational dynamics, acting in favor of family agriculture in the region (PETERSEN, 2014).
The evolution of these dynamics over the past 33 years has been marked by a continuous process of technical-productive, economic, and socio-organizational innovation that covers the Borborema territory with 13 municipal rural workers’ unions, more than 150 community associations, a regional organization of agroecological farmers, and a cooperative of family farm producers. This regional configuration currently mobilizes a social base of around 5 thousand farming families (AS-PTA, Internal Project Reports 2020-2022).
The experiences of social and institutional innovation introduced in the region during this period are fundamental to understand the dynamics established, aiming at sustainable and democratic rural development and the social and political construction of the Territory of Borborema. The renewal of rural workers’ unionism, which started to consolidate in the region in the early 1990s, starting in three municipalities, is expressed in the search for a common project of social transformation, which resulted in the creation of the Polo Sindical e das Organizações da Agricultura Familiar da Borborema. Strengthened by the evolution of these new institutionalities, Polo da Borborema is constituted as a political-organizational space unifying the set of family farming organizations around the conception and execution of a common rural development project of territorial scope (PETERSEN, 2014).
The virtuous cycle that marks the evolution of the experience of the Paraiba agreste is inseparable from the organic articulation of the Polo da Borborema with the non-governmental organization AS-PTA. This articulation has fertilized the construction and permanent updating of methodological proposals, of formation, of production of knowledge, and of intervention in the local reality, with a view to experimenting with alternative patterns of rural development. AS-PTA organizes its actions in the territory in thematic groups corresponding to the “mobilizing themes” – temas mobilizadores – identified through diagnostic approaches made in the communities and shared with the Polo’s thematic commissions: seeds, water resources, livestock, health and food, agroforestry systems, women, youth, and markets. Each group promotes technical, methodological, and socio-organizational assistance to the local networks of farmers articulated by the Polo.
At the end of the 1990s, the constitution of the Articulation of the Brazilian Semiarid (ASA-Brasil) – and its local expression, ASA- Paraíba – enabled the debate on the meaning and value of incorporating the agroecological approach as an input to activate innovations aimed at local development (PETERSEN et al., 2017). The functional concept of “living with the semi-arid”, proposed at the time by ASA member organizations, became the foundation of an agroecological development strategy for the Caatinga biome. Since then, there has been a strong and fruitful interaction between social innovation practices and the knowledge of agroecology in the improvement of productive, biodiverse and resilient agricultural systems.
The union movement’s determination to act regionally has been constitutively associated with the decision to permanently advocate for public policies, whether the existing ones or those to be created, for family agriculture in the semiarid region of Paraiba. The aspects pointed out above have given a differentiated quality to the social movements of the region, giving them the capacity of initiative and protagonism indispensable for the implementation of a territorial approach.
The institutional and social experimentation occurred in two diverse but interdependent dimensions in Borborema – that of coexistence with the semi-arid and that of the construction of the agroecological territory at the socio-organizational level.
We indicate below some of the territorialization processes propagated in the region, that have incorporated the main components (mainly conceptions, actors, projects, institutional innovations and public
policies) to favor the social and political construction of the Territory of the Borborema Territory, giving it a quite unique identity within the territorial development approach.
Construction of a sociotechnical network inspired by the agroecology paradigm, which has been developed for over 20 years in the territory
AS-PTA has played an important role in the conceptual development of the agroecological paradigm in Brazil, and in the formulation of methodological proposals for the application of this paradigm in specific territories, as is the case of Borborema. The focus on networks constitutes one of the central components of these proposals. It is the expression of a methodological strategy to strengthen the construction of collective agroecological subjects through “dispositivos coletivos”: networks of seed banks, networks of solidarity revolving funds, network of motoensiladeiras, networks of farmers markets, network of family and community kitchens, networks of points of commercialization, networks of young beekeepers, networks of women and young people, among others. The active and majority role of women farmers and rural youth groups in the activation of the thematic networks stands out (AS-PTA, Reports 2020-2022).
Common goods: indispensable resources for the territorialization of Borborema
A strategic dimension of the Polo’s action is aimed at converting the public resources mobilized from the political advocacy into common goods to be continuously activated by families for the operation of their establishments (PETERSEN, 2014). Polo’s action as a driver of rural development dynamics is related to the fact that it acts to support the creation and/or improvement of collective action mechanisms [dispositvos coletivos] aimed at the management of the commons. These devices can be interpreted as products emerging from the combined action of social processes of local innovation and the mobilization of public resources through political advocacy.
Partnerships with government agencies and international organizations and access to differentiated public policies
AS-PTA has a role in the debate and promotion of alternative technologies and agriculture, in search of an ecologically sustainable, healthy, and less socially exclusionary agriculture. The growth of socio-technical networks in Borborema, the articulated actions of the Polo, AS-PTA and ASA, and the political re-democratization of the country, since the late 1980s, led to a growing interest in the Borborema experience on the part of civil servants and professionals from government agencies directly linked to the proposals of alternative agriculture and agroecology; by technicians from the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA); by the Banco do Brasil and Banco do Nordeste, in a dialogue seeking to advocate for the adoption of new credit lines and new technical proposals, more appropriate to the climatic and productive environment of the semi-arid region; by university researchers and consultants from international organizations – CIRAD, from France, for example, has developed an important work [assessoria ao Território da Borborema] for several years.
This has led to new collaborative relationships, signaling a concern of the lideranças do Polo not to remain isolated, but to open the accumulated experience of the networks to qualified external debate and to obtain strategic support, both for obtaining funding and for formulating proposals for differentiated public policies. Thus, the permanent updating of the Polo’s propositional capacity before state agencies is directly linked to the concrete experiences and demands of the farming families, aiming at the improvement of their strategies of social and economic reproduction.
Schmitt (2016) proposes a timeline that synthesizes, in a very clear way, the main differentiated public policies to which the Borborema network had access and in whose implementation it participated in some way, starting in 2000:
(1) Years 2000-2005: (i) intense articulation with ASA and ASA-Paraíba that led, in 2003, to the creation and implementation of the One Million Cisterns Program (P1MC); (ii) the political mobilization of entities linked to ASA-Paraíba influenced the enactment of State Law no. 7. 298, which created, in 2002, the State Program of Community Seed Banks; (iii) Lula da Silva Government created in 2003 the Secretariat of Territorial Development (SDT) in the Ministry of Agrarian Development (MDA), which introduced the territorial approach to rural development in Brazil through the National Program for Sustainable Development of Rural Territories (PRONAT) and the creation of the so-called “territories of identity”; (iv) the idea of Food and Nutritional Security (SAN) gained strength in this period.
(2) Years 2005-2010: (i) Continued articulation with ASA and participation and management of the implementation of the P1MC and the 2007 Program Uma Terra e Duas Águas (P1+2) in the territory; (ii) In 2008, in the context of the Rural Territory Development Policy, the Territories of Citizenship Program (PTC) was implemented, aimed at fighting rural poverty through the articulation of several already existing public programs allocated in different ministries; (iii) the Food Acquisition Program of Family Agriculture (PAA) and the National School Feeding Program (PNAE); (iv) Law No. 11.947, of the Federal Government, determined that 30% of the amount transferred by the PNAE should be applied in the direct purchase of family farming products.
(3) Years 2010-2015: (i) all the programs mentioned continued to be implemented in Borborema during this period, but these policies were dismantled after the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016; (ii) three policies, in this period, are part of the debate in the agroecological network and start to affect the Territory of Borborema: the constitution of an advisory network for rural development in the Northeast (the ATER-NE Network); the proposals for shifts in the conception and formatting of PRONAF, seeking to make it more accessible to peasant family farming, not specialized in typical agribusiness products (soya, maize, sugar cane, among others), but aimed at diversified food production, as well as to women and young farmers, an old claim never satisfactorily made viable; the strengthening of agroecological rural extension services (ATER agroecológica), a debate and proposal traditionally very important to the actors of the socio-technical networks of Borborema, both leaders and employees (Schmitt, 2016).
Social construction of markets
Borborema’s experience was largely centered on territorialization processes that sought to strengthen and expand the agroecological network and its experiments, the articulation between different actors from inside and outside the territory, the design and implementation of production and income generation models anchored in agroecology and sustainable agriculture, the relative autonomy of farmers in conducting their ways of life in accordance with agroecosystems and local culture. It had as one of its fundamental bases the ability and willingness to dialogue with government agencies and international organizations and to influence the generation and implementation of differentiated public policies adapted to the needs of its multiple and multidimensional objectives.
Internal debates on pesticides stimulated the emergence, in 2000, of agroecological markets (feiras agroecológicas), which sell a wide range of products. The great proliferation of these in the territory led to the need to create an institution to regulate them, which occurred in 2005 with the emergence of the Ecoborborema Associação dos Agricultores e Agricultores Agroecológico do Compartimento da Borborema (EcoBorborema). According to Petersen et al. (2017), the association began to play a strategic role in the network, since it coordinates a set of 12 agroecological fairs and manages projects for the sale of products in institutional markets (provided by the PAA and PNAE), in addition to establishing connections with growing portions of urban populations in the municipalities of the Territory (AS-PTA, Reports 2020, 2021, 2022).
Schmitt (2016) draws attention to the fact that in addition to these fairs, there are other actors/equipments that link local production to different types of markets: intermediaries specialized in regional products and connected with markets outside the region; CEASA (Central Estadual de Abastecimento, a state or mixed-capital organization) that connects local and national production; small markets, small supermarkets, hypermarket (located in Campina Grande) and large retail, with fundamentally urban characteristics (with the exception of small markets); the Network of Community Seed Banks, which constitute a “direct” and “true” market for seeds. More recently emerged another type of market, stimulated by the changes that occurred in the Organic Law in Brazil, the third-party audited organic production channels, with reasonable growth potential.
The surplus and its direct sale at fairs depends on different forms of collective action and reciprocity, ranging from intra-family exchanges and donations to collective action related to networks(community associations, union pole, AS-PTA, ASA). This stimulated the Polo and its technical committees to implement initiatives aimed at realizing the potential of increasing supply and product diversity through the expansion and creation of new enterprises for processing and selling productions:
• With the contribution of public resources, 10 family and community kitchens were initially structured, managed by women farmers to process food products intended for sale and for self-consumption. In 2021, a school kitchen was set up as a training space both in the technical field and in the economic and operational management;
• processing of agroecological corn was implemented with the production of various marketable derivatives (cornmeal and couscous) in marketing structures under the “Produtos do Roçado” brand, already with extensions in markets of Campina Grande and João Pessoa, in Paraíba and Recife;
• in addition to the 12 existing agroecological fairs, a network of fixed points of sale was structured, consisting of 5 municipal greengrocers and one of a regional nature;
• for the commercialization of ecological cotton, a partnership was established with the company Veja Vert, which also undertook to favor the conservation and multiplication of cotton seeds free of transgenics;
• in 2021, the Cooperativa da Agricultura Familiar Camponesa do Polo da Borborema (CoopBorborema) was set up, an institution dedicated to supporting the management of enterprises and enhancing their capacity for growth in scale and optimization of income
references
AS-PTA. Relatórios de Atividades – AS-PTA- Programa Paraíba. Esperança/Pb, 2020, 2021, 2022.
AS-PTA. CoopBorborema: inclusão produtiva de mulheres, jovens e famílias agricultoras do Agreste da Paraíba nas cadeias de valor de base agroecológica. (Documento de trabalho). AS-PTA, 2022.
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