Agroecology and peasantry: a new logic for the agriculture of the future

Abstract

The current stage of the capitalistic development has tried to impose in agriculture a model of technical agriculture, with a minor presence of workers in the countryside. After the incentive to the expansion of the cultivation of transgenic grains, another way that has been tried is the biofuels – actually agrofuels – showed by the media as “ecologically correct cultures”. It is another attempt of the agribusiness trying to dribble the effects of the crisis through which it has been passing, and of the representation of the monoculturalism in great extensions, as it is the case of the sugar cane for the production of alcohol, in high expansion in the Brazilian countryside, specially in the state of São Paulo. The peasants, however, have not accepted these impositions and have looked for another alternative for their own future, and at the same time, for ours as well. It is in this context that the agroecology has gained more and more space and, at the same time, the debate on the resuming of the local dimension of a development that, besides being local, is able to be self sustainable. The present work will deal with this debate coming from successful examples of production and commercialization of agroecological products which have meant the achievement of freedom and autonomy over the land through the land reform to the peasants of the state of Paraíba, from Alto Sertão to Zona da Mata.