Changes in small-scale farms of Silvânia: a small agrarian revolution in the brazilian cerrados

In Brazil, as in most developing countries, small-scale farms are often ignored by research, agriculture policies benefiting capitalist farms more often than not. The latter are seen as symbols of modernity and thus are assumed to deserve support from the State, whereas small-scale farms are only addressed by policies of poverty reduction. This position is based on a negation of the economic efficiency of small-scale farms. The present paper intends to question this assertion. For more than a decade a joint Embrapa/Cirad project (Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement, Cirad/Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, Embrapa) observed, and contributed to, an agrarian revolution that took place in small-scale farms of Silvânia. Silvânia is a rural district, in the cerrados region of central Brazil. Numerous multi-disciplinary (agronomy, soil science, economy, sociology…) and multi-scale studies (at field, farm, region levels, and through institution analysis) were performed within the framework of this R/D project. As a synthesis of these, the present article highlights the main factors explaining this "success story". At the beginning of the development process, these farms were carrying out highly diversified activities and were poorly integrated to the market. This was a consistent strategy given their extremely unfavourable environment. They were located on very poor soils, and had to cope with hyperinflation. At the beginning of the 1990s, land divisions between children led to reduced farm areas. While hyperinflation reached an end and although markets were apparently not so attractive due to an increasing input/output price ratio, farmers entered into a drastic evolution towards intensive, market-oriented dairy farms. Within the space of a few years, they adopted technologies that are not usually expected to be easily harnessed by poor farmers excluded from information and education networks: soil reclamation, animal genetic improvement, fodder production, artificial pastures. A simple economic modelling of the different farm systems showed that, without these technical changes, farms would have faced a decreasing income per worker. These technical changes were made possible thanks to the collective action of farmers: building associations, they obtained credit from the State and reduced the transaction costs for commercialising their products and buying their inputs. The analysis showed that thanks to these changes, most of the farms could actually increase the income per worker. Beyond this case study, the paper suggests that the tremendous capacity of evolution observed at Silvânia is a general feature of family farms which should not be ignored, when designing rural development policies.

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Bainville, Sébastien, Affholder, François, Figuié, Muriel, da S. Madeira Netto, José
Format:	Digital revista
Language:	por
Published:	Superintendência de Comunicação (Sucom), Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária 2005
Online Access:	https://seer.sct.embrapa.br/index.php/cct/article/view/8668
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