Formação e educação na agroecologia : entre resistências e subordinações

Abstract

The current thesis is a critical assessment of capitalist agriculture and its limits, that can be overcome through the consolidation of agroecology. The economic, social and environmental contradictions of the agribusiness, which is based on monoculture and latifundios (large landed estates) are pointed out. These aspects lead to economic dependence and environmental destruction in Brazil. Agroecology is shown as a counterpoint. In order to fulfill this role, it must develop practices opposite to the hegemonic paradigm of capital and avoid to become just an alternative and auxiliary element of the capitalist system. We aimed at assessing the agroecological practice based on the categories of labor and human formation and emancipation. Interviews were conducted with four agroecological farmers. We did a throughout observation of the 4th National Agroecological Encounter and the 10th Brazilian Agroecological Congress and visited the encampment Maria da Conceicao, associated to the Landless Workers' Movement (MST). The thesis is divided in five chapters. First, we present the research theme. On the second chapter we outline the methodology and the conformation of the thesis. Chapters three and four address the socioeconomic formation of capitalist agriculture in Brazil, since the colonial agro-export model, through the insertion of Green Revolution techniques until the conformation of the agribusiness, based on a critical perspective opposite to capitalist agriculture. On chapter five we discuss agroecology based on the categories of labor and human formation and emancipation, in order to understand the telos of its practices. The consolidation of agroecology as a new agricultural paradigm is directly related to the possibility of overcoming the “metabolic failure” that comes from capitalist agriculture. However, agriculture has been reduced to the production of organic food, consumed by elites. We concluded that agroecology must be a practice from below, since it is full of contradictions, potentialities and limitations. Agroecology is not a homogeneous movement, and as any other movement inside the capitalist sociability it is influenced by a deeply inequal access to land, to training and, above all, to material conditions for its reproduction, it carries many contradictions, but also many perspectives of radicalization, associated with a new project of society. This allows us to think in a structural manner the relation established between society and nature, in the search for balance between life and the necessary conditions for its reproduction. In this context, we highlight that agroecological transition, in a worldwide scale, is not going to happen by itself, since the elements that assure its fulfilment are part of historical workers struggle: access to land and the emancipation of work relations. If we are facing a history under construction, we need to point, as social organizations, to the horizon and to the project of society that allows the construction of agroecology.