A produção do transnacional: compilações da agricultura familiar e camponesa na Contag e no MPA

Abstract

Brazilian rural activists and their organizations have managed to influence some of the international debates concerning them, having become relevant actors in some transnational disputes. The dissertation focuses on how the National Confederation of the Workers in Agriculture (Contag), and the Movement of Small Farmers (MPA) created transnational ties, translating to their political platform, ideas, concepts, and practices from international collectives in which they engaged or helped to create. Three analytical tools were deployed to analyze the data collected during the research, which was based in documents, interviews, and participatory observation. In the introduction, Contag and MPA were presented in terms of their relations with other actors, using the tool of "discursive fields of action" of the rural workers. Additionally, the transnationalization of these Brazilian organizations was analyzedby means of the disputes in which they engaged, using the notion of "controversies" as the main analytical tool. In the case of Contag, controversies were identified over trade unionism, work conditions, liberalization of international trade, models of agriculture (family farming),and women's rights. In the case of MPA, the controversies were over food sovereignty; agriculture models especially peasant farming which includes debates over native seeds, biodiversity, and pesticides; and, finally, the presence of women in international debates. In the second part, the "mode of gathering" tool was used for observing the controversies from inside and discussing how each organization produced its engagement in transnational disputes. This research was driven by the understanding that neither actors nor scales are totally defined before the action, therefore the research emphasizes the way in which they were produced and transformed throughout Contags and MPAs activities. The empirical data supports that 1) establishing transnational ties is relevant for the contemporary Brazilian farmers organizations; 2) they not only engage in transnational practices but also dispute what is part of the transnational; 3) there are several partial transnational experiences, which depend on the associations established by each organization, and some of those connections are better described as translocal; and 4) from these experiences, it is possible to include the engagement in disputes as a defining feature of the transnationalization processes