From incentive to criminalization: the terms of adjustment of conduct in the rice farming in Santa Catarina state - Brazil

Abstract

In Santa Catarina State, the “Agreements for Adjustment of Conduct”, a legal agreement between farmers and the State, are becoming common in rural areas, a legal tool to restore riparian forests. In the case of rice growers, the situation is, at least, debatable: farmers who once got incentive from the State to use lowland areas up to the river side as production areas, now are being to recover the riparian vegetation, “which should never be replaced” by crops. Ignoring the complexity of the situation, the State Public Prosecutor adopted a command-and-control approach to “solve” the problem. Three years have gone and almost nothing has happened in practice. In this article, we use a systemic approach to understand the problem-situation and to point out some measures to improve it. We used qualitative and quantitative methods (documental analysis, interviews, inventories and workshops) and mainly the Soft System Methodology (SSM). The results revealed that the riparian forest is only another element of a complex system of interests, where social, cultural, environmental and economic factors interact dynamically. They also point out the need of an approximation between the stakeholders to make possible an accommodation of their diverse worldview.