The family agriculture in the MRC: a look at the relationship between environment and society from the community of Mergulhão

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the community of Mergulhão, located in São José dos Pinhais City, on the fringe of the metropolitan center, answers the pressures and opportunities created by the relationship with the Metropolitan Region of Curitiba (MRC), by analyzing the strategies of social reproduction of family agriculture. Strategies that result from constitutive experiences of the habitus (Bourdieu) family, the responses to the pressures and opportunities arisen in the context of public policies and demands on the metropolitan, as well as the future projects established by the families. Historically, it has generated a close proximity of families to the metropolis, which allowed both the intensification of agriculture and the existence of an important pluriactivity. This close relationship has, over time, enabling development alternatives when this relationship becomes concrete strategies that allow the reproduction of family agriculture. More recently, these strategies are linked to so-called new rurality, such as rural tourism and the conversion to produce more "natural," resulting from the family tradition of producing grape, wine and "offal" and the public policies for water resource and forest remnants conservation.