Desenvolvimento rural: uma análise do PRONAF nas Comunidades Rurais da Saudade, Lagoa da Serra e Pitombeira, Serra Negra do Norte-RN

Abstract

Public policies in Brazil, especially in the mid-90s, focused on agriculture, began to gain space and gradually consolidated and brought a positive outlook for small farmers. With PRONAF – a national program to strengthen family farming, which was instituted in 1996, it brought small farmers a feeling of progress in agriculture, where these family farmers had rural credits with a 40% bonus on the maturity of the installments. The present work made it necessary to analyze the PRONAF program in the three rural communities of Saudade, Lagoa da Serra and Pitombeira in order to evaluate in an analytical way the effectiveness of this program and the rural development, especially in the quality of life of family farmers in rural communities. The work analyzed social and economic aspects of these farmers in order to better understand if there was an improvement in the quality of life after PRONAF. A questionnaire was applied in order to collect information about PRONAF and socioeconomic aspects of these farmers from the three rural communities of the municipality of Serra Negra do Norte. Thus, when analyzing the information collected in the field, it is clear that PRONAF had an accessibility rate corresponding to 95.7% of the family farmers interviewed from the three rural communities in the municipality of Serra Negra do Norte. The activity most practiced by these farmers is livestock farming, where the entire family earns their income through the sale of milk, thus raising dairy cattle as the main activity corresponding to livestock farming.