Intensification without simplification: a strategy for combating desertification

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Intensification without simplification: a strategy for combating desertification Paulo Petersen, Luciano Marçal da Silveira and Adriana Galvão Freire

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ntensify farming’ – this idea was and still is repeated by those championing industrial farming. For them this production model is the only way to meet the critical challenge of feeding a burgeoning global population expected to stabilize around 9 billion people by the mid twenty-first century. Intensive farming is defined as a form capable of attaining high levels of physical productivity, that is, higher volumes of production per unit of cultivated area. The intensification enabled by industrial farming, as promoted by the technological packages of the so-called Green Revolution, has indeed obtained significant rises in production levels. However it has also had a series of negative environmental consequences related to the ecological simplification of agroecosystems caused by the widespread use of agrochemical-dependent monocrops and heavy machinery.

One of the most alarming negative effects of the spread of this scientific-technological model has been the worsening of the processes behind the degradation of arable lands. Estimates suggest that 12 million hectares are degraded worldwide each year, a pace of natural resource consumption that seriously jeopardizes any chances of solving the food dilemma faced by humanity. In the arid, semi-arid and sub-humid regions of the planet where 44% of food production areas are located and where 800 million people live, the problem is exacerbated by desertification, a stage of soil degradation extremely difficult to reverse.

Given this challenging scenario, there is a clear and urgent need to implant global public policies capable of reconciling the intensification of farming with stemming and reversing the processes causing arable soil degradation. Based on the experience accumulated by the NGO AS-PTA over 20 years working in an area of Brazil’s semi-arid region that is subject to desertification,1 this article looks to show how the agroecological approach enables this reconciliation. It does so not only by encouraging the creation of innovative alternative technologies allowing the sustainable use and management of farming soils, but also by stimulating the enhancement of local institutions designed to regulate the social management of natural resources so that these interact positively with economic activities.

A fertile Agreste2 Unlike most of the Brazilian semi-arid region, the Agreste region of Paraíba is densely occupied by small-scale family farming. Historically it became established as the main food-producing region to Paraiba’s urban population. Situated between the sugarcane monocropping along the coast and the cattle ranching inland in the sertão3, the Agreste became shaped by cycles of peasantization and depeasatization (Silveira et al. 2010). This alternation essentially accompanied the equally cyclical interests of the rural elites as they occupied or abandoned AS-PTA - Family Farming and Agroecology, works since 1993 in the semi-arid region of the state of Paraíba (see www.aspta.org.br). Since 2011, the initiatives for reversing the effects of desertification in the Borborema region have been supported by the Terra Forte Project, co-funded by the European Union.

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2 In Portuguese the word Agreste features a double meaning: 1) a rough, inclement, rigorous environment; 2) A geographical region in the Brazilian Northeast, located between the humid forest in the coast and the most drought region.

3 The term sertão originates from the word desertão (i.e. big desert) and was used by Portuguese colonizers to describe their perception of the physiognomy of the interior region, marked by the presence of Caatinga vegetation (white forest in the Tupi language) typical of the Brazilian semi-arid conditions, especially in contrast to the coastal region, occupied by dense tropical rainforest.

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portions of the territory in response to the rise and fall of large-scale production of agricultural produce for the major markets. This repeated a pattern of territorial occupation typical to agricultural space in Brazil where family farmers move into areas of little value to agroindustrial and financial capital, only to find their rights under threat whenever the interest of the latter in their lands reawakens.

The State’s numerous initiatives in support of economic activities based around monocropping within a business-oriented farming model played a key role in the intense and systematic process of deforestation of the region’s rural landscape: sisal in the 1950s and 60s, herbaceous cotton (substituting arboreal cotton) in the 1970s; artificial pastures from the 1980s onwards, and so on. The deleterious effects of replacing the plant cover were most keenly felt in areas possessing a more unstable topography and shallower soils, precisely those more susceptible to erosive processes. A large part of the huge environmental liability resulting from deforestation was subsequently assumed by rural communities settled in the region following campaigns for agrarian reform.

A wide variety of small-scale agroecosystems were developed in the spaces between the large rural estates. These systems reflect the equally diverse micro-environments shaped by the gradual decline in precipitation levels from east to west, a pattern resulting from the reduction in rainfall coming from the ocean due to the presence of the Serra da Borborema plateau. In a context marked by the constant disputes with large landowners over agricultural land and faced by continuous fragmentation of family units with the division of plots by inheritance, the space available for ensuring the social and economic reproduction of family farming

dwindled generation by generation. Faced by these conditions, farming families found themselves obliged to intensify production on their land, gradually reducing, until eventually abandoning, the practice of shifting cultivation (laying fallow, burning and planting) traditionally used to restore the fertility of the ecosystem. However this attempt to intensify production was not accompanied by innovations in environmental management methods: these remained essentially extensive, dependent on the natural rhythms of ecological regeneration.

Here, though, we need to ask why family farmers in the region apparently ‘historically froze’ their management practices. Indeed we need to question whether this freezing really took place. Studying the responses to demographic rises by different farming populations around the world, Boserup (1981) showed that changes in the technological base were very often stimulated by a reduction in the environmental resources available to sustain the local population, especially cultivable land. In other words: increases in demographic density that led to land shortages

Photo: André Telles/ActionAind

The planting of seedlings of tree species for multiple use has favored restoring the ecological functioning of agroecosystems in Borborema’s Territory

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would set off dynamics of technological innovation that tended towards more intensive farming.3 One of the main conclusions of Boserup’s work is that there is no ‘agrarian ceiling’ or ‘natural support capacity’ for a particular region. Potential productivity levels depend not only on the available ecological capital, but also on the social and human capital capable of continuously improving the technical systems through investment in local experimentation and innovation.

Returning to the earlier question: were the land constraints imposed on family farming in the Borborema region responsible for triggering the local innovation that allowed an intensification in land use on a more sustainable basis?

In another article we looked to show that the region’s farmers were indeed

Esther Boserup’s work challenged the Malthusian thesis that demographic pressures on limited resources would inexorably lead to population decline.

However, this endogenous movement of family farmer experimentation went unnoticed for a long time, meaning it was overlooked by public policies as a source of practices and knowledge useful to agricultural intensification in the region. The invisibility of the innovations locally developed and/or adapted by farmers is explained above all by the conceptions of rural development widely adopted in Brazil after the 1960s when the modernization paradigm came to dominate the theory, practice and politics of official institutions working in the area. By insisting that agricultural development depends on the incorporation of exogenous technologies that enable farming to become more intensive and thereby catch up with industry, the theory of modernization played an important role in delegitimizing the historical actions of farmers in producing and socializing knowledge relating to agroecosystem management, as well as their management of natural assets. Modernization was conceived to result, therefore, from the intervention of institutions and actors outside the farming sector, denying the capacity of local populations to balance the economic, ecological, social and cultural dimensions of development.

This form of conceiving farming subsequently informed the perceptions of technicians, scientists and politicians who began to foreground some problems in the dynamics of rural development at the cost of others. This helps explain the predominance of short-term productivism as an economic approach, accompanied by a neglect for the ecological integrity of ecosystems and equity in the distribution of the benefits of development. Given this reductionist and fragmen-

Photo: Adriana Galvão Freire

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forced to seek creative solutions in order to improve and innovate on their forms of agricultural management (...) based on living in close intimacy to ‘the unwritten codes of nature,´ experimenting with multiple variations on the use and management of local resources (Petersen et al. 2002 p. 23).

Effects of environmental degradation in Caatinga Biome

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Photo: André Telles/ActionAid

tary approach to rural problems, we can also understand why institutional frameworks shaped by the paradigm of agricultural modernization very often contradict the public measures intended to foster environmental conservation and social inclusion.

The development of a multi-sectorial perspective that contemplates the complexity of the factors involved in the processes of desertification now spreading through the Brazilian semiarid region must be recognized, then, as an indispensable condition for the phenomenon to be contained and reversed.

This signifies the need for a radical revision in the strategies employed to intensify the use of farmland.

From capital-based intensification...

The dynamics of intensification advocated by the modernization policies involved the increasing subordination of farming systems to the economies of scale regulating the operation of the globalized agro-food markets, leading in turn to the ecological simplification of rural landscapes through the spread of monocropping. While this style of intensification based on massive capital inputs has resulted in large-scale environmental degradation in other Brazilian biomes, it promoted even quicker and deeper negative effects in the Caatinga (biome of the semi-arid region) due to the higher ecological vulnerability of its ecosystems. In natural environments formed by unpredictable rainfall patterns like the Brazilian semi-arid region, the integrity of the ecological infrastructure is an indispensable condition for the continuous recomposition of the biological production capacity after periods of drought. Damage to this capacity is most acutely expressed in the processes of desertification, a severe stage of environmental degradation that can be understood as the ecosystem’s loss of ecological resilience owing to declining levels of soil fertility.

From the technical viewpoint, this loss of resilience can be seen to result from the generation of environmental conditions that combine hydric stress – a phenomenon natural to the region’s ecosystems – with nu-

The paved cisterns favor the creation of microenvironments with high yield potential

tritional stresses caused by the heavy loss of nutrients from the environment as the result of erosive processes.4 In their biological-evolutionary strategies, the native plants of the Caatinga developed physiological mechanisms capable of tolerating hydric stress, but not nutritional stress.5 In fact the physiological strategies for living with these two environmental stresses are mutually divergent (Resende, n.d.), meaning that not even native plants are able to grow when the soils become chemical impoverished, setting the conditions for desertification to take hold.

The areas in Paraíba’s Agreste region where the processes of soil degradation are the severest coincide with the terrains with more unstable relief and where plant vegetation has been drastically reduced, leaving soils vulnerable to erosion. In the most serious situations, the subsuperficial horizons of the soils are exposed, compromising the physical, chemical and biological qualities needed for plant growth.

Soil salinization is another factor behind desertification linked to the change in the nutritional dynamic of the soils. This phenomenon is more frequent in areas of the semi-arid region where large irrigation projects have been installed, meaning that it is not a common reality in the Agreste region of Paraíba.

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Since they are shallow and little weathered, the soils of the Caatinga are relatively rich in chemical

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Photo: André Telles/ActionAid

…to labour-based intensification Rather than adhering to models that aim to obtain more intensive farming through specialized production and structural dependence on the markets, the focus on family farming’s innovative practices aims to mobilize, increase and develop the locally available resource base. This strategic approach is undertaken through the conversion of natural resources into goods and services for human consump-

tion. Arguing along these lines, Ploeg (2008) emphasizes that the peasant family farming model of production is structured through dynamics of coproduction between people and nature.

In systemizing a broad and diverse set of innovative practices employed by family farmers in the region, AS-PTA identified three main strategic lines that guide this local process of innovation: 1) maintaining and valuing high functional biodiversity in agroecosystems; 2) accumulating and managing stocks of resources; 3) the valorisation of limited production spaces with a high biological productivity potential (PETERSEN et al. 2002).

Taken as a whole, the innovative practices developed through these strategies enable agrarian space to be occupied in a mosaic form, configuring an ecological infrastructure analogous to natural ecosystems and, therefore, capable of reproducing environmental functions essential to the reproduction of their fertility.

Box 1 shows the relation between the three strategic lines adopted for the management of agroecosystems and the traditional and innovative practices

Box 1 – Relation between agroecosystem management principles and traditional and innovative practices

Practices

Management principles

Maintenance of high functional biodiversity

Accumulation and management of stocks

Traditional • • • •

Consortia Use of native forage species Use of local varieties Hedge planting

• • • •

• • Saving financial capital in form of cattle • Pits, cisterns, stone tanks, etc.

• Domestic storage of seeds • Storage of crop leftovers as source of fodder • •

Valuing of limited spaces with • House yards a high potential for biological • Intensive planting in low-lying areas production Source: adapted from Petersen et al. 2002.

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Innovative • • • • • • • •

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• • • •

Recuperation and multiplication of local varieties Evaluation and introduction of new varieties Tree planting around smallholdings Alley cropping ‘productive forests’ Green manure Planted cordons Diversified production in house yards Community seed banks Underground dams Slab cisterns and paved cisterns Trench earthen dams Silage and haymaking practices Mixed palm fields Manure reservoirs Plant beds Diversified and intensified production in house yards Stone barriers Intensification of production in yards through the use of water stored in the paved cisterns

developed and/­or improved through the institution of sociotechnical networks at territorial level, based on the activities of male and female experimenter-farmers.

Technically speaking, the practices listed in the box converge towards one central objective: the maximization and regularization of the ecological processes that convert the environment’s basic abiotic resources (water, solar radiation and nutrients) into biotic resources (vegetal and animal biomass) without the need for external inputs and their increased dependency on the markets.

As they become incorporated into agroecosystems, these practices combine with each other in complex ways, forming an organic and indivisible whole. In this sense they acquire a multifunctional dimension by fostering positive knockon (systemic) impacts on the functioning of the agroecosystems. They are, therefore, consistent with the peasant family farming approach of intensifying economic production without simplifying ecological reproduction.

As Box 2 illustrates, the multifunctional dimension of these innovative management practices enables an increase in the ecological efficiency of the processes of converting natural assets into economic resources due to the continuous recycling of nutrients, energy and water between the different ecological subsystems and compartments of the agroecosystems involved. From this perspective, the integrated management of water and nutrients in family farming units emerges as an essential condition for fertility to be continually regenerated, allowing high production levels to be sustained without industrial fertilizers, even when the areas cultivated are used on a permanent basis.

At the same time, multifunctionality affords an increase in productivity and a reduction in the harshness of manual work, since the conversion processes involve a synergic integration of human labour and the work of nature. In other words: ecological cycles and flows in agroecosystems are ­purposefully oriented to favour the efficiency of the conver-

Box 2 – The multifunctional dimension of management practices in Paraíba’s Agreste region

The complex management of water and nutrients in agroecosystem is essentially achieved by managing the biomass and demands the use of technical strategies linked to a systemic approach. For example: water storage in the 66 underground dams and the 1132 paved cisterns already built in the region has created environments with a high potential for biological productivity by ensuring a stable supply of water for use in production, independent of climatic seasonality. By using different technical strategies, families are able to converge nutrient sources into small spaces (house yards, low-lying ground, etc.), making it possible to extend the growing season and the number of species cultivated.This practice, in turn, is consistent with the strategy of increasing functional biodiversity in local systems, a configuration that favours processes of nutrient recycling, water saving and biotic regulation (control of insect-pest populations and pathogens). Meanwhile the possibility of producing large volumes of forage biomass in these environments enables an increase in the livestock kept by family units without a corresponding rise in pressure on soils from overgrazing.

In addition, the increase in livestock produces extra levels of manure, the primary mediator of fertility between the animal and plant production subsystems. We can also highlight the 65 community seed banks that enable both seed storage and the conservation of intra-specific agrobiodiversity, an essential

condition for the adaptation of production systems to environmental qualities (soil, climate, etc.) and local cultural preferences. Likewise the 640,000 seedlings of native and fruit-bearing tree species already planted have enabled the re-establishment of key processes in the ecological functioning of local ecosystems, beginning with the protection of soils from erosion and the increase in nutrient recycling in the soil-plant system. The 180 ecological ovens built since 2011 have reduced the consumption of firewood in households to a quarter, generating a saving of 1080 cubic metres of firewood per year, meaning a significant reduction in the pressure on the arboreal component of agroecosystems, as well as mitigating the negative effects of burning firewood on the health of those primarily responsible for food preparation, namely women. Faced by the pronounced climatic seasonality and the recurrent risks of prolonged drought in the region, higher levels of stabilization of the production capacity of the systems are reached through various resource storage strategies: water for human, animal and agricultural consumption in small-scale infrastructures built on family properties and in rural communities; seed banks containing family and community seeds; organic fertilizer stored in manure reservoirs; fodder stored in silos, hay making and fields planted with xerophilic species: mixed palm fields, mandacaru cactus hedges, etc.

Obs: Data until 2014

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Work rally to forage storage Increased productive diversity and intensity in backyards

sion of ecological capital into economic resources without causing a deterioration in environmental fertility.

Unlike the strategy of capital-based intensification of production, therefore, labour-based intensification can be described as a ‘win-win’ strategy in which economic efficiency and ecological efficiency feed back on each other to the benefit of the farming families and the integrity of the environment.

This approach to intensification is based on qualified labour, in the sense that it combines both physical and intellectual work. In other words the person carrying out the work also takes the strategic decisions. This craftsmanship character of the work is indispensable to the systemic and complex organization of the tasks and sub-tasks typically involved in family farming production. However, the reproduction of this artisanal approach depends on this knowledge being learnt and continually enhanced through processes of observation and experimentation, guided by local creative intelligence.

Seen from this viewpoint, in contrast to the technical guidelines prescribed by external agents, the knowledge associated with family farming is not expressed in inflexible rules: instead it is continuously improved through social processes of local innovation.

Along with the continuous generation of new ­methods for managing agroecosystems, the territorially rooted d ­ ynamics of innovation pursued by family farmers perform an important role in the development of human capital: that is, the autonomous capacity to organize and improve work routines. In this way, the endogenous processes of producing and s­ocializing knowledge function as social spaces of empowerment. While this aspect is essential for a historically marginalized social sector like family farming, it performs an even more crucial role for women farmers since they are subject to a double form of culturally constructed domination: due to their condition as family farmers and due to their condition as women.

As they developed socially and grew in thematic complexity, the networks of agroecological innovation in Paraíba’s Agreste region were able to mobilize more than 1.000 women on a permanent basis. As well as being active experimenters and protagonists in the strategies for intensifying agricultural production, these women, through their concrete practices,

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have taken on key roles in problematizing and confronting the social inequalities linked to gender and the various forms of violence to which they are subject.

The more active the mechanisms of social interaction between farmers-experimenters, the more dynamic and wideranging the social networks of innovation tend to become in terms of their thematic and social scope.6 This correlation is confirmed in numerous ways in the Agreste region of Paraíba and highlights the fact that the decisions put into practice by individuals and/or families in the domestic sphere are heavily conditioned by the collective dynamics of experimenting with alternative ways of intensifying farm production now being developed in the region. This challenges, therefore, the diffusionist approaches conventionally adopted by Technical Assistance and Rural Extension (ATER) entities, at the same time as it emphasizes the importance of institutional frameworks structured at territorial level for the management of resources, whether these are tangible (seeds, biodiversity, water, land, work, etc.) or intangible (knowledge, norms, values, etc.).

The role of institutional arrangements in the territory AS-PTA’s experience in advisoring family farming organizations from Paraíba’s Agreste region shows that local networks of innovation become catalysed when farmer experimentation is socially valued and institutionally supported. Proof of this can be found in the processes of creating and consolidating the Borborema Union and Family Farming Organization Pole, involving 15 rural workers unions, a regional association of agroecological farmers and 150 grassroots community organizations. Acting as

As Sabourin observes (2009), the more peasant communities become closed off through increasingly limited forms of proximity, family reciprocity or interpersonal connections, and the more dominated and marginalized they become, the more isolated, discrete or even invisible innovation will be. The reverse situation logically applies: the more intense social interactions are, the greater the flow of knowledge in the networks of local innovation.

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Box 3: Social devices for collective action an instance of political-organizational management of these networks of local innovation at territorial level, the Pole performs a decisive role in mediating the social dynamics involved in agroecological intensification with official bodies. In this way, the Pole directly executes and influences the elaboration of a broad set of programs and public policies consistent with its strategic aim of strengthening family farming.7 A particularly important aspect of the Pole’s activities is linked to the fact that the public policies mobilized to foment the dynamics of rural development are implemented through decentralized social initiatives focused on the management of common goods. Box 3 shows some of these collective forms of action that have been helping boost the efficiency of the collective management of these goods.

Contradicting the famous hypothesis of The Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin 1968),8 the collective action initiatives developed in the Agreste region of Paraíba demonstrate the capacity of family farming to construct and maintain institutional configurations that are locally adapted to the governance and the efficient and sustainable use of scarce resources indispensable to the labour-based intensification of production.

The Pole performs this institutional mediation through its interaction with public bodies operating at different levels and managing ­different resources: municipal, state and national governments and the Territorial Development Committee (an entity linked to the territorial development policy of the MDA (Ministry of Agrarian Development). Along with AS-PTA, it also works to mobilize international cooperation resources towards strengthening its ­project for the territory.

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In a famous article that functioned for a long time as reference work in the elaboration of environmental policies, Hardin (1968) postulated that individuals and groups who depend on the same environmental resources to reproduce themselves inevitably fall into the trap of overexploitation and, consequently, provoke ecological degradation. According to the author, avoiding this scenario requires ensuring that access to these common goods is limited by rules imposed by a government body or that they come under private sector management.

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1) Shared management of equipment. Unions and associations linked to the Pole organized to collectively run a network of 10 mobile silage machines funded by the Territorial Development Program of the Ministry of Agrarian Development (MDA). These machines are used to build silos, allowing the storage of cattle feed for consumption during the dry periods of the year. Circulation of the machines is regulated by locally defined rules and is associated with community work rallies (mutirão in Portuguese) that process the large volumes of forage biomass produced by a variety of plant species grown in the smallholdings.As well as enabling many families to obtain animal fodder in a short time scale, this system stimulates the intensification of the planting of forage species with the potential for use in silage production.This institutional arrangement benefits around 280 families with an average annual input of 4 tonnes of fodder. Like the silage machines, a set of fruit pulpers is managed by community mutirões. The use of these machines enables large volumes of native and exotic fruits to be processed for sale during harvest periods, performing an important role in stimulating the planting of fruit species.

2) Collective practices for preserving and reproducing biodiversity. A network of 65 community seed banks enables a large portion of the agrobiodiversity heritage to be conserved and made available for planting as soon as the rains arrive. As well as being adapted to environmental conditions and local cultivation systems, the ‘passion seeds’ – as they are known locally – assure greater autonomy and security to families in running their farms. The network of nurseries producing tree seedlings (forest and fruit species) is another initiative that has provided hundreds of families with access to diverse and high-quality genetic material. Managed by unions and community associations, this network formed by seven nurseries was developed as a system to reforest the agricultural landscape with multi-use species.

A network of male and female farmers responsible for collecting forest seeds subsequently became associated with the seedling network, stimulating the creation of a social group with the knowledge and practices to propagate native tree species. In order to facilitate seedling production, the nurseries very often make use of work rallies.

3) Community work rallies (mutirões). As we have seen above, this practice is widespread in family farming regions and is also used for the construction of small infrastructural works linked to the capture, transportation and storage of rainfall water, which have been essential to the development of a vast and intricate water supply network designed to meet the multiple demands of family farmers.

4) Community savings and financing. The Solidary Revolving Funds (FRS) mechanism has been used to enable the purchase of the equipment and inputs needed to intensify the production of agroecosystems: water supply infrastructures, ecological ovens, netting for protecting yards, zinc silos, small animals, etc.

5) Organizing access to markets. A network of 8 agroecological fairs in the region’s municipalities, as well as collective sales in institutional markets, allows the diverse produce typical to family farming to be marketed, increasing the remuneration of the work of family producers.

Obs: Data until 2014

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Although the real-world context described here p­ ossesses unique features that cannot be replicated in other contexts, it broadly echoes situations found in various other regions of the planet where family farming is present. Evaluating the design and establishment of family farming institutions oriented towards natural resource management, Elinor Ostrom, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009, observed that the most successful are those adapted to local contexts (Ostrom 1990). This implies that the institutional configurations with the most positive results should emerge from collective actions that use the resource base present in the territory itself. These approaches can be cultivated therefore through public incentives that open up spaces for creative capacities and collective potentials for self-organization to become developed autonomously.

On the other hand, public programs and policies designed according to the modernization paradigm tend to hinder, or indeed completely block, the emergence of family farming institutions aimed towards the economic-ecological management of the territory’s resources. Informed by technical guidelines controlled by agents of the State or the markets, business-focused farm management encourages the formation of social environments dominated by individualism and competition, creating the conditions for the Tragedy of the Commons to materialize. Indeed this can be seen as one of the key reasons behind the spread of desertification processes in Brazil’s semi-arid region.

Peasant Family farming and agroecological intensification Peasant Family farming is the institutional form most ­suited to reproducing styles of agricultural development based on intensification without simplification. Its organization of work focuses on valuing the locally available resource base in sustainable form. Through social regulation mechanisms typical to peasant agriculture, such as reciprocity and mutual aid, and due to the artisanal nature of the work involved, a variety of resources are liberated for the production process and used carefully and parsimoniously without the need for any kind of subjection to market rules.

The experience in the Agreste region of Paraíba ­ emonstrates that, even in hostile conditions, family farming d can act positively towards reversing desertification processes by occupying agricultural space with culturally constructed landscapes that meet the economic, ecological and social objectives of society simultaneously. However the increase in the social and geographical scale of initiatives like this demands the opening up of spaces for family farming to develop its latent capacities. This implies, first of all, democratizing the physical space through agrarian reform that amplifies the territorial scale of the management of natural resources under family farming management. It also implies moving beyond the modernization paradigm in the design and implementation of public policies. This signifies the institutionalization of the agroecological approach among State institutions so the latter can interact with the territorially-rooted socio-technical networks needed for the ‘trigger of local innovation’ to remain active. The shift beyond modernization is also expressed in

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the social construction of local markets, an essential condition for the biodiversity present in agroecosystems to be economically valued and monocrops discouraged.

Finally the experience recounted here highlights the fact that the intensification of economic production without ecological simplification of the agroecosystems used is both possible and essential for desertification to be successfully combatted. To this end it needs to be recognized that this dramatic socioenvironmental problem is unlikely to be solved through reductionist initiatives of regulatory state bodies, or through market mechanisms that usurp the territorial rights of rural communities.

Paulo Petersen executive coordinator of AS-PTA paulo@aspta.org.br Luciano Marçal da Silveira technical advisor at AS-PTA coordinator of the Terra Forte Project luciano@aspta.org.br Adriana Galvão Freire technical advisor at AS-PTA adriana@aspta.org.br

References BOSERUP, E. Population and technological change; a study of long-term trends. Chicago, University of Chicago, 1981.

HARDIN, G. The Tragedy of the Commons. In: Science no.

162, 1968.

OSTROM, E. Governing the Commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

PETERSEN, P., SILVEIRA, L.M. and ALMEIDA, P. Ecossistemas naturais e agroecossistemas tradicionais no Agreste da Paraiba: uma analogia socialmente construída e uma oportunidade para a conversão agroecológica. In: Silveira, L. M., Petersen, P. and Sabourin, E. Agricultura Familiar e Agroecologia no Semi-Árido Brasileiro: avanços a partir do Agreste da Paraíba. Rio de Janeiro: AS-PTA, 2002. p.13-122.

PLOEG, J. D. van der. Camponeses e Impérios Alimentares; lutas por autonomia e sustentabilidade na era da globalização. Porto Alegre, UFRGS, 2008.

RESENDE, M. Ambientes nos trópicos; peculiaridades e implicações para a agricultura, n.d.

SABOURIN, E. Camponeses do Brasil: Entre a Troca Mercantil e a Reciprocidade. Porto Alegre, Garamond, Col. Terra Mater, 2009.

SILVEIRA, L. M.; FREIRE,A. G.; DINIZ, P. C. Polo da Borborema: ator contemporânea das lutas camponesas pelo território.

Agriculturas, v. 7, n. 1, 2010, pp. 13-19.

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