Dinâmica das ocupações e a “nova” ruralidade na região Norte do Brasil: desafios para uma agenda ampla de desenvolvimento rural

Abstract

The objective of this Thesis consists in analysing the dynamic of the different sources of employment and income of the rural families and people of the North Region. The analyses are based on microdata from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD), from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE in Portuguese), made in the 2004 to 2015 period. The central hypothesis of the research is that the non-agricultural activities have been becoming more and more important in employment and income generation for the rural population, replicating a behaviour previously observed in other countries as well as in the more developed brazilian regions. The results highlight that the number of rural families and people in the North region has increased in the last years, but this increase was sustained by the expansion of non agricultural employment and of rural non-occupied people, while agricultural, exclusively, showed a significant decrease tendency. From this scenario, the families income came to be increasingly composed by the income from non-agricultural sources, and of the income from non-occupied (retirement and pensions, income transfer, among others). Concerning the household and material assets access conditions, it became clear that regardless of the condition of the family’s activity (agricultural, non-agricultural, pluriactive and non-occupied), there is a scenario of complete deficiency in domestic services of water supply through general distribution networks, sewage systems, domestic garbage removal, etc., including in the families with higher incomes (non-agricultural and pluriactives). This shows that these services depend much more on government action than on the family's income level. It is possible that this scenario is related to sectorial policies that prevail in the region, so that other dimensions of the rural (habitation, transportation, communication, health, education, etc.) are being forgotten, which implies in the continuation or widening of a precariousness scenario in household conditions. It is believed that wider rural development policies, with focus on the demands of the multi-sector and multi-functional rural, will become important to guarantee a better quality of life for the population.