Development pathways for family farmers: Lessons from Brazil on the need for targeted structural reforms as a means to address regional heterogeneity

Abstract

Identifying development pathways for family farmers is one of the main on-going global efforts toward rural development. Promising development pathways are assessed for Brazil as a case study based on official data from the national agricultural census. The results revealed that modernization is the most consolidated development approach, which promotes farmers’ integration into global agribusiness value chains and gave rise to the first generation of agricultural policies based on subsidized credit. Census data show that the modernization approach directly supports around 10% of Brazilian family farmers, particularly in the South of the country. More recently, efforts have been made to promote a new rural development paradigm through short food supply chains, which gave rise to another generation of agricultural policies based on governmental procurements. It is estimated that this approach may provide a development alternative for about 10% of the Brazilian family farmers who are closer to consumer markets. As a result, around 80% of family farmers in the country remain unreached by the current development approaches. These are farmers facing structural constraints such as insufficient land to produce (mainly in the Northeast region) or lack of land tenure rights (mainly in the North region). There is an urgent need for land reform as well as a new generation of agricultural policies targeting local potentials as a way of addressing regional heterogeneity in Brazil and elsewhere.