Estratégias de acesso e construção de mercados de circuitos curtos pela Agricultura Familiar em tempos de Covid-19: o caso da Associação Amanu

Abstract

Family farming is a social category of significant importance for food production in Brazil. Farming families who produce in an agroecological way have a great relevance, especially when one considers aspects of quality and socio-environmental issues. In 2020, the whole of Brazil had to adapt to the drastic change in habits due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which transformed several relations, generated a new reality of access to the markets and countless difficulties in generating income and guaranteeing food security. To face these questions, family farming was organized in different ways with the aim of strengthening and achieving the socioeconomic objectives of the category, with the transformation and maintenance of the rural life. The main objective of the work here presented was to analyse the strategies used by Associação Amanu and associated families for the construction and access to short food supply chains in the period of Covid-19. The research was carried out with a qualitative methodology, using semi-structured interviews applied to four people from the administrative team and twelve associated families, besides document analysis. The Associação Amanu – Educação, Ecologia e Solidariedade is an agroecological family farming organization in the city of Jaboticatubas and has been operating in the region since 2008. The association works by helping family farming to develop in the countryside, generating income, raising the self-esteem of the social category and contributing to economic development in the city. Among the main results, it was observed that Amanu contributed to changes in the forms of commercialization, with the expansion and creation of commercialization strategies, such as purchasing groups, consumer awareness, improvement of marketing with the impossibility of face-to-face markets. These strategies are based on aggregation of value, in which cultural and traditional aspects, productive forms and affectivity are valued; creation of new products with traditional and regional characteristics, using feedstock from the Cerrado and inherited recipes with adaptations; valuing specific aspects of quality, such as agroecological feedstock and differentiated flavor; in addition to encouraging production diversification; adapting to the realities of family farming, in relation to production, transport and logistics issues with restricted economic resources; and aligning with social actors aware of the importance of marketing products from family, agroecological or in transition agriculture. It is known that family farming presents realities of difficulties to maintain a constant production, financial limitations of investments in labels and packaging standardization, and that certain information is difficult to be collected without the collaboration of professionals. Strategies can be kept even after the pandemic, in order to guarantee the improvement in the quality of families lives and contribute to greater income generation for them, with access to a greater diversity of markets.