Agricultura familiar na Amazônia Oriental: uma comparação dos resultados da pesquisa socioeconômica sobre fronteiras agrárias sob condições históricas e agroecológicas diversas
In the eastern Amazon, market-integrated peasant/family agriculture represents an economically significant part of the agrarian sector. The dominant view qualifies this form of agriculture mainly as inefficient and economically unsustainable shifting cultivation, based on the model of the frontier cycle (shifting cultivators are necessarily expelled by cattle ranching) and on the classic model of tropical ecology of the Amazon rain forest. Recent research results on the tropical ecology of the eastern Amazon show that the classical model needs to be revised in several aspects directly related to the sustainability os peasant agriculture. The historical reconstruction of the development of peasant production systems in Igarapé-Açu and a comparison with data on other more recent agrarian frontiers in Pará, show that depending on the specific historical development of the agrarian frontier, the ecological and economics factors influencing it information, and the macroeconomic setting, a wide diversity of relatively stable regional trajectories the agrarian development can be found.
