Feminismo e agroecologio: o sujeito político e avaliação do ATERmulheres no Rio Grande do Norte 2004-2016

Abstract

In the time between 2004 and 2016, rural women have achieved a set of social programs, among them, Technical Assistance and Rural Extension for Women, the ATER Women program, offered by the Directorate of Policies for Rural Women, DPMR, from the Ministry of Agrarian Development / MDA. It aims to assist women farmers in the fields of production, management and marketing. With this purport, the research had as its general objective: to evaluate the effectiveness of ATER Women in Rio Grande do Norte from 2004 to 2016. The thesis is the result of a practical theoretical course obtained during the investigation. The proposed approach focuses on three theoretical formulations: feminism as a critical theory and social movement, agroecology in ecological and socioeconomic aspects and evaluation of government social programs. It is from the studies of feminist economics that the research dialogues with the construction of agroecology as a science and social practice. The conceptual debate is held with the trajectory of feminism as a social movement and with its theoretical-practical shift in the historical process. The theoretical contributions also provide references for this evaluation, capable of demonstrating that the social relations of gender, in an approach of consubstantiality, should be an integral part of the reading of agroecology and anchor for the perception of the effectiveness of the studied program. As part of the methodology, the research seeks to carry out an evaluation of social programs understanding that these are constituted by scientific theories and techniques. The study used research tools that make the evaluation process more precise and to achieve the objectives, the criteria are established according to the field of studied research. (WEISS, 1975). The evaluation of the effectiveness of the program was based on the concept of ARRETCHE, (2009), which recognizes how the perception of whether or not the life of people who accessed the program changed. Based on these references and the empirical data, the research states that the ATER Women, executed in RN, developed in the territories Açu / Mossoró, Sertão do Apodi, Seridó and Mato Grande, had effectiveness in women’s life by the ability to combine the contributions of feminism and of agroecology in its execution.