Fundamentos teóricos de experiências de apoio administrativo a agricultores: o caso da RUOP e do PGSAF no Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

The theme of administrative support to farmers is frequently involved in the scenario of technical assistance and extension actions. Therefore, the number of activities undertaken that seek, in different ways, to present alternatives and solutions that help farmers to better manage their production units, having as a general context of the transformations in the conditions of production in agriculture and the possibilities of innovation resulting from the development of information technology in the different fields of human activity. Many of these actions carry with them the conception that family production units are a type of organization similar to industrial organizations, and for this reason, they bring with them the classical idea of administration in their action strategies. For this reason, it is common to see problems of discontinuity, lack of participation, and engagement of farmers in participating in such actions. Some analyzes point to a lack of harmony between the objectives of the actions and the needs of farmers in terms of administrative support, or even that the activities adopt a framework that does not fit with the nature of the administrative activity of family production units. Therefore, this work aims to analyze two actions developed with family members in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, to point out to what extent these experiences take into account the debates about the administrative support when is designing, implementing, and operationalizing the experiences. To this end, the literature review surveys the evaluations of other administrative support experiences developed in Brazil, beyond to uses as a theoretical lens the contribution about practice and nature of rural administration, as well as the process of decision-making and action within family production units. The experiences of the Pedagogical Observation Unit Network and the Family Farming Sustainable Management Program were described and analyzed through documentary and bibliographic research, in addition to semi-structured interviews with technicians conceived in both experiences, seeking to highlight the motivations, objectives, methodologies, and adopted strategies. As a result, we point out that there is an incorporation of debates on the theme of administrative support developed in the 90s within the analyzed experiences, besides pointing out innovations for other actions to be developed. Finally, there is also evidence of a need to build up works that assess the administrative specifications of production associations and their needs in terms of administrative support.