Conservação da Agrobiodiversidade: saberes e estratégias da Agricultura Familiar na Amazônia

Abstract

The conservation of agrobiodiversity in environmental systems in the Amazon is being promoted by the family farmers through strategies involving a complex network of organizations and social interactions. This role is extremely important and essential for sustainability in agriculture but has remained in invisibility by the policymakers. This study aimed to analyze the agrobiodiversity conservation strategies adopted by farmers in the Upper Solimões River. This research attempt to analyze the cognitive strategies expressed in local knowledge relative to change of agroecosystems landscapes and inter and intraspecific diversity of crops. The characterization of the strategies, processes and labor relations in the local family farming was also intended. The study was realized with farmers in Comunidade São José, at Assentamento Agroextrativista – PAE, Aramaçá Island, Benjamin Constant, AM. In this study, it was adopted the Multiple Case Study model with the dialectic of systemic complexity as a theoretical framework which is capable of providing the necessary epistemological instrumental to the study. For understand the relationships between biological diversity and cultural diversity, based on own values and meanings of each culture were used to search the Ethnobiology and Ethnoecology methodological principles. The complexity and heterogeneity of Aramaçá Island impose high degree of risk and uncertainty on São José farmers. It’s requiring strategies to know, select and conserve varieties of adapted plants at circumstances. Therefore, conservation of agricultural diversity in family agroecosystems is a complex process of knowing and acting of the farmer. By confirming the agricultural diversity conserved by these forms of production, the study also highlighted the importance of the homegardens as conservation areas of intraspecific variability, and the interspecific sites. The articulation between the different forms of social kinship and work relations among families establish complex systems in networks, with each type of relationship driven in space / time required. Agricultural diversity and the knowledge associated with it are generated, evaluated and improved by each family, however, the appropriation happens collectively through these social local networking. In sharing networks were identified key family units in the dynamics of seed flow in São José, the nodal families, also called nodal farmers. The knowledge richness articulated in the agrobiodiversity conservation strategies is a strong evidence of the São José family farmers to conserve and confirm the view that the action strategy requires a cognitive strategy.