Public policies for rural development in Brazil: from the selective character of agricultural modernization to the approach of territorial development

Abstract

The agrarian policies implemented in the last decades have proved insufficient to generate rural development in the country. The positioning of the State concening public policies for agriculture has historically proved to be centralizing and strongly stimulates its modernizing project, being unable to achieve the expected effects. Invisible to local particularities, it is concluded, mainly from the 1990s, that the national and centralizing policies of the Union have not been able to sufficiently develop the productive chains of each region. As a rule, in this way arises the so-called territorial approach - widely spread in European countries - which seeks to overcome the sectorial and productivist approach of public policies focused on rural areas.