PRONAF IN THE STATE OF PARÁ: CHARACTERIZATION, DYNAMICS AND IMPACT ON AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION
Family farming; Rural credit; Agricultural Financing; Agricultural Policy.
Until the beginning of the 1990s, agricultural policies for rural areas in Brazil had a highly concentrated character, to which only large businessmen enjoyed the benefits of a close relationship with the State. The construction of a new trajectory based on support for family-based socio-productive activities occurred in 1995, when the first specific policy for this segment was created, the National Program for Strengthening Family Agriculture (PRONAF), which was designed considering different life spectra. social, environmental and economic development of family farmers to promote so-called sustainable rural development. In view of the fact that public policy evaluations show great potential to assist in the formulation and evaluation of government projects, academic interest in this type of analysis has been growing. However, the studies developed to elucidate the behavior of Pronaf in the North region constitute a real bottleneck in the information available about the Program. Thus, this research aims to characterize the main effects of Pronaf on family farming in Pará. To fulfill this purpose, the initial approach of this dissertation is dedicated to the general analysis of the Program at the national level, taking into account the perspectives of different studies published between the years 2000 and 2020. The second chapter performs the general diagnosis of the supply behavior credit in the state of Pará between the years 2000 to 2019, using methodologies such as shift-share to decompose the sources of credit growth, the Gini Index to measure the level of concentration of resources and the Normalized Rural Credit Index to identify the productive specialties of family farming at the municipal level. Finally, the methodology of the third chapter uses econometric modeling of panel data to verify the existence or not of possible impacts of the Pronaf financing on the agricultural activities typically financed in family farming.