GENERAL TYPOLOGY OF ECONOMIC AGENTS IN THE COCOA AGRARIAN SYSTEM, SOUTHERN BAHIA, BRAZIL

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the crisis of cocoa monoculture in the southern region of Bahia, Brazil, since the second half of the 1980s and the strategies for economic overcoming towards the transformations of the regional agrarian system based on a new typology of social categories in the region. The crisis of cocoa monoculture begins with the growth of regional unemployment, the considerable drop in cocoa production, which makes Brazil a cocoa importing country, implying the productive destructuring of agricultural systems based on cocoa plantations in the cabruca agroforestry system. New pastures and coffee plantations are implemented, contributing to the deforestation of the rainforest and the replacement of agriculture by cattle ranching. In this way, the regional crisis of rural and urban unemployment caused the orderly structuring of social movements through agrarian reform, intensifying incursions and entries into rural settlements, strengthening the new agrarian reform settlements through the organization of a new type of family farming. As for the categories, the most generic, it is observed the existence of eight categories of economic agents in relation to cocoa cultivation in the South of Bahia. They are: family cocoa producers and diversified agrarian reform agreements; medium employer or family farmers with a partnership ("sharecropper") or salary payment; farmer employers who have abandoned their cocoa farms; new investors who bought abandoned land; small agro-industries, chocolate associations and cooperatives; transnational agro-industrial companies and medium-sized commercial cocoa storage companies. It is possible to identify pluriactive families, exclusively agricultural or exclusively non-agricultural, and families that develop strategies for the conservation of natural resources.