As redes geográficas e a produção de leiteira na comunidade de Nosso Senhor do Bonfim, município de Salto do Lontra-PR

Abstract

In this research, we sought to understand the geographical networks existing in the milk production units in the rural community of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim in the municipality of Salto do Lontra-PR, and its influence on the modernization and obtaining higher productive indices in the activity. For this, we use the concept of network which consists of a set of fixed that are interconnected with each other from the concretization of the flows over a certain space. As networks take place in space, we also use it as a key concept, understood as a systemic set of objects and actions. The Southwest Paranaense mesoregion, especially the municipality of Salto do Lontra and the community surveyed, are composed of a family agriculture based on the production of corn and soybeans, poultry and milk linked to the capitalist logic of production, commercialization and transformation. Milk production, which was a subsistence activity and linked to women's work, after the modernization of agriculture and the activity itself, gained space in the productive units and, in many cases, as the main productive activity and source of income of the farming families. In this sense, the process of consolidation of milk activity is intrinsically related to the performance of geographic networks in space. The networks, made up of production units, dairies and local markets, chemical machinery and supplies resellers, marketing and credit cooperatives, etc. Make possible the existence of flows of goods, people, information and money among the fixed ones. The fixed and flows in the milk activity show spatial interactions with different scales and intensities that, in most cases, are celetistas on the spaces where they act, including and excluding fixed ones of their operation depending on the productive, economic, political and social interests that each network Presents, which are coordinated by their hegemonic actors/subjects. The constitution and functioning of the networks on the milk activity in the researched community favor the increase of the levels of modernization and productivity, since they allow the effective circulation of object systems and actions that shape the space and, consequently, milk production. Being that, the objects and actions that are moved by the networks, from the technical-scientificinformational means, have the rationality like element of constitution of the rural space. Therefore, the networks that constitute the researched community have productive, commercial, political and social characteristics, being, at the same time, technical elements and a social construction of individual and/or collective subjects. In addition, the networks modify dairy production in the community, but, simultaneously, were also modified by the preexisting characteristics in that space.