Las polí­ticas públicas para la agricultura familiar en la horticultura del Gran La Plata (Buenos Aires), 2016. Un análisis de sus alcances, potencialidades y limitaciones

Abstract

The periurban of La Plata became in the last decades one of the biggest centers of production and supply of vegetables of the whole country, influenced by the techno-productive transformations, the changes in the demand and the migratory processes and of social mobility of the Bolivian community. However, this productive boom coexists with a set of factors that precarize the family workforce. Given that family farming has become a socially problematic issue in the last decade, with a series of specific public policies for the sector, in this article we investigate the link between these policies and living and working conditions in La Plata’s horticulture. The question guiding our research is: What changes does the implementation of public policies for family farming suggest in La Plata’s horticulture? What can be the scope, potentialities and limitations of these interventions? The methodology implemented is qualitative and based on bibliographical reviews, analysis of documentary sources of programs and public policies, and the analysis of interviews and registries of participant observation. Among the main results, we highlight the prescriptive role of the family agriculture category as a form of new subjectivity in the territory; the constitutive contradictions of some policies for the formalization of excluded sectors, that maintain the structures that reproduce this exclusion; and how the conformation of groups based on public policies creates new social relations and triggers new actions in the territory that seek to transform, in turn, the socio-productive reality of the region.