Visit of the professor Niurka I. Pérez Rojas, of the Havana University, Cuba, expert in rural development and Cuban agriculture, to the Department of Geography, FFLCH - USP

Abstract

SCHEDULED ATIVITIES: 1. Short Course on "Agrarian structure and the condition of the national farmers in Cuba", to be held on the Graduate Program in Human Geography of the USP. SUMMARY Objective: To characterize the complexity of agrarian structure and of the farmers in Cuba. Topics: The agrarian character of the Cuban Revolution. The I and II Agrarian Reform. The creation of the state farming sector and the peasant sector. The agrarian transformations from 1963 to 1975: the specialized establishment. The agricultural cooperativization and its phases. The individual peasant producers and the cooperativization. The agrarian policies from 1985 to 1993: crisis of the agrarian model based on the big state farms. Experimentation in Cuban agriculture. Policy of mistake and negative tendency rectification. Strengthening of the special plans, creation of agricultural quotas. The National Agroalimentar Program. Food safety and economic crisis. The new agrarian transformations: the creation of the Basic Unities of Cooperative Production, the strengthening of the peasant and cooperative sector. Land redistribution in usufruct system. The new agrarian structure and the new actors of the agricultural production.2.A talk with the Agrarian Geography Lab (AGRÁRIA)'s researchers.3.A lecture on "The critical balance of the Cuban agrarian reform experience” in the IV Agrarian Geography International Symposium (SINGA). JUSTIFICATION: Prof. Niurka Pérez stay has the aim of contribute to improve our researchers' instruction - being the AGRÁRIA's members or those of the Graduate Program in Human Geography - in a critical perspective based on the understanding of the agrarian processes in the national or international scale. Prof. Niurka is an expert on rural development and also on the recent evolution of the Cuban countryside. She has studied the current state of the Cuban countryside and its forms of the organization of production, mainly the agro-ecological and cooperative experiences. Prof. Niurka's work is internationally acknowledged, she has worked as a visiting scholar in England, United States, Mexico and Bulgaria as well as consultant in Guatemala. She has already been in Brazil lecturing in UNESP-Araraquara and in USP in 1992.The AGRÁRIA is constituted by 4 teachers (Ariovaldo U. de Oliveira, Valeria de Marcos, Larissa M. Bombardi e Júlio César Suzuki), besides myself, and about 30 researchers of different levels, involved with research projects from scientific initiation to doctorate. From 20 years, the AGRÁRIA has been studying the contradictions and unevenness of the Brazilian countryside on the purpose of contributing to the rural development, conceived as a process of building the social justice in this space. At the present, the increasing complexity resulting from the capital mundialization has prompted us to construct a multidisciplinary dialogue with national and international researchers. The Prof. Niurka's visit actualize this shift and is part of a set of activities jointly promoted by AGRÁRIA and Human Geography Graduate Program in the last decade on the purpose of deepening our international participation in the debate about the agrarian question in the world and of narrowing our relationship with other researchers abroad. The AGRÁRIA's current researches will certainly benefit from Prof. Niurka's visit, either for her theoretical and conceptual contributions to the analysis of the alternative forms of production in the countryside, or for the opportunity of better knowing the Cuban experience. Prof. Niurka will also participate of the IV SINGA, at UFF, Niterói-RJ. This symposium has been supported by a group of public institutions with active participation of the universities of São Paulo, by means of the AGRÁRIA or of NERA of the UNESP-Presidente Prudente, and has consolidated as an important forum of debate about the agrarian question in the world. (AU)