Changes in the Brazilian rural sector during the 2010s

Abstract The 2010s saw an increase in the share of non-agricultural families living in Brazil´s rural areas and a decrease in the share of agricultural and pluriactive families. In order to better understand this new phenomena, this paper first uses secondary dataset to illustrate the issue, followed by a multinomial model and dataset from the Continuous Pnads in order to evaluate the importance of individual attributes, family features, the family workforce´s occupation type and the regional location considering the probability of a rural family to be non-agricultural or pluriactive in relation to be an agricultural family. Statistical results allow us to conclude that any rural family living outside of the Central-West are more likely to be a non-agricultural or pluriactive family than an agricultural family. As the rural family has a retired person among its members, has a greater number of members and its head is either black, indigenous or a person of color the probability of being a non-agricultural family is greater in relation to an agricultural family. The probability that a rural family is pluriactive, in relation to agricultural, increases, since it produces for self-consumption, is a beneficiary of the government-allowance-program, and has a greater number of dependents.