Revisitando o Pronaf: velhos questionamentos, novas interpretações

This paper aims at updating Pronaf’s performance in Brazil, deepening the discussion about the beneficiary public and financed activities. The main source used for the analysis is the Statistical Yearbook of Rural Credit of Brazil’s Central Bank (1999- 2012), supplemented with information from the Family Farming Secretariat (SAF) of the Agrarian Development Ministry (MDA), mainly for the period from 1996 to 1998. The results show that Pronaf maintains a concentration of resources and contracts on more capitalized farmers, commodity producers (mainly corn, soybeans and coffee) located in the South, Southeast and Center-West in Brazil, reinforcing its strong productivity-based bias. However, on the other hand, when analyzing spatialized data, we find the funding for a variety of crops in different regions. In regional terms, the increase of the overall resources and contracts has been higher in the Northeast and North. Despite this expansion, these regions and public remain, in absolute terms, the minority accessing Pronaf despite amounting for most of Brazilian family farmers.