Transformations des stratégies sociales et productives des éleveurs transhumants de la province de Neuquén et de leurs relations avec les interventions de développement

After the 90s, the Argentine society and economy have been deeply transformed. Structural adjustment programs, state functions decentralization towards provinces and districts, national currency parity with American dollar and trade liberalization have induced deep changes for public institutions and for productive activities. The agricultural sector, in a direct contact with the international market, experimented one of the major crisis of the history. Peasant farms, numerous in Argentine, are living hard exclusion processes but also simultaneously new inclusion processes, going with in a general way a territorial fragmentation induced by globalization. This PhD research propose to understand these processes analyzing the Nord area of the Neuquen province, in the argentine Patagonia, where are 2000 transhumance small breeders families and which is the most peasant influenced area of the province. About one hundred questionnaires have been applied on a sample of breeders’ families along with some deep interviews with the objective of detecting the diversity and the dynamics of socioproductive strategies. We are aiming at, through a comprehension of these simultaneous processes of inclusion and exclusion, to perceive modifications in the intervention paradigms of public institutions and of their agents, in one of the argentine provinces where development institutions in rural areas have been the most important and have strongly structurate the peasant sector. The modifications in agricultural sector of intervention paradigms, just as social rules, led actually to a deep crisis of development projects and agricultural development arena, just as the District Services for Production and NGOs and these new actors modify existing relationships between the main agricultural sector actors (breeders, breeders’ organizations, development institutions, national and provincial states…). An historical analysis of development projects and of interventions (through archives, long interviews with managers and field agents and an introspective research of this author who has been a development worker in this area for more than 15 years) permit to propose a model of these changes in intervention paradigms. Finally we put into relation social and productive strategies transformations of small breeders and of the intervention paradigms. The PhD shows the apparition of a new relationship between peasantry and public institutions that belongs to more global transformations of the territory and of the territorialities of rural development actors.