“Proteger a mata para o rio não secar”: análise da recuperação de matas ciliares realizada por agricultores familiares às margens do rio Itabocal, Irituia – PA

Abstract

On the municipalities of Pará’s Northeast mesoregion, family farmers have been standing out by establishing experiences with forest recovering on their properties. Based on that context, it was aimed to understand how forest recovering of riparian forest has been implemented on their agricultural establishments, considering their importance to the environment and the relation built between those areas, the Amazonian rural populations and their water resources. Hence, the research supports on the principles of systemic approach and of interdisciplinarity. The region of Itabocal, rural area of the Irituia’s municipality, located on the Northeast of Pará, was chosen as sample. In the first paper the processes of forest recovering found on the area’s riparian forest were characterized through a typology developed by field research. Altogether, three main types of recovering were identified, being enrichment of regenerating forest, natural regeneration and agroforestry systems. In the second paper, the socio-productive trajectories that took the farmers to decide on riparian forest recover were investigated, through a space-time analysis. After analyzing how factors that were extern to their agriculture establishments and how those that were intern of their systems influenced them through the years, it was understood that the recover of the areas was mostly caused by the concern with the maintenance of quality, flow and biota of the region’s biggest stream, Itabocal river. With the knowledge of Itabocal river’s importance to the local population, the third paper focused on the impacts suffered on it and the proposition of solutions to control them, based on the socio-spatial analysis built with the farmers. The deforestation of riparian forest, encouraged mainly by landowners, was noteworthy as the most frequent impact. It was also noticed that the river’s management is established on a non-institutional way on the region, generated by the family farmers’ efforts towards its maintenance. The results showed that the Itabocal’s family farmers follow a trend towards the forest recovering and have a well-defined perception over the problems caused by the deforestation of riparian forest. The main obstacles noticed for the recovering of those areas are related to a) the inefficiency of local public power in inspecting and stimulating them, either by proposing legal instruments of incentive or by including the region’s inhabitants on the decision making process relative to environmental conservation; and b) on the absence of certain groups’ environmental consciousness, like landowners, that insist on the riparian forest predatory exploitation. It was accomplished that the relevance of riparian forest recover is tied to the relation that the studied population have with the water.