Representaciones sociales y desarrollo económico localuna propuesta estratégica para los agricultores freseros de la Cuenca del Lago Ypacaraí

Abstract

Paraguay is perhaps the least known country in the Latin American scene. This small country, located in the center of South America became a prosperous country without foreign debt. Two great wars -The Triple Alliance and the Chaco War- blurred its geography and its population decimated. Many turns and a long dictatorship ended more than three decades put the hallmark of endemic underdevelopment for the country and its population, with one of the lowest HDI of the continent and the highest rates of corruption. The fall of the dictatorship and the country's entry into MERCOSUR set new political and economic directions in a globalization pattern. Then, it is strongly believed that the only way for the development was the growth through exports. More than twenty years later, the data indicate an excessive dependence of the largest bloc countries, Argentina and Brazil. This leaves the economy tied to the fate of their neighboring country. The country's economy is based primarily on the sale of commodities of little value or no value added and dependent on extensive farming, such as soybeans. Another of the major problems the country is the sharing and use of land, with a real agrarian reform always postponed. In this scenario major producers and exporters coexist with small, often lacking technical and financial care and government policies rural farmers. One of these sectors is the strawberry, which although this culture dating from the 1920s, its development has not been promoted from government entities nor are there published studies on it. This research is part of an approach to this subsector, mainly located in the basin of Ypacarai Lake, where hundreds of families make the cultivation of strawberries that passes from generation to generation, like a family tradition. The study of this sector was conducted within three complementary theoretical and methodological perspectives -Local Economic Development, Social Representation Theory and Strategic Planning- identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Then they have outlined some general guidelines within a systematic and systemic model of bottom-up local development pointing. The study of social representations has detected the impossibility of implementing a development based on the cooperative subsector, such as the one conducted in Huelva, the area of greatest strawberry production in Europe. The study concludes with a role model to facilitate economic development based on participatory action, the mobilization of social capital and cohesion of the subsector, with a view to achieve the improvement of living standards of the families of farmers, environmental sustainability cultivation and guarantee a better future for next generations of strawberry farmers.