Identity Valorization of Rural African and Brazilian Peoples: Towards a New Perspective of Rural Extension for the Brazilian Semi-arid Region

Abstract

Semiarid Brazil passes through a situation similar to that of Africa. For a long time it has been excluded from the social and economic public policies. In the last decades there was seen the urgent need to develop this region in order to reach the levels of development of Southern and Southeast Brazil, with regard to education, income and technology. There exists a cultural clash between the proposal of the extension service developed in the United States, acclimatized in Southern Brazil and imposed on a population that, because of the political abandonment, has already developed its own survival strategies according to each region or ethnic group, and the traditional culture that most often not combines with the neoliberal green revolution model. We as extension workers often underestimate this secular knowledge and try to skip stages by introducing production proposals, which do not interact with the climate, with the local culture or with the needs of the families. Paulo Freire in his experience in Africa teaches us to try to build a proposal of the rural extension that starts from the local reality, enhancing what is already a cultural practice and what has been working for many generations, what gives value to the people and their way of life, which is a proposal that empowers families and encourages them to seek the solution of their problems by themseves, being in reality a technical advisory service and not a technical assistance.