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Family farm product qualification and relationship of reciprocity : [Draft]

Sabourin E.. 2009. In : Re-inventing the rural between the social and the natural : XXIII ERS Congress, Vaasa, Finland, 17-21 August 2009. s.l. : s.n., 19 p.. ESRS Congress. 23, Vaasa (Finlande).

This paper mobilizes the theory of reciprocity to analyze family farm product qualification process effects in Brazil. All qualification processes that guarantee the origin, the specificity, the quality process or the norms of a product, contribute to reduce the effects of competition and speculation peculiar to the capitalist exchange. My hypothesis is that a qualification process can contribute to establish a binary symmetrical relation of reciprocity between producer and buyer. They also can contribute to generate a sharing structure (of quality) among the group of producers. When the producer's name is at stake, reciprocity relationships generate values of trust, reputation, honor and responsibility. It is often these ethical values that guarantee the legitimacy and the authority of the certification process of quality and origin standards. In fact, it thus creates a territoriality of reciprocity around a specific product. However, apart from this group of qualified producers and also for the marketing of other products which are not be labeled by them, it is the rules of the capitalistic exchange market that apply. Qualification and certification could also induce exclusion. That is why, in the case of a centrifugal qualification process, one has resort to some kind of interface: that of the certification mechanism, which makes it possible to reintroduce reciprocity dimension (the domestic unit, the peasant community, the cooperative) into the capitalist exchange market system. The paper presents in the case of Brazil, various initiatives of setting up such co-certification, group certification, or even, the so-called participative certification systems, between producers or between producers and consumers.

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