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Relationships between trajectories and vulnerability on smallholder dairy farms in Brazil

De Oliveira M.N., Triomphe B., Cialdella N., Ingrand S.. 2013. In : EAAP. Book of Abstracts of the 64th annual meeting of the European federation of animal science, Nantes, France, 26-30 August, 2013. Wageningen : Wageningen Academic Publishers, p. 493-493. EAAP Annual Conference. 64, 2013-08-26/2013-08-30, Nantes (France).

In a context of limited supply of family agriculture products to the local market, mainly due to problems in delivery quantity and regularity, smallholder farmers adopt different strategies to adapt their system in order to enter into an organized and competitive supply chain. We interviewed 24 smallholder farmers in the municipality of Unaí (Brazilian Cerrados), which deliver different amounts of milk to the local cooperative. We first described the different trajectories of each farmer since inception (a few years ago). Then, we built some indicators to compare the vulnerability of each system face to different events (identified by the farmers themselves). The variability observed in the trajectories of milk production systems is linked to different technical choices and management practices, and leads to a greater or lesser capacity of the systems to cope with unpredictable events. We propose to assess this capacity by using a set of 21 indicators based on the concept of vulnerability, i.e. the capacity to adapt to exogenous and endogenous shocks. Three components of vulnerability are considered by the different indicators: exposure, sensibility and adaptive capacity. We show that the same perturbation has not the same effect on the farming system according to its previous trajectory (including workforce, money and technical management).

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