The National Policy of Technical Assistance and Rural Extension (Pnater): a new model of rural development still far from family farming

Since the 1990’s, the Brazilian countryside has undergone profound transformations. Rural development ceased to have a purely productivist and economic character and added other dimensions such as environmental, social, political and cultural. Several public policies to support family farming were created, among them Pnater, which broke with the former diffusionist model of Technical Assistance and Rural Extension (Ater) and prioritised the rural populations that have always been forgotten by the public power. The present work is a bibliographical review which aims to analyse the advances and the challenges of this new Ater that emerged with Pnater. The study showed that Pnater is an excellent achievement for family agriculture because it favours sustainable rural development, participatory methodology, multidisciplinarity, ecologically based agriculture, issues of gender, race, ethnicity and generation, as well as being the way to small producers may have access to the new technological tools. However, it also revealed that, in addition to being few producers receiving Ater services in the country, most technicians still resist abandoning the old model of a rural extension