The productive and food practices in rural space of western Santa Catarina: Public action in the search for and critique of modernity[As práticas produtivas e alimentares no espaço rural do Oeste de Santa Catarina: A ação pública na busca e na crítica à modernidade]

The western region of Santa Catarina was integrated to the "modernization of agriculture" in the 1950s, through the agro-industrialization of the food system, having as protagonists the State, civil society and the market,which acted at the national, state and municipal levels. Based on the sociology of public action, the objective of this paper is to verify how public policies promoted modernity and how the more recent public actions and policies reinforce or delineate new patterns and trajectories of rural development and influence productive and food consumption practices. The methodological procedures consisted of literature review and field research. In 2018, we conducted 13 semi-structured interviews with public managers and mediators from seven organizations operating in the region, two focus groups and 49 questionnaires with family farmers located in Chapecó and nine adjacent municipalities. The results indicate that modernity has led a significant portion of family farmers to produce less food for self-consumption and to consume more industrialized and ultra-processed foods, besides causing concentration of production, rural exodus and environmental pollution. Faced with these risks and uncertainties, "new" food and production practices emerged, and new actors began to build alternatives to modernity. The "new" production strategies consisted of food agro-industrialization, agroecological production, biodiversity restoration, creation of fairs, and the maintenance of production for self-consumption, supported by various actions and public policies. The same State that produces productive and food risks, threats and uncertainties, also contributes to food and nutritional security in the region.