Ageing in the countryside and the need of public policies of social security as means to implement the rights of elderly rural workers in Brazil

In the contemporary society, the rural labor is still essential for the maintenance of the economy. However public policies still favor large scale and exporting agriculture, and landed estates, while smallholdings, focused on the domestic supply, are facing difficulties. In this context, the rural workers, already rejected over the time of working activity, is still more abandoned when they cannot produce or be inserted economically in the system. Such situation coincides, mostly, with a phase of marked ageing, characterized by physical, psychic and social changes including the transition to non-working, prejudice and abandonment of a generation who contributed so much for the development of the society.

Historically, rural elderly people were treated with contempt by the legislation and nowadays they are still considered obsolete and outdated, after all “a rustic”. However it must be noted the relevance of the agricultural activity to the nationwide economy, especially in relation to the production of foodstuff by small farmers, for domestic market; and the changes resulting from the Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988 which introduced into the national legal order, new guarantees for the rural worker, for instance, by means of the principles of social security such as solidarity, uniformity and equivalence of benefits and services to the urban and rural population.

The present work examines the need to implement such principles, especially in the perspective of the rights of rural workers to the social welfare in Brazil. The focus lies in peculiarities of ageing in the countryside, available or required public policies, as well as the possibilities of access to benefits at the time of labor incapacity, which shall occur, even, from different treatment because of the characteristics of their activities and as a result of constitutional and infra-constitutional commandments which ensure social protection to all.