The Brazilian rural world: access to goods and services and coutryside-city integration

the rural world is a space of life, a place of residence for a large number of brazilians, where they come from and where they experience the world. the theme of the paper will be the forms and social processes that assure the rural population access to the goods and services produced and available in brazilian society. this access is assumed to be an indicator of the participation of the brazilians living in the countryside in the results of the social progress obtained by society in general and the effective expression of the constitutional principle of equal opportunities for all citizens. the official definitions of the rural environment in brazil always take it to be the area surrounding urban centers, many of which are small agglomerations. as a result offers of employment and services are not widely available locally, which results, on the one hand, in the precariousness that can be observed in many brazilian rural areas and, on the other, in the need for local populations to have to travel, often covering large distances.