This paper analyzes small farmers' trajectories in converting to organic farming in the metropolitan region of Sao Paulo during the 1990s and 2000s. The conversion occurred under the initial push of individuals connected the movement of the Theology of Liberation and after the structuring of a regional market around large-scale distribution. The paper shows how the integration of these farmers in a market system ruled by capitalist logic was accompanied, at the local level, by the professionalization of agriculture and by the implantation of corporate structures and logic. It also shows how these ecologic modernization dynamics, while contributing to the creation of a new rural elite and new forms of social inequality, seem to also be able to contribute to the maintenance of farming in a context of strong urban pressure, to the return of young people to farming, and the construction of territories of ecologic quality. In this sense, it questions whether contexts exist in which ecologic modernization would be a compromise accepted by defenders of more radical alternatives? Whichever the answer to this question, the answer we propose underlines the importance of reintegrating the analysis of the ecologic farming trajectories to a broader study of social changes, mainly in its local components.
