Unit’s productive integrals, as a product of tourism for sustainable Rural Development

Abstract

The productive integrals units (UPI), are a production system that allows optimal use of natural and cultural resources through the management of low-cost technologies, promoting endogenous development and sustainable auto and high diversity of products agricultural, forestry and energy of local origin or adapted to the territory.  They typically deal with family labor, organic products of indigenous origin, marketable and linkable to the local tourism product. Its importance lies in that provide food security, integrated management of resources, protection of the environment, formation of micro-enterprises and community organization.  For this reason the National University of Costa Rica (UNA) with his extracurricular projects, accompany these indigenous communities in the implementation of these units. As a project called: self-management and sustainability of the productive units in indigenous territories of the Valley star, with a view to the consolidation of a system of production based on an indigenous cosmovision and ancestral knowledge exchange in the Territory Tayni indigenous, in the Valle de la Estrella, Limon, Costa Rica; which with participatory techniques which tend to favour the exchange of ancestral knowledge as a tool for learning. In this territory the one has managed to replicate the model of the UPI, in all schools around the first initiative created in 2015, allowing diversification of food products in local student canteens and in the community and in overall, the rescue of traditional medicinal products of the forest, and the local culture. The project has generated local empowerment and has created the need to venture into rural community tourism, focused on the local ancestral knowledge initiatives. Associated with the motivation of students in schools to enter in a future one, where there are currently five students of this territory, of which four are already graduating in the different careers of Sarapiquí Campus.