Caracterização de cafeicultores do norte pioneiro do Paraná por meio de análises de “cluster” e discriminante

Abstract

In recent years, the Brazilian coffee production has been undergoing major changes motivated by new more attentive consumer markets to the questions of the production process related to environmental preservation, health of rural workers, the living conditions of rural families, the coffee quality and safety food, among others. Such markets, which pay better for a different coffee requires from the farmers to adopt more sustainable practices of coffee production. For family farmers, so that these changes valued by consumers are put into practice, it is important to establish policies that strengthen associations and cooperatives, as well as efficient and constant production of differentiated coffees. This coffee must be of high quality, produced by means a careful technical program able to decisively position the clusters before these markets that are increasingly close to the family coffee farms. In this study the objective was to study the technical and socioeconomic profile of 56 farmers certified Fair Trade, affiliated to the Specialty Coffee Association of Norte Pioneiro of Paraná (ACENPP), participants of the "Specialty Coffee" and members of the "100% Quality" and characterize them in terms of agricultural practices adopted in their coffee farms. To obtain the data in the field, it was used a structured questionnaire "Survey" between the months of March to May 2015 and the information analysis occurred with the use of SPSS 17.0 (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). First, there is the existence of significant differences between the farmers, which allowed the identification of two interview groups. The first group was formed by farmers with lower property area and lower annual production of coffee, but with greater technical alignment with the guidelines of the project regard to good farming practices, but which have major difficulties in coffee marketing and the second group, consisting of farmers who have larger farms, more diversified as the crop, which perform coffee marketing more efficiently, however, present significant technical limitations in the production process.