Mudança tecnológica na cafeicultura mineira: um estudo no período de 1978 a 1993

Abstract

Coffee is one the principal "commodities" traded on the international market. Due to it's importance in obtainings foreign exchange credits for Brazil at the beginning of the century, the Brazilian government began to intefere in the market early on, which became know as coffee valorization politics. These politics changed throughout time in terms of implementatíon, but have elements in common with the maintenance of coffee prices on the outside market, which exclude objecting modernization and the macroeconomy stability. Although, in spite of having reached their objectives in a short time, they ended generating long term negative effects for national coffee growing. Brazilian coffee growing has been characterized by an image of cyclical crisis since it's early beginnings primordium. However before the International Coffe Agreement (AJC) in July, 1989, coffee prices registered at the lowest levies since the turn of the which made it the employment century, and the activity stoyed with the least return in the last 30 years. This crisis caused distortions and losses in the technological standard of coffe growing which modified the market's input and it's efficiency. As a result, the use of productive recourses was redirected and Xlll investments in that sector were reduced. In turn, both productivity and product quality decreased while production costs increased. The main objective of this study was to show the changes in the technological treatment of coffee growing and it's relation to the productive inputs market analogy. It was intended to verify the relatioships between the input market and the input substitution of production activity. This study was based on the theory of duality between production and cost as well as the economic concepts refered to as cross-price direct elasticities of factor demand and Allen's substitution elasticties between production inputs. This data used in this study includes a 15 year time span 1978/79 to 1992/93 and were collected from the following publications: Anuário Estatístico do Café' publication, Informe Agropecuário, and coffee operations costs from Cooparaíso, Cooxupé's co-operative, and from Emater-MG. The model used was based on the Translog cost íunction that places the total cost of coffee production as a dependent variable and coffee production prices of productive inputs (land, capital, labor, recourses and other costs) as an independem variable. In addition, the "dummy" variables Di and D2 were used as subsidies in order to analyse the variations of investiment in each productive factor between 5 year sub-periods. The procedure used to obtain desired cost parameters consisted of the applying Shephard's premise in an indirect cost íunction and generating a cost parcels equation system. Zellners iterative method was utilized to treat desired properties within the parameters of the parcel estimators. In regards to "dummy" variables, alterations are shown in the technological treatment of coffee production between the analysed sub-periods. The proportion of expense of XIV land and labor in relation to total cost, increased during the analysed period and the parcel of capital cost decreased. The use of recoursesremained practically inaltered. The econometric results show that direct price-elasticities of production's factors of coffee growing reflect a great sensibility to recourse price alterations, thereby demonstrating the scarceness of this recourse in the productive process. Substitution reveals the relation between recourses and land; recourses were more utilized if the land became more scarce. This relation is indicated by the cross-price elasticity of factor demand in relation to land price. The cross-price elasticity of the demand for capital in relation to recourses's price, shows that capital and recourses are substitutes in production. In addition a closer analysis of the labor demand structure, shows the substitution relation between this factor and capital. In accordance with substitution elasticities, land and recourses, capital and