Efeito da precipitação sobre a eficiência técnica de produtores de café

Abstract

This paper aimed to analyze the coffee farms technical efficiency in Cerrado and South of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and verify how climate variables could alter the results. The omission of environmental variables may bias the results because the choice of farmers’ inputs respond, in parts, to the environmental conditions. The methodological framework was based in a stochastic frontier production. In a general way, we observed a very small impact of the addition of climate variables to determine technical efficiency. However, analyzing the producer’s efficiency and viewed separately each region is possible to identify some influence of environmental variables to determine the technical efficiency, still modest. The number of producers in high classes decrease when it was considerate the rainfall impact. We emphasize that this result is related to the current climate scenario. In the future, with climate change, the impacts probably will change significantly.