Atuação das câmaras técnicas após alterações do conselho estadual de política agrícola - MG sob a ótica institucional

Abstract

The political and economic openness and the growing demands of the consumer market for quality, sustainability and prices constituted a highly competitive environment, which in the Brazilian case intensified after the 1990s. The demands of the various productive sectors, then under pressure, should to find an echo in democratically elected governments, starting with the emergence of structures that would enable the participation of organized civil society in the formulation of public policies. This scenario required a new attitude of the State to receive the demands and contributions of the productive sectors, which led to the emergence and consolidation of the Technical Chambers. In this scenario, the Technical Chambers of the State Council of Agricultural Policy, CEPA, linked to the State Secretariat of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply of Minas Gerais were created in 2003 and underwent reformatting at the end of 2004. The main regimental changes of Cepa were the distinction between sectoral chambers and thematic chambers, minimum and maximum limitation for the number of representatives, majority participation of the private sector, coordination of sectoral chambers by representatives of the private sector, and creation of management committees of the Technical Chambers. The present work sought to answer if such CEPA regimental changes were relevant to improve the dynamics of the work of this forum and creating a favorable institutional environment for productive systems, allowing the reduction of transaction costs in the studied sectors. The theoretical approach is based on New Institutional Economy, NEI, specifically using the Economics of Transaction Costs. To understand the motivation of the regimental changes, semi-structured interviews were conducted with CEPA managers. In order to identify the performance profile of the Coffee Sector Technical Chamber, CTCafé, and the Thematic Technical Chamber of Insurance and Rural Credit, CTSCR, interviews were held with coordinators and rapporteurs. From the content of the minutes, we used the Correspondence Analysis to categorize the issues raised in these forums regarding nature if they belong to institutional, technological or organizational themes. Finally, some of the sectoral demands worked out in these Chambers were selected and the Comparative Discrete Structural Analysis was used to evaluate the contribution to the reduction of Transaction Costs in the Agroindustrial System, SAG. The results show that the changes in the regiments brought improvements in the dynamics of the Chambers functioning, specifically in the questions, organization and planning, representation legitimacy, t echnical dialogue and reduction of informational asymmetry. The performance profile of both Chambers prevails in the solution of demands of the institutional scope, which justifies, by the government, the existence and the maintenance of such interaction mechanisms with organized civil society. There is evidence of contributions to reduce transaction costs related to the demands made in these forums, such as the restrictions on access to rural credit imposed by agroclimatic risk zoning for some municipalities in Minas Gerais, in the proposal "Minas Gerais + Insurance", in the use of municipal average productivity as a parameter to compensate rural producers who purchase rural insurance, and finally, in the definition of quality attributes in public licitations for the purchase of coffee.