Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: LUCIANA FREITAS DE ANDRADE

THE EFFECT OF SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES ON BRAZILIAN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION: AN ANALYSIS BASED ON THE 2017 AGRICULTURAL CENSUS

Sustainable Agricultural Practices, Production Theory, Agricultural Production, Agricultural Establishments.

The objective of this study is to generate knowledge about the role of sustainable agricultural practices in the context of Brazilian agricultural production. The study intends to verify the potential of sustainable agricultural practices in leveraging the productivity of Brazilian agriculture, comparing with conventional agricultural practices, and analyzing their participation in the performance of Brazilian agriculture in recent years. For this, the theory of production represented mathematically by a production function was adopted, to describe an output quantity that an agricultural establishment can produce from certain quantities of inputs using efficient production methods. Agricultural practices will be incorporated as a component of the Cobb-Douglas production function in order to identify its effect. And to verify the effects of sustainable agricultural practices, the method of ordinary least squares will be used.

The data used in this work come from the 2017 Agricultural Census of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics - IBGE. The analysis units will be the 5,564 Brazilian municipalities, being the maximum number of observations. To estimate the production function, the gross value of agricultural production in 2017 in reais was chosen as the product variable. The production factors were represented by the following variables: cultivation area in hectares encompassing crop, livestock and agroforestry areas; capital goods represented by machinery, tractors and equipment for agricultural establishments; number of people employed in agricultural establishments and agricultural inputs including pesticides, fertilizers, seeds and seedlings, pesticides, fertilizers and veterinary products. The variable of interest, cultivation technique, was selected because it represents sustainable agricultural practices developed by rural producers. And one way to represent it was to consider the establishments that use good agricultural practices in cultivation and the establishments that use conventional cultivation practices.