Investimento agrícola “Pronaf mais alimentos” na região Celeiro/RS: uma análise institucional da tomada de decisão

Abstract

The program “Pronaf Investimento Mais Alimentos”, with the intention of fomenting food production, increasing the productivity of family farming and providing access to agricultural implements with technology for producers, has provided opportunities for changes in different rural enterprises. The formal restrictions for joining the investment are due to the requirement to comply with the “Pronaf Aptitude Declaration” (DAP), according to the Law of Family Farming, adding to technical and financial issues. However, for farmers, other criteria are influencing decisions as informal institutional components. It was then considered the elements that are part of the institutional economic theory, which includes decision-making premises and influences provoked by public policies. From this, the research question is: how do the institutional components influence the decision making of the family farmers in an agricultural investment? The goal of the thesis was to analyze the influence of the formal and informal institutional components in the decision-making of those who joined or did not join “Pronaf Mais Alimentos” program in family farming. In order to verify these influences, a research was carried out in three cities of the Celeiro Region in the northwest portion of Rio Grande do Sul State, in Brazil. The mixed method of this research, with a concomitant triangulation strategic approach, has prioritized the quantitative results, followed by the analysis of the qualitative data. Data were analyzed through content analysis, descriptive statistics, non-parametric hypothesis tests and logistic regression. The results showed a process of selection and adaptation of the institutions in family agriculture in the following sense: those who have a low level of technology, little equipment, and improvement, and who are less qualified, only keep their production, often waiting for retirement, or if they already have such a benefit, they continue to live in the countryside due to their quality of life. The expansion of production has taken place due to farmers who have presented formal components with more equity and capital, added to the informal components that represent orientation values on life in the field of expansion of production and personal growth, allied to the search for information and learning processes, besides behavioral patterns of service delivery. By linking formal and informal components and obtaining a statistically significant result of Nalgekerke and Qui-square R², it can be reaffirmed that a membership of “Pronaf Investimento” is influenced by these elements by the time of the decision to invest. It is noteworthy in the informal models such as age, years of activity, behavioral patterns of outsourcing and contracting services, in addition to education, participation in fairs, and finally, the perception of values in relation to the expansion of production and profits. These conclusions present convergences with discussions by North (2005) that the evolutions of these experiences in individuals build the mental models, which explain and interpret the environment in which they are inserted and, ultimately, determine social behavior, influencing the decision making by the agents. When proposing scenarios of probabilities, it can also be seen that the level of technology, when related to the pattern of behavior of non-outsourcing / services contracting, increases the probability of the producers joining the program. It is added that those who give more importance to values of production expansion present a greater probability of adhesion to “Pronaf Investimento Mais Alimentos”. Finally, those who have a pattern of outsourcing/hiring production services and present a very low level of technology do not appear to be the target audience for such agricultural credit policy and should be encouraged in a different way by rural extension actions which consider these particularities.