Estruturas de governança e apropriação de renda no sistema agroindustrial do café

Abstract

Since deregulation in the coffee sector, competition has been intensified. A new framework is presented, characterized by a high turnover rate, with new entries processing companies, mergers and acquisitions. This framework can insert limits or variances in the competitive dynamics of the chain, in scope of competition, and the possibility of rent appropriation become feasible. Thus, in this work, the objective is comprehend how governance structures present in relationships involving producers and processors in the coffee agribusiness system influence the rent appropriation in North of Paraná. For amplitude theoretical, comprised studies related to the mechanisms of production coordination and agents behavior, involving,therefore, the Transaction Cost Economics (TCE), Measurement Cost Theory (TCM) and Industrial Organization (IO). The field work involved Coffee Agribusiness System in North of Paraná, and comprehension intended was through qualitative research, descriptive,transversal-cut and with a longitudinal perspective, drawing on interviews semi-structured as an instrument of data collection, and content analysis from aggregation of data into categories. The results showed that the market adoption, as governance structure prevalent in interviews, does not align with the attributes and measurable dimensions. Although as a commodity product, it presents specific asset, not costly measurement of dimensions of the attributes that would indicate such conditions as the structure that provides greater efficiency, by ECT and ECM, would be contracts. In integration cases, this is justified by the TCE, since the producers increase their asset specificity, coffee quality, and opt for this structure in order to ensure their property rights. Regarding the market structure, this differs from traditional coffee and specialty coffee fair trade. In traditional coffee case, the prevailing market structure is characterized as competitive structure, being a homogeneous product, has low entry barriers and several producers and processors. In specialty coffee fair trade, the market structure may be characterized as oligopoly differentiated, once the product is differentiated with entry barriers and high concentration of producers. Regarding the possibility of rent appropriation, this was visualized mainly in traditional coffee, by the temporary workers that increase the daily rate at harvest time, taking advantage of producers who depend on their labor during this period, thus appropriating the identify the possibility of quasi-rents appropriation in evaluating the product so slightly lower, allowing different gains in commercialization; it was possible to perceive the Ricardian rent appropriation by processors when add value by blend, paying market price for coffee and winning the disaggregation of products with different quality levels. It was possible to observe the relation between New Institutional Economics and IO theories, due to nonalignment of the governance structure does not present itself as a generator of high transaction costs, unlike the prevailing rational, given the market conditions. It can be inferred that these costs does not occur due to market structure, by low producer concentration, since it is not necessary reputation and there is no dependence between agents.