The Institute of Applied Economic Research (Ipea) released on Thursday (02) a study that analyzes the total productivity of factors (PTF) in Brazilian agriculture. The text was prepared in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply (Mapa) and the Center for Advanced Studies in Applied Economics (Cepea-USP).

Brazilian agricultural production increased by 400% from 1975 to 2020.

According to the authors, the average growth of PTF in this period was 3.3% per year.

Ptf is the relationship between the total product index and the index of inums. It is calculated by the difference between the growth rates of the total product and the inums.

The PTF explained 87% of the product increase in the period studied, while the inums corresponded only to 13%.

In the context of national agricultural production, the expansion of capital in the form of machinery, fertilizers and pesticides has outsperformed the growth of other factors, such as land and labor.

"We can say that our production is intensive in science and technology and less and less intensive in traditional factors. This dynamic results in a huge increase in work productivity over time," said José Eustáquio Ribeiro Vieira Filho, ipea researcher and one of the authors of the study.

Brazil has promoted several reforms in the production research and financing system. We highlight the policies of credit and insurance, prices, cutting subsidies, among others.

In addition, there has been an increase in resources, with an emphasis on investment credit, financing lines that serve different production sizes, as well as in areas that stimulate low-carbon agriculture.

José Garcia Gasques, general coordinator of Policies and Information of the Map, explained that "investments in research, biological nitrogen fixation, no-tillage adoption and maintenance of integrated systems (crop-livestock-forests) proved quite viable for the tropical conditions of the country."

According to him, these productive systems brought marked productivity gains of the national agriculture.

Productivity

Productivity growth, the research authors argue, enabled the competitiveness of agriculture and allowed food to become more abundant and cheaper.

"If it were not for the reduction of food participation in household income since the 1970s (from 50% to 20%), income transfer policies, which gained strength from the late 1990s, they would not have the effectiveness they had, without the fall in the price of food and the expansion of the productive supply of agricultural goods", said José Eustáquio.

Between 1995 and 2017, for a 100% growth in the gross value of production, the technology's share rose from 50% to just over 60%. In the same period, the participation of the work factor decreased from 31% to less than 20%, while the share of the land factor was practically stable at 20%.

In the international comparison, Brazil showed a growth of PTF higher than the world average, being among the countries that grew the most from the 1970s onwards.

Brazil, the study reveals, began to lead world productivity from the 2000s, when it began to grow above the rate presented by the world's leading producers, such as the United States, China, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Chile, among others. Between 2000 and 2019, while the Brazilian PTF grew about 3.2% per year, the same global indicator was around 1.7%.

The growth analysis for selected products shows a new geography of national production, with emphasis on soybean, sugarcane and corn, moving to areas of the North, midwest and northeastern cerrados. These new regions also lead the growth of productivity in the country, as verified in the data from the ibge agricultural census survey.

Source: Canal Rural