O PRONAF no Estado do Pará: caracterização, dinâmica e impacto na produção agropecuária.

Abstract

Until the early 1990s, agricultural policies in Brazil were directed at large rural entrepreneurs, with a highly concentrated focus on credit resources for the sector. The construction of a new path began in 1995 when the first specific policy for small production was created based on the National Program to Strength Family Farming (PRONAF), which was designed considering the social, environmental, and economic life of family farmers with an intent to promote the so-called sustainable rural development. Considering that public policy evaluations denote great potential to assist the formulation and evaluation of government projects, the academic interest in this type of analysis has been increasingly growing. In this segment, this research aims to characterize the main effects of PRONAF on family farming in Pará. To fulfill this purpose, the initial approach of this dissertation is dedicated to the general analysis of the Program at the national level, taking into account the perspectives of different studies published between the years 2000 and 2020. The second chapter performs the diagnosis of credit supply behavior in the state of Pará between the years 2000 and 2019, using methodologies such as shift-share to decompose the sources of credit growth, the Gini Index to measure the concentration level of resources, and the Normalized Index of Rural Credit and Agriculture and Livestock (INCR and INAP) to identify the productive specialties of family farming at the municipal level. Ultimately, the methodology of the third chapter employs panel data econometric modeling to verify the existence or not of possible connections of PRONAF financing on the main products produced by family farming. The perspectives of the studies on the policy indicate improvements in the performance of the Program although there are still many challenges to be overcome, for instance, the high concentration of resources. In Pará, the results show that credit is concentrated mainly on livestock farming and the largest financial flow occurs in more regions considered more representative in the context of the state. Concerning the set of financial products, the application of credit in the state prioritizes, in addition to livestock farming, perennial crops such as açaí, cocoa, and palm oil. Regarding the effects of financing, the evaluations of this research indicate the Program hadn’t had much impact on the agricultural items analyzed (pineapple, banana, cocoa, beans, cassava crops, pepper, açaí, milk production, number of cows… and cattle expansion) This result reveals that the policy still fails in its objective of providing the necessary conditions to increase the productive efficiency of these productive systems in Pará.