Tensões intertemporais amenizadas por meio de práticas conservacionistas: um estudo aplicado na produção da soja

Abstract

One of the main challenges for soy producers can be the reconciliation between good short-term economic performance with good long-term environmental and economic performance. Therefore, it is essential to think about the sustainability of agricultural companies considering the temporal aspect. In this way, it is verified that the necessity to present good immediate results can carry through inducing the rural producer to ignore some important conservation practices in the cultivation of the soybean, that can generate positive results both environmental and economic over time. Thus, this project searched to analyze the relationship between conservation practices used in soybean production and the intertemporal tensions related to sustainability inherent to agricultural activity. For this, it was estimated the level of efficiency that 40 soybean producers worked in the 2016/2017 harvest through the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). From the Mann-Whitney test, it was verified the behavior of the efficiency scores obtained for each soy producer through the adoption of conservation practices. It was possible to observe a significantly greater difference in the technical efficiency of those producers who adopted conservation practices than those who did not adopt these practices in their production process. Thus, the findings of this project may indicate that through the use of these conservation practices in the production of soybeans it is possible to reduce the tensions existing between short and long term decisions, given that, besides the economic and environmental results, there is a possibility to increase significantly the level of technical efficiency in soy production, reducing inputs and minimizing long-term environmental impacts, thus maximizing short-term economic results.