Resultado econômico da estocagem no âmbito da cafeicultura brasileira

Abstract

Within the Brazilian agribusiness, coffee is an important item on the national production agenda. Besides being the largest producer and exporter, Brazil is one of the largest consumer markets of the product. But the activity is fraught with risks and uncertainties. The constant fluctuation of market prices of arabica coffee makes producers seek to protect themselves by sales alternatives that maximize their profitability. One strategy for this is to maintain inventories. The purpose of this paper was to present the particularities and contrasts of Economic Management approach regarding the decision to hold inventory, particularly in the Brazilian coffee culture. For this, it was proposed to evidence, in different coffee selling alternatives, the behavior of the economic result of storage within the Brazilian coffee culture in the last 8 years, from 2004 to 2011, monthly, covering, therefore, four periods of high harvests (2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010) and four periods of low harvests (2005, 2007, 2009 and 2011). In order to understand the most frequent and affordable selling alternatives for the producer of arabica coffee, it was analyzed the time period of 12 months before the month of harvest and 12 months after it. The economic result of storage was analyzed in light of the Operational Contribution Margin of Storage, according to the precepts of the Economic Management approach. The values obtained were analyzed separately for the years of high and low harvests, to observe the impact of biannuality of coffee culture in the economic results of storage. Within the time period delimited, 108 possible selling alternatives were identified for each year of harvest. From these, 13 include spot contracts and 95 include future contracts. Although found the possibility of storage generate economic value to the producer, it was not possible to determine a single best coffee selling alternative. The higher economic result of storage will depend on the economic scenario of each year. Nevertheless, it was possible to observe favorable moments for selling the product. For spot contracts, the best periods for physical settlement occurred during the interharvest, between the 5th and 12th month of storage, in high harvests. In low harvests, storage did not show favorable results for spot contracts, which makes the sale in the harvesting month the best alternative, without any storage. For future contracts, the period of the interharvest, specifically 9 and 11 months of storage, was the best period for physical settlement in high harvests. In low harvests, however, there were no significant differences between the period of the harvest and interharvest. Comparatively, the economic results of storage in the years of high harvests were higher than in lower harvests for both spot and future contracts. The results show that the decision to hold inventory and how long to keep them should always take into account the effect of biannuality of the coffee culture, since the behavior of values in high harvests tend to be quite different than in low harvests.