Determinantes dos custos na produção de cana-de-açúcar no Brasil

Abstract

The costs involved in production chains that are based on agricultural commodities cover a high complexity of the elements involved in these activities. Among the various agricultural activities in the country, sugarcane stands out as one of the great activities of agribusiness. the general objective of this paper is to identify the determinants of sugarcane costs and to verify their effects on the cost structure of the organizations. It has the hypothesis that despite all growth, sugarcane production still faces numerous difficulties, especially with regard to infrastructure and other factors essential to production. As for the methodology, this is an exploratory research for clarifying concepts, quantitative by the technique of data collection and documentary character by the analysis of material aiming to discover social or economic circumstances with which they may be related. The results showed that the analysis of sugarcane production costs allows the identification of some determinant factors that significantly affect the cost structure that must be administered by the producers to obtain advantageous results, it was observed that the planting, the labor force and the geographical profile were some factors. It should be noted that the stage of preparation of the soil and planting is the step that contemplates more operations, however it is not the one that presents the greatest cost. It is suggested for future researches the analysis of the revenue with the costs per product (sugar, ethanol) besides the use of macroeconomic variables in order to apply the accounting of costs with a larger series.