O agronegócio de carnes de aves e suínos e a especialização regional do Oeste Catarinense

Abstract

The Santa Catarina west area currently includes the national economy as the main producer and supplier of poultry and pork meat, both for the national market and for exportation. The agro-industrial sector, which originated in the region and has consolidated itself as a modern meat production segment, has been stimulated by numerous factors, once essential for its consolidation. At present, the activities of large companies in the sector are carried out based on the dialectic between the local order and the global order, making the study of the regional space emblematic, where production happens. This is because it is in the local or regional space where cooperation between the different stages of the production process is best identified, demonstrating the nuances of achieving globalized agribusiness. In this context, we seek to support the thesis that the traditional poultry and pork meat sector in the West of Santa Catarina, because of its endogenous characteristics (land structure, family productive organization and local capital in the implementation of agro-industries) and of exogenous factors in a certain way more recent (policies for the sector and consumer market dynamics), resulted in a highly competitive region, endowed with significant productive investments, allowing us to recognize it as an Agribusiness Productive Region. To this end, our objective is to understand the characteristics, in Western Santa Catarina, of the processes of productive restructuring of agriculture and the organization of agro-industrial networks, based on the territorial dynamics of poultry and pork meat agribusiness in that region. As a methodology, we favor the definition of themes, processes, variables, and indicators that allow us to identify how the performance of agroindustrial networks occurs and their respective impacts in the regional space. In this way, we found a set of activities, actors, and places linked to modern agro-industrial production that, although comprising interscale relations, are visible mainly in the regional space. This is increasingly specialized, given that the spread of globalized agribusiness was (and still is) the main driver of changes in rural, urban and regional areas in the West of Santa Catarina.