Competitividade das exportações brasileiras de frutas para o mercado europeu

Abstract

Over the last few years, Brazil has increased its market share on the international market of fruits. Despite this increase, it remains insignificant considering the country's productive capacity. The objective of this study is to analyze the competitiveness of the Brazilian fruit exports to the European market, therefore identifying the important factors that have influenced these exports. The data used for such purpose were selected from the crops of mango, grapes, papaya and melon. To perform the analysis it was applied the following models, namely (i) Constant-Market Share (CMS) from 1990 to 2009 and (ii) the revealed Comparative Advantage-(VCR) for the period 2000 to 2009, and finally we applied surveys on three enterprise to test the results obtained from the models. The results from the VCR have shown that, in the Brazilian case, VCR> 1 which means that the country has generated surpluses in the cases analyzed here. The European Union (EU) is the largest importer of Brazilian fruits and some imports exceed 90%. The results obtained from the CMS model has shown that there was an increase for the sub-period (1990/91/92) and sub-period (1999/00/01). The last sub-period (2007/08 / 09) there was a decline due to reduced demand from the import market. The decrease in demand was driven by the 2008 crisis in the euro zone. Another factor that affected the Brazilian fruit’s exportation was the devaluation of foreign currencies, e.g., dollar and euro, given that the contracts between Brazilian exporters and European importers are signed in these currencies. Besides these variables, the precariousness of the national highways and ports has influenced negatively the competitiveness of Brazilian exportation sector. Despite these costs, given the high quality of the fruits produced, Brazil still competitive in the exportation of melon, grape and mango.