Resumo

This study deals with the organizational forms of agricultural corporations, defined here as profit oriented companies that operate in agricultural production with high scale, various types of property structures and institutional arrangements for the coordination of production transactions. The emergence of agricultural corporations is part of the ongoing transformations in agriculture, traditionally conducted in establishments with individual farmer registration.

The general objective of this article is to propose a typology to analyze the agricultural corporations based on capital ownership structure, productive profile and coordination of transactions. The two specific objectives are, first, to present the subcategories of the typology according to institutional environment and observed practices in the sector, and second, to test the typology with secondary data on a sample of agricultural corporations.

Some research efforts have been made to explain the characteristics of the agricultural production units. In this field, we can highlight three approaches. First, to consider the principal-agent relationship to justify the predominance of family farms (Allen and Lueck, 1998). Second, associate the attributes of the assets involved in the production as determinants of financial structure (Mondelli and Klein, 2014). Third, the choice of organizational form and structures of governance of global farmers in response to property rights enforcement and measurement costs of the transactions.

This article have an exploratory and qualitative analysis of the issue of the organizational forms of agricultural corporations in the Brazilian research context. We could collect a sample with the 19 largest groups in Brazil, according to the perceptions of the respondents.With this group of companies, we started the collection of secondary data to construct an original database with relevant information to apply the proposed typology.

The data on Land Formation indicate a clear distinction between foreign and national corporations, since all of the companies in the first case adopt this strategy, and only a two national corporation follow this option. This could be explained for the profile of the capital owners abroad when investing in primary sector in Brazil, particularly with respect to the profitability and the construction of exit mechanisms for the investments. The data on property rights on land indicate a conservative profile of the corporations.

The results offered an overview of these issues for a sample of 19 agricultural corporations, which can be considered almost a census in the segment of large-scale agricultural production by profit oriented organizations in Brazil. This is a relevant contribution of the article, and to our knowledge there wasn´t an earlier study with this characteristics. Productive Profile is diversified in terms of scale of production, the average level is as high as 170,000 ha. The governance challenges of these structures present risks from the areas of production, market, weather and logistics.

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