Os efeitos econômicos da expansão dos bioinsumos no Brasil

Abstract

The expansion of agricultural bioinputs constitutes a central strategy in the technological transition of Brazilian agriculture, aligned with the guidelines of the National Bioinputs Program (Decree No. 10,375/2020) and with the new legal framework established by Law No. 15,070/2024. Despite the institutional relevance of the topic, an analytical gap persists regarding the systemic measurement of the economic, sectoral, and distributional effects of this policy under different fiscal financing regimes. This dissertation aims to analyze, in an integrated manner, the economic impacts of the expansion of the biofertilizer, biopesticide, and biocomposting sectors on the Brazilian economy over the 2024–2050 horizon, with emphasis on the role of the production subsidies granted to bioinputs and on their macroeconomic and sectoral repercussions, as well as their effects on relative prices, under distinct fiscal policy scenarios. The methodological strategy articulates two complementary and successive stages. In the first, the elasticity of land productivity with respect to fertilizer use is estimated by means of a fixed-effects panel-data econometric model. In turn, in the second stage, this estimated parameter is used to compute productivity shocks derived from the use of fertilizers and biofertilizers in the policy solutions of a recursive-dynamic computable general equilibrium model for the Brazilian economy, named BIO-BR, which explicitly disaggregates the bioinput sectors within the national production matrix and simulates six policy scenarios, organized into three pairs of fiscal regimes: free budget, balance via taxation, and balance via expenditure, each evaluated with and without land productivity gains. The main results indicate that the expansion of bioinputs would produce positive macroeconomic effects in the free-budget scenarios, with cumulative deviations in real GDP between 0.27% and 0.28% in the long run, accompanied by an expansion of investment, household consumption, the capital stock, and the real wage. The scenario of budgetary balance via expenditure reallocation emerges as a fiscally sustainable alternative, preserving positive effects on GDP, investment, and external competitiveness. The contribution of this dissertation is articulated along four main fronts, namely: a novel analytical instrument for the systemic assessment of bioinput policy in Brazil; it constitutes the first integrated quantification of its macroeconomic, sectoral, and distributional effects; it points to the identification of a redistributive mechanism operating through food prices; and a demonstration of the feasibility of coexistence between bioinputs and the conventional agrochemical sector.