Trade Agreements and their Impacts on the Familiar Agriculture in Brazil

The concept of Familiar Agriculture has been used in Brazil to guide the agriculture policy towards farmers who use the labor available at the household more intensively and also were historically less privileged by the agriculture policy. This paper evaluates the impacts of trade agreements scenarios on the Brazilian economy, industries and families, considering the differences between rural and urban households and familiar and commercial farmers. We use the GTAPinGAMS computable general equilibrium model in its last version with the most recent available GTAP data. The model is modified to account for different households in Brazil, with a more detailed focus in several categories of familiar farmers. We simulate multilateral, regional and multi-regional agreements to measure the differentiated impacts of trade polices on groups of familiar farmers, commercial farmers and rural employees. Our results show that the familiar farmers gain with the agreements and the income differential between rural and urban households decreases in Brazil. However, the income distribution among rural households is deteriorated, since the commercial farmers, relatively richer in land and capital, present higher gains than familiar farmers, and the rural employees, usually without land and education, suffer losses.