Analysis of the Agribusiness Form in Farm Management in South America

the Uruguayan Case

Abstract

The Southern Cone of Latin America lives an expansive process of agriculture of grains without precedents in magnitude and intensity. In only six years the production of soybeans doubled from 45 to 90 million tons per year in this region. This process is consequence of big technological changes associated with the emergence of the direct sowing, the transgenic, and the ICTs. Also the demands of commodities and the appearance of new actors with logics and strategies different from the traditional farm, they generate a dynamics of growth and productive concentration without precedents in Uruguay, which along with the forestry, presses the traditional farmer, generating a strong intensification and a pressure on the natural resources. The new companies are alike the industry, as for the normalization and standardization of processes, technologies, financing through investment funds and generating networks of contacts and business relations. The central aim of the present work is to analyze the changes in the business management of the agricultural companies from the perspective of the Industrial Economy, with special emphasis in the companies in network of the Uruguayan agriculture. This is possible by means of the combination of strategies based on the available information, interview to experts, and methodologies that allow to understand through a conceptual model the form, strategies of work and factors of success of the network companies.