UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE DO SUL - UFRGS CENTRO DE ESTUDOS E PESQUISAS EM AGRONEGÓCIOS PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM AGRONEGÓCIOS

The agricultural production more and more is targeted to attend the market demands where it is commercialized, as well as to follow the legal aspects of the country looking for a bigger food safety. However, alterations in the standards need that the whole productive chain alters for its implementation. In this process, it is necessary to alter the set of apprenticeship and to introduce the new set of rules, formal or informal. The Integrated Fruit Production (IFP) appeared in Italy in order to reduce faced problems in the apple culture by the pest resistance. In Brazil, it was introduced, requested by the apple productive sector, to reduce the risk of the national product to be rejected in other markets, especially in the European Union (EU) So, it was adopted like a public agricultural politics with the objective of stimulating a bigger standard of quality to the national product, getting higher the use of traceability and certification in the Brazilian agriculture, but for that the productive sector must realize the incentives and have to implement several changes, adapting to the new institutional standard, in other words, to the new game rules. This paper analyses the influence of the institutions and organizations in the adoption of the Integrated Apple Production (IAP), valuing the incentives, difficulties, construction of the rules, among others. To understand this process, it was done visits to the enterprises and producing cooperatives that adopt or adopted the IAP, collecting the informations through structured questionnaires and interviews with other public and private agents who participate of the process to value these aspects through several visions. The IAP is of spontaneous adoption and as a strategy it was looked for creation of experimental areas to show the system efficiency and creation of the standards together with the technical committees, with the participation of the productive sector. The enterprises and cooperatives adhered to the proposed system, however, the enterprises for the demands of the markets in which they participate, also were using other certification systems and they stopped certifying the IAP, even using its recommendations. In the cooperatives, they keep on certifying, because the biggest incentive is to have production control, with the standardization of products and processes among the cooperated ones. The current processes can change easily, what makes necessary that several agents of the productive system, public or private, realize the changes and manages to implement them.