Abstract
In Brazil, the National School Feeding Program (PNAE) seeks to contribute to the socio-economic development of smallholder farmers, prioritizing them in supplying their products for preparing daily meals in public schools. However, farmers face challenges in determining which school calls to bid for and the potential benefits from their participation, due to the multiple quantitative and qualitative decision criteria involved. This paper presents a novel Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)-based method for bidding priority setting, to support the decision making. The model was applied for a case study in Brazil. The academic contribution lies in the innovation of using a Double-Frontier Slack-Based Measure (SBM) DEA model for Hierarchical Network systems, i.e., applied to multiple levels and followed by a tie-breaking method. The practical contribution lies in the decision support of farmers by presenting the results at three levels, the first of which is a ranking by the town or urban cluster priority, the second by the school, and the third by the products. Thus, using the rankings of calls, farmers can make informed decisions regarding the feasibility of bidding for each PNAE public call. At the same time, the objective rankings can alleviate friction and conflict within co-operatives during the decision-making process.
Highlights
According to the perception of public agents, most challenges in implementation are related to the fact that smallholder farmers face several difficulties to operate in the institutional market context
There are two ties in the municipal call of Aparecida de Goiânia. This city is efficient at the school and town levels
A decision-support approach has been developed for priority setting of the bid/no-bid decisions and showed that, the previous existing farmers’ decision heuristics cannot be neglected, they should be systematically integrated to financial criteria to compound a priority setting where qualitative and quantitative measures are used jointly to make a decision
Summary
According to the perception of public agents, most challenges in implementation are related to the fact that smallholder farmers face several difficulties to operate in the institutional market context. “Responsible Rural Research and Innovation” has already been pointed out as a new field of research, once digitalization creates new socio-technical systems which can marginalize rural places [5] In this way, PNAE implementation requires encompassing digitalization for improving efficiency. This paper aims to present a tool to support the decision making of smallholder farmers for priority setting for the bid/no-bid decisions, regarding which public calls they should choose to apply for. This tool considers simultaneously the quantitative characteristics of the calls and the qualitative parameters that reflect the objectives of the smallholder farmers and is based on the calls’ relative efficiencies.
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