| Summary: | Agricultural systems in the Barlovento Valley, a major tropical area of cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) production, were studied according to multivariate statistical methods based on factor analysis. Basic data of samples were selected at random from a census of 850 production units, encompassing three main components of the systems: producer's economic rationality, technology, and natural environment. Thirty simple variables were reduced to 11 compound variables or factors. Results indicated that the main factors were related to the technological and economic rationality components of the agricultural systems. Factors were classified by a cluster analysis and farms were grouped into five sets, which defined a spatial pattern in the Barlovento Valley.
|
|---|