Abstract

This article studies the self-perception of the socioeconomic reality of the productive process of small rural producers in a metropolitan region of Brazil. Small food production accounts for a significant proportion of the country’s total food output. The objective of this study is to investigate the opportunities for advances in small production and the institutional, environmental, and economic obstacles that hinder this process. The hypothesis is that the producers’ failure is related to regulatory complexity and the difficulty of adapting to legal regulations. The adopted methodology was documentary and qualitative analysis through online research. The results confirm the hypothesis, since in the view of small producers, regulatory complexity impairs the performance of their enterprises. The work also identified an unexpected complaint: difficulties in selling produce in the most developed region of the country. It is concluded that the productive activity of small producers faces difficulties because of both entangling and overlapping divergent laws and production flow infrastructure, which producers identified as inadequate.