Owing to macroeconomic problems in Brazil in the late nineties, some modifications occurred in the agricultural cooperatives institutional environment that had influence on debt level and compromised the cooperative enterprises leverage on financial market resources. This situation has improved, in recent years, to maintain cooperatives' organizational competition level in markets. Owing to the significant implications of this important new business environment, this paper tries to discuss the tools to reduce the information asymmetry among cooperatives and the financial markets agents. In this way, developing a rating methodology applied to agricultural cooperatives in Brazil to reduce moral hazard and adverse selection that creates business and contractual organizational inefficiency among cooperatives and financial markets agents. The 'five C' method was used which considers organizational financial capacity, corporate governance characteristics, relations with members, and commodity market characteristics, among others. A weighting and evaluation were associated with each variable. The result was applied to an agricultural cooperative case study which concluded that this methodology is applicable and that results, evaluations and weights, could be discussed in cooperative rating committees. As a final consideration, an agenda is discussed for new applications of this methodology, for testing in other agricultural cooperative organizations and to consolidate it as a market financial information signal.
Cooperatives; Rating; Auditing; Risk
