Closing the yield gap: The politics of agrarian extractivist technologies in Brazil

• In Event: Reestructuraciones, intervenciones, y mercados en en el sector agroindustrial

Abstract

In the last forty years, agricultural export commodities have come to play a crucial role in underpinning Brazil’s economic development. The rapid increase in the production of key export crops in Brazil has been premised on two explicit state goals: 1) the incorporation and control of agricultural ‘frontiers’ and; 2) the development of new technologies to render landscapes as agroindustrial extraction zones. The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (know by its Portuguese acronym of Embrapa) was established in 1973 to inform and carryout these two aforementioned state objectives. This paper critically examines the case of Brazil’s center-west region, the Cerrado, where Embrapa played a central role in organizing the social and ecological environment into a form of agro-extractivist production. According to Norman Borlaug, often called the father of the Green Revolution, Embrapa’s work in the Cerrado produced “the world’s most important agricultural expansion zone for this century”. The paper argues that the technological transformation of the Cerrado must be situated in its relation to the politics of scientific research as an explicit state-building project. This research is based on thirty interviews with Embrapa managers, scientists and state bureaucrats to understand the social relations of how agricultural science is conducted, what are its objectives and why a particular form of technology is developed to expand agricultural commodity exports. A more recent push to reproduce the Brazilian experience of agro extractivism in Sub Saharan Africa demands a critical examination into the technological underpinnings of the Brazilian agricultural miracle itself.

Author

• Ryan Nehring, Cornell University