Feeding the World: Brazil’s Transformation into a Modern Agricultural Economy. By Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2019) 413 pp. $94.99 cloth $32.99 paper

Abstract

Esteemed co-authors Klein and Vidal Luna have added one more outstanding book to their previous important volumes that exhaustively explored the economic and demographic history of Brazil, slavery, the Cold War, and the period of the military dictatorship, 1964–1985. Feeding the World traces the change in Brazilian agriculture from a long-standing colonial legacy of reliance on single exports (sugar and coffee), based on low-technology and the continuing incorporation of new lands on the internal frontier, using unskilled labor and few agricultural inputs. By contrast, today Brazil is one of the top five world producers of thirty-six agricultural products, and the first- or second-largest exporter of dozens of crops including oranges, sugar, beef, chicken, corn, and soy, using highly mechanized production techniques, advanced agricultural research, and highly developed systems for agricultural credit and inputs.How did this thoroughgoing transformation happen over the past fifty years? The aim of the book is to provide an explanation, particularly given the contrasting failure of Brazil’s efforts to modernize its industrial sector. The authors argue that the transformation of Brazilian commercial agriculture was due to “the introduction of new products, the occupation of new spaces, and the utilization of the most modern technology available in the market” (2). embrapa, Brazil’s outstanding agricultural research institute, emerged during this period to develop and promote a number of innovations in tropical agriculture. Re-organization and integration of the systems of agricultural credit and marketing led to an impressive growth in production and agricultural exports. The strategy adopted to modernize Brazilian agriculture avoided land-reform initiatives such as those undertaken by many other Latin American nations to address the persistent concentration of landownership. Instead, Brazil’s military government undertook a “conservative agricultural revolution,” providing incentives for traditional landowners to become modern farmers, while leaving traditional land tenure systems intact.Under the military dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s, agricultural development became a priority to keep urban food costs low and overcome the concentrated structure of power and land in rural areas that was an impediment to agricultural development. The regime introduced subsidized credit, minimum pricing policies, and government purchase of agricultural stocks. The military regime also initiated embrapa’s sophisticated agricultural-research program, the factor that “best explains agricultural productivity gains over the past 20 years” through the development of new seed and cattle varieties as well as other technologies implemented on the acidic soils of the cerrado region, primarily in Mato Grosso (41). During the economic crisis of the 1980s, these agricultural-support policies were largely eliminated in favor of the adoption of neoliberal policies, leading market actors to develop integrated systems that would become the principal source of commercial agricultural credit. These changes allowed Brazilian commercial farmers to compete successfully on the world market because of the high productivity of its agriculture.This well-written and data-rich economic history combines a broad understanding of social history with painstaking quantitative analysis from multiple official sources to demonstrate key points and paint a thorough picture of the historical trends. The book, which is organized into nine chapters plus an introduction and conclusions, presents voluminous data—21 maps, 62 graphs, and 107 tables meticulously support its findings and conclusions regarding how and why Brazil became the world’s largest food exporter.The first chapter, “Antecedents,” discusses the evolution of Brazilian agriculture from the colonial period until the 1960s, and the second chapter provides a detailed portrait of the post-1960 “new agricultural economy.” The third chapter reviews the many causes that contributed to this dramatic transformation. The fourth chapter focuses more specifically on the inputs, technology, productivity, and sustainability of Brazilian commercial agriculture. Chapter 5 discusses the important regional differences in wealth, rural well-being, and farm size, and Chapters 6, 7, and 8 focus, respectively, on the states of Mato Grosso, Rio Grande do Sul, and São Paulo to demonstrate the important regional variations in the evolution of commercial agriculture over the last half-century. Chapter 9 focuses on the “Agrarian Question” and the fate of Brazil’s noncommercial farmers, who were largely left out of the conservative modernization approach adopted in Brazil, leading to persistent violent land conflicts and deforestation, especially in the northern and northeastern regions. In these regions, the authors show that even in official colonization areas, poor living conditions and educational levels, as well as low incomes, prevail among farmers largely relegated to the traditional agricultural practices of a century ago.