The Modernization of Brazilian Agriculture Since 1960

Friday Lecture with Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna

The rise of Brazil as a world agricultural powerhouse is one of the most important developments in modern world history. Since 1960 Brazil went from being a food importer to becoming the largest net food exporter in the world. It is now among the top five world producers of some 36 agricultural products. Though Brazil was always an agricultural exporter, it was a mono-producer first with sugar in the colonial period and then with coffee in the 19th and 20th centuries. But these crops were produced with the simplest non-machinery technology and the constant use of virgin soils to which little or no fertilizer or insecticides were ever employed.  Labor was unskilled, farm credit minimal and over half the economically active population was in agriculture. All this changed in the last half of the 20th century and above all after 1990. Today commercial agriculture in Brazil is highly mechanized with access to abundant public and private credit and is a major world consumer of fertilizers and insecticides and competes successfully in the world market even against the United States. Output has quadrupled in the post 1960 period and has been growing at over 3.5% per annum at the same time as total land usage and the number of farms has declined. Moreover, this enormous volume of production is now generated by only 10% of the EAP with a land tenure system little changed from the pre-1960 period. It is the aim of this study to explain how and why this conservative agricultural revolution occurred. We examine the factors of capital, technology, scientific advances, government policies and commercial and industrial reorganizations which made this transformation possible and allowed agriculture to compete in the international market. Moreover, this has occurred in contrast to the large national industrial sector which has failed to compete in the international market after 1990.

Herbert S. Klein is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and curator of the Latin America collection in the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. From 2005-2011 he was Professor of History and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies, at Stanford University. In 2005, he retired from Columbia University as the Gouveneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History, where he taught between 1969-2003.

Francisco Vidal Luna serves as a Professor of Faculdade de Economia e Administração da Universidade de São Paulo - USP. Dr. Luna served as the Secretary of Economy and Planning of the State of São Paulo between 2007-2010. He is co-author of a number of books with Herb Klein, including "The Economic and Social History of Brazil since 1889" (2014), "Slavery in Brazil" (2009), and "Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750-1850" (2003).