Diseño de soluciones centradas en el usuario

The background for the significant rise in Brazilian agricultural production from the end of the 20th century must, as has been done in previous sections, be seen in the light of a broader process of multidimensional restructurings within the global food system. Yet, although a broad range of financial, technological, and institutional factors within the wider global political economy of agriculture were essential in spurring Brazilian agro-industrial development, important drivers behind this phenomenon should nonetheless be found within the domestic sphere.

Until around 1970, expansion of Brazilian agriculture had taken place in traditional agricultural regions, characterized by their relative proximity to the population centers in the coastal regions. Yet, in the early 1970s, the potential for further increasing the area under cultivation in these regions was approaching exhaustion (ALVES 2016, p.152). Furthermore, the pressed national food supply, as well as the need to generate external revenues from the primary commodity sectors to fund the country´s ongoing industrialization process, meant that public attention was directed towards augmenting agricultural production (Ibid). This led the military regime at the time to pursue a policy of inwards agricultural expansion in the Cerrado and the Amazon regions. The Programa de Cooperação Nipo-Brasileira para o

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Desenvolvimento dos Cerrados (PRODECER), signed between Brazil and Japan in 1974, was established as part of these ambitions. The scarce Japanese land availability had pushed the country towards the pursuit of food security by providing technological expertise for the cultivation of the Brazilian Cerrado scrubland, with the adaption of the temperate soybean crop to this climate. Similarly, the Plano de Integração Nacional (PIN), which implied a strong infrastructural expansion in the Legal Amazon, also stimulated the growth of agriculture, - not least in the state of Mato Grosso, in which the farmland area grew from 22 million hectares to 38 million between 1975-1985 (CHADDAD 2016, p.113).

The introduction of agriculture within the Cerrado region in turn, became highly dependent upon public engagement within the field of technical development, related to soil improvements, proliferation of best practices to medium-sized farmers, as well as biotechnological innovation (HOSONO & HONGO 2016, p.11). The strong public engagement in relation to agricultural expansion from the time of the import substitution industrialization period has thereby been strongly emphasized as an essential factor in spurring the sector´s subsequent competitiveness (HOPEWELL 2016a).

The public involvement became particularly pronounced in relation to the technological innovations which permitted the cultivation of a long range of crops in the Cerrado region. The Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (Embrapa), a public research institution founded in 1972 with the goal of developing biological research for the use in agriculture, became particularly relevant in this regard. Embrapa was thereby minded at assuming the risks associated with the high costs of investment related to research and development of new agricultural technology, in order to be able to proliferate its findings to the general use of Brazilian farmers (HOSONO & HONGO 2016, p.13). In the beginning of the 1980s, Embrapa developed new cultivars of the soybean adapted to cultivation in tropical regions (CHADDAD 2016, p.117), and along the 1980s and 1990s, the organization developed a broad range of cultivars which proved to be a very significant for the introduction of large-scale agriculture in the Cerrado region (LOPES et al. 2012, p.35). Agricultural innovation in this period was also advanced within other public and private research institutes (HOSONO & HONGO 2016, p.26), as well as a series of public universities (Ibid p.19). Embrapa also maintained a close cooperation with public universities, and helped consolidate a range of graduate programmes within agricultural research (LOPES et al. 2012, p.41). The

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institution also maintained a wide cooperation network with universities and similar organizations in other countries (Ibid, pp.31-32) .

Embrapa hereby occupies a special position in relation to research in tropical agriculture, - both in Brazil and globally - which also came to confer a special financial priority to this organization. This is reflected within the organization´s budget, which by 1980 had reached a point of 0,5% of the entire Brazilian agricultural GDP, a number which rose to around 1% by 1990 (ALVES 2016, p.144). The impact of Embrapa´s research and development efforts span very broadly, ranging from yield increase and crop adaption, to the lowering of production costs and diversification of production systems (LOPES et al. 2012, p.35). It has thus been estimated, that for every 1 R$ of public investment in Embrapa, societal gains amount to R$ 8.62 (Ibid p.40). When accounting for the Brazilian agro-industrial development up through the last decades of the 20th century, the significance of domestic innovation must thereby be at least partially taken into consideration, as they appear to have constituted an important condition for this development to materialize.

The increase in cultivation in the Cerrado region stands as the conjointment of a broad range of factors, comprising of both scalar expansion, as well as rises productivity and resource application in the production process. Land productivity gains for crop production in the state of Mato Grosso have thus been estimated to account for an average annual rise in agricultural production of 3.1% since 1976, while expansion of the planted area has been found to account for 6,8% (CHADDAD 2016, p.116). Land productivity gains for soy production have been found to increase around 2% per year (Ibid). Rada´s analysis of the total factor productivity (TFP) in the Cerrado region nonetheless point to great differences between the most efficient farms, which from 1985-2006 experienced annual TFP increases of 4.3%, while less efficient producers only reached 0,4% per year (RADA 2013, p.153). The same study also indicates that when accounting for the broad range of inputs used in agricultural production, efficiency gains have only constituted a very minor part of output increases, while the inclusion of new land, and the more intensive application of labour, materials, capital as well as infrastructural development, has constituted very significant factors behind the development of agricultural production on the Cerrado (RADA 2013, pp.151-153). In their analysis of the TFP increases within Brazilian agriculture, Gasques et al. (2004) also find an average increase of 3.3% from 1975-2002. The increases in agricultural expansion, particularly of soybeans, has also spilled over into the rise of a very

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significant agro-industrial complex, implying both the presence of a significant crushing and processing sector, as well as a very large poultry and pork production (PEREIRA 1993). This is in line with the general development by which the Brazilian agricultural sector has become highly capital intensive relative to other sectors of the economy, compared to other countries (SPOLADOR & ROE 2013, p.336).

Accounts of the surge of Brazilian agricultural production from the last part of the 20th century, which for a large part was related to the agro-industrial development of the Cerrado from that time and onwards, must thereby also include the domestic technical capacity development in the general explanation of this phenomenon. This development might well be generally consonant with food system theoretical accounts of how the proliferation of biotechnology (MCMICHAEL 2009; OTERO 2012 & 2013) and increased capital intensity of production (BURCH & LAWRENCE 2009;

ISAKSON 2013) have led to the incorporation of certain developing countries in to the global staple food chains (BERNSTEIN 2016; FRIEDMANN 1992; MCMICHAEL 2005 & 2009). Yet, it would be wrong to ascribe a uni-directional character to impulses originating at the systemic level to this process: Although certain exogenous systemic factors were favorable and also stimulated the incorporation of Brazil as an agro-export powerhouse within the third - corporate - food regime, this subchapter highlights that a certain margin of collective agency was available for central public and private actors to define the mode and intensity of this development. Yet, by no means can the events in Brazil be decoupled from those within global agriculture. This is highlighted by the very fact that PRODECER was devised in large part as a response to the crisis in the second food system, threatening food security in Japan by the early 1970s. The surge of Brazil as an NAC⁶ heavyweight can thereby be seen as the product of conjunctural causation between transformations within the material dimension of the global food system, which in a reciprocal interplay with developments within the Brazilian agricultural sector led to a marked surge in innovation, productivity, and scalar expansion.

6 NAC - New Agricultural Countries

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