Rationality over Radicalism: Agronomists and Irrigated Smallholding in the Northeast Brazilian Sertão, 1932–45

This paper examines archives of Brazil’s National Department for Works to Combat Drought (DNOCS) to consider the role of agronomists in debates about smallholding and economic development during the Vargas era.  DNOCS, established in 1909 to address the crisis caused by periodic drought in northeast Brazil’s semi-arid sertão, was staffed and directed primarily by civil engineers.  Throughout its early history, the agency oversaw road and reservoir construction, the latter often on private land.  DNOCS and its supporters justified these projects as essential for the sertão population and ranchers’ cattle to withstand droughts; critics viewed them as infrastructure beneficial to landowning elites which did not address the vulnerabilities of the region’s landless poor.  Following a sever 1932 drought, Vargas established an agricultural commission within DNOCS to demonstrate his concern for sertanejos’ welfare.  Its agronomists saw expanded smallholding in irrigated, planned colonies as the surest route to social and economic improvement.  They often described irrigated smallholder colonies in utopian terms, as the means of creating “new Brazilians” and modern “centers for credit, consumption and production” in the sertão, while redistributing economic and political power and providing greater food security for those most adversely affected by droughts.  However, due to engineers’ control over DNOCS’s funding and to the growing conservatism of the Vargas dictatorship, agronomists made concessions in their recommendations to the agency that diluted the transformative potential of their projects.   This paper analyzes how DNOCS agronomists understood the sertão’s social ills, what they thought irrigated smallholding might achieve (socially and economically), and how they curbed these ambitions to suit the Vargas administration’s paternalistic, conciliatory approach to social reform.  Under Vargas, DNOCS used technocrats to deflect radicalism by offering tempered solutions to social problems.  Agricultural experiment stations addressed expanded irrigation as a technical problem while ignoring the political frictions that inhibited smallholding.