Brazil's Sugarcane-Growing Law of 1941 and the "Peculiar" Exclusion of Agrarian Workers

When state intervention in Brazil’s sugar industry stabilized prices and established quotas for sugarmills in the 1930s, many Northeastern sugarmill-owners opted to purchase or reposess lands previously controlled by cane-farmers. Over the course of the decade, the Vargas regime’s developmentalist state policies unintentionally facilitated this process by extending credit and loans to sugarmill-owning “industrialists” to the exclusion of sugarcane-planting “farmers.” The land take-over drove a wedge between the Northeastern cane farmers and sugarmill owners previously united by regional interests, kinship networks, and seigneurial sensibilities. Together with sugarcane-farmers from other regions of Brazil, the newly self-defined sugarcane-farming class of the Northeast mounted  a lobbying campaign to reclaim ground lost to the sugarmill-owning class [“lavradores/plantadores/fornecedores de cana” versus “usineiros”]. The former labelled the latter great land usurpers [latifundios] whose greed was risking social peace in the countryside by undermining the stabilizing middle-class yeoman farmer. Industrialists responded to the consequent Sugarcane-Growing Bill’s potential division of quotas between themselves and cane-farmers by flooding state representatives’ offices with letters of protest that such quotas would preclude the economies of scale required to compete in the world sugar market. Cane-farmers and usineiros battled over the state redistribution of sugar’s spoils and threatened “peace” in the countryside to such an extent that lawmakers ended up cutting out the most vulnerable potential beneficiaries of the new Sugarcane-Growing Law—workers. This paper will demonstrate that usineiros and cane-farmers from various regions of Brazil made the seigneurial case that both the industrial and agrarian workers attached to sugar production belonged in a “peculiar” category as patriarchal dependents rather than workers and, as such, they did not need the kind of new social laws officially extended to Brazil’s urban industrial workers under the Vargas regime.