Agronomists and Anti-Revolutionary Reforms in Brazil’s Semi-Arid Hinterland, 1940–60

Northeast Brazil's semi-arid hinterland, assailed periodically by devastating droughts, has been the focus of technical remediation by Brazilian federal agencies since the 1910s.  At various points in the twentieth century, Brazil's government called upon public health physicians, civil engineers, agronomists and economists to address the dual problems of drought and economic development in this marginal region.  Each technocratic cohort promised a new approach to regional development modeled on similar efforts undertaken by U.S. federal agencies (such as the Bureau of Reclamation) or by the development apparatus of European imperial governments in India, Egypt and elsewhere. This paper argues that scientific reformers working in northeast Brazil's sertão during the early decades of the Cold War perceived their efforts as anti-revolutionary.  Agronomists in particular hoped that changes to agricultural technologies and practice would deflect more radical uprising that scientific management of the climatically and socially precarious region offered a rational alternative to bloody upheaval.  Agronomists saw themselves as offering a middle ground between the Marxist radicalism of sugarcane workers and their ideological supporters, who threatened to overturn the social order in the Northeast (and whom the U.S. State Department consequently feared), and the intransigent conservatism of landholding elites determined to retain their control over natural and human resources. Brazilian agronomists hoped that their model settlements of irrigated smallholders would provide a moderate route to social and economic betterment.  However these were realized only on a small scale and were less successful in producing self-sufficient yeomen farmers than their promoters had envisioned. Meanwhile, federal funding for drought works continued primarily to support the road and reservoir construction (often on private property) favored by the region's influential elite.  My research thus emphasizes the chimerical twentieth-century hope in technology as a panacea for entrenched social disparities that was often embraced by Latin American elites.