Foreign Expertise and Development in Postwar Brazil: The FAO’s Fishery and Forestry Missions to the Amazon

In the decade after World War II, the Brazilian government initiated a push for the development of the vast Amazon region, trying to integrate this sparsely populated and economically ‘backward’ region more firmly into the nation. As part of this effort, in the early 1950s it asked the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to organize a series of missions to assess the fishery and forest resources of the Amazon Valley.

The proposed paper analyzes the role of the FAO missions in the context of this regional development initiative and the broader, national commitment to developmentalist policies, asking three broad questions. How did FAO expertise shape the approach of local or national actors/agencies in this development drive? How did changes in Brazil, both in the approach to economic development and in national politics, reshape the FAO mission? And finally, to what extent were changes to the FAO’s overarching mission, whether driven by shifts in development ideology or institutional priorities, reflected in the Amazon missions? The latter two questions, in particular, emphasize the importance of the Cold War context.

My preliminary argument is that the FAO, influenced by both shifting international development paradigms and new domestic preferences in Brazil, moved towards a more market-driven development model by the mid-1960s. This mirrored a gradual shift in Brazil’s development policy for the Amazon that became cemented after the 1964 military coup: away from ambitious assistance programs towards economically viable resource exploitation.