The accidental agro-power: constructing comparative advantage in Brazil

Abstract

Brazil has emerged as an agro-export powerhouse: from being a net-agricultural importer and food aid recipient as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, it has now become the world's third largest agricultural exporter, after the US and EU. What is more, Brazil's new role as a major agricultural trader has provided an important foundation for its enhanced status and influence in global economic governance, as an emerging power and one of the BRICS. This paper analyzes how such a remarkable transformation was brought about. I argue that Brazil's emergence as an agricultural powerhouse was the result not of its natural factor endowments, but extensive intervention on the part of the Brazilian state that had the effect of constructing a new comparative advantage. This transformation was propelled by state-driven innovation and related policies that opened up massive new areas of the country to agriculture, enabled it to shift to producing goods in direct competition with the world's dominant agricultural exporters, and generated significant gains in productivity and competitiveness. The irony is that the intention of these policies, initiated in the 1970s, was to foster industrial development in Brazil as part of its import-substitution industrialization program, yet they wound up having precisely the opposite effect -transforming Brazil into one of the world's dominant agricultural powers.

Local-global linkages in the food regime: global history and the internationalization of Brazilian agribusiness

“…The globe is undergoing an agrarian transformation that is taking place across disparate spaces. The driving factors behind these transformations are many: commodification and globalization of the agribusiness (Escher 2018); economic changes in the international food markets (Turzi 2011); strategic intervention of states in the agricultural sectors (Hopewell 2016); and conflictive land governance, -especially in developing regions (Scoones et al 2018). As such, I argue that while these different elements are indeed present in the global agrarian transformation, they also inevitably catalyze transformation at the local level, evident in actions such as coalition-formation.…”

“…The main characteristics of Brazilian agribusiness are the following: a highly competitive export agricultural sector (Hopewell 2014(Hopewell , 2016; a technologically advanced sector (Martha, Contini and Alves 2013); a segmented sector with policy networking (Leite 2016); and a growing power and autonomy of agricultural business elite (Hopewell 2014). In light of these characteristics, how does Brazil participate in the current global food regime?…”

“…In this process, the state took the role of driving the transformations in agribusiness, although the reforms in the agricultural sector started in the 1980s in the aftermath of the economic crisis. The more recent involvement of the state in agriculture has been coined "state-sponsored agricultural development" (Hopewell 2016).…”

Cultivating Alternatives to Authoritarian Populism in Amazonia

“…A multispecies analysis shows that the equivalence of produtores and “the people” is not only a feature of the differentiated entitlements (Peluso and Watts ) created by the colonization process but a situation created by cattle, grasses, soybeans, and soils that shape political relations in nondeterministic ways. Rather than inert resources that landholders controlled, monoculture ecologies resulted in unplanned, “accidental” outcomes (Hopewell ) that benefited—but profoundly altered—the lives of produtores who could never fully control the nonhuman conditions that made them into representatives of “the people.” So even if praised by figures such as Jair Bolsonaro, produtores themselves are at the mercy of an impersonal process of relentless accumulation driven by nonhuman forces that tear social and ecological bonds apart (Tsing ). Thus, to open alternatives to authoritarian populism is not a struggle against produtores that could be won by supporting one “people” over another.…”

The Forgotten History of Food Security in Multilateral Trade Negotiations

“…Though export subsidies made food cheap on international markets, they also had the effect of discouraging staple food production in developing countries while also undermining the competiveness of other grain exporters. 7 Meanwhile, agriculture had come to be viewed by developing country as the "backwards" sector (Hirschman, 1978;Roa 22 1986); many taxed agriculture to fund industrialization, often resulting in policies that were biased in favor of urban over rural populations and that resulted in a prolonged period of underinvestment in agriculture (Krueger et al 1988;Bezemer and Headey, 2008;Anderson, Rausser and Swinnen, 2013;Hopewell, 2016).…”