BRAZILIAN AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH IN THE POSTWAR PERIOD

Abstract

In spite of having produced important research results in its nearly 20 years of existence, the evolution slow and uneven. The shortage of funding for this organization along with the low level of demand for agricultural technology were a reflection of the sequence of events which were to give absolute priority to industry which, in the decade of the saw its industrial park expanded, tanks to a massive transference of capital from the primary sector which occurred as a result of underpriced foreign exchange rates. In 1962, the SNPA was extinct, making way for the Department of Agricultural Research and Experimentation (DPEA), which defined as research priorities crops destined for human nutrition, and which did not alter the institucional model adopted by the SNPA. The military movement of 1964 rearranged the Brazilian state, renouncing structural reforms and choosing a conservative-type modernization, concentrating on the internationalization of the economy and on an external dependence. For agriculture, this signified a search for standards of tecnological efficiency which would permit a greater productvity of land and of labor, assuring a greater return on capital. In order to sustain the transformation of the technical basis of agriculture in the shortest period of time, the government instituted measures designed to insure a profound change in the institutional and operative model of agricultural research. Thus, a public enterprise, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Organization EMBRAPA), whose operation has proved to be functional accumulation, was established.