TECHNICAL CHANGE IN AGRICULTURE, FORMATION OF THE AGROINDUSTRIAL COMPLEX AND RECENT TECHNOLOGICAL POLICY

Abstract

The paper attempts to establish relationships between changes at the technical base of production means in Brazilian agriculture and the consolidation of the Agroindustrial Complex during the Seventies. Outstanding is the role of industry as a backward link for agriculture, organically integrated with the agricultural research system and promoting interdependent biological, mechanical, physical-chemical innovations. This process reproduces a given standard of resource use dissemination which, consolidating itself on world scale since World War II, has as its model the North American agroindustrial complex. Special emphasis in the Brazilian case is given to the relevant role of the state which creates the industrial base and centralizes the public agricultural research and technical assistance system. Furthermore, the state supports decisively the diffusion of the technical standard, by means of the monetary-financial policy followed until the end of the decade of the Seventies. To the reversal of that situation in the beginning of 1981 add themselves difficulties of style with respect to the modernization pursued until then, opening up space for new technological policy priorities.