How to interpret Brazilian agrarian development?

Abstract

This article analyzes several facets related to the book “O mundo rural no Brasil do século 21.” A formação de um novo padrão agrário e agrícola,” ten years after its publication by Embrapa and Editora da Unicamp (2014). In its initial section, it is argued that the collection, which presents 35 articles resulting from the participation of 53 authors attached to various Brazilian research institutions, was motivated by the transforming context of the agricultural economy, which was accelerated from the mid-1990s, an expansion maintained in the present century. Though an economic intensification produced by many factors discussed in diverse chapters in the book, in these years a “new pattern” of capital accumulation in agricultural Brazil spread its roots, gradually abandoning a history of rent-seeking anchored in land property that existed in the past. There emerged a Schumpeterian context where competition acts as an uncontrollable coercion factor. Thereafter, the article presents some particularities of the book (1182 pages), how it was structured, and its analytical logic, which accompanied, in general, the conceptual vision systematically exposed in one of the articles, written by Antônio Márcio Buainain (Part 2, p. 211-240, 2014). In conclusion, in its final part, the article discusses “what was missing.” Among some limitations, the book does not emphasize other processes but only economic, financial, and productive and technological ones, leaving undiscussed analyses on sociological, anthropological, or political-institutional aspects. It is also stressed that a subject increasingly decisive, the environment, was scarcely discussed in most chapters of this collection, thus not assuming the centrality and urgency of our times.